4 ideas
Piyal, the once-poor village tutor who finally married Nanda of the Kaisaruwatte family, becomes a prosperous businessman in Colombo, and the couple raise their children in an urban, money-centred household. The novel follows how one family's rise into commercial wealth coincides with the unravelling of the obligations that once held it together.
When a family's standing shifts from land, lineage and village reputation to money earned in a market, the duties that bound generations lose their enforcement mechanism. The prosperity that is meant to secure the family is what dissolves it.
Read migration from village to city as a loss of the surrounding community that watched, judged and sustained behaviour, not merely a change of address. Decay then shows up as a gradual thinning of restraint rather than as dramatic sin.
The traditional idea of the Kaliyuga, the dark age of declining virtue, is recast as an observable sociological process within one family rather than a cosmic prophecy. Its signs are ordinary ones: status bought rather than inherited, children indifferent to parents, and relationships reduced to transactions. The title's frame lets everyday modern habits be read as symptoms of a civilizational turning.