Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 7.djvu/81

Rh striking a bell-metal plate with a stick. When he has finished, and gone through a little more business on his own account, the girl's husband or brother (if she is unmarried) appears on the scene. He holds aloft the coir string, under the lower end of which a cocoanut has been placed on the ground. The girl passes three times forwards and backwards without touching it. Two cotton wicks, lighted at both ends, are laid on the cocoanut, and the girl should cut the wicks and the cocoanut through, completely severing them, with one blow of a strong knife or chopper. If she is successful, the omen is considered good. The girl, with her party, then bathes a second time. As she comes out of the water, she kicks out backwards like a mule, and sends the stem with the single cocoanut attached flying into the water with her right foot. The second māttu cloth is then brought, and she is clad in it. Then she is full dressed and ornamented and led back to the house with a silk canopy over her head. She is taken to the middle room, and cakes and rice are given to her to eat. A feast is then held. The girl has so far been purified as regards most affairs of life, but she cannot touch any cooking-vessel until she has undergone yet another ceremony. This takes place on the seventh or ninth day after the first appearance of the menses. Every day until then the girl is rubbed with gingelly oil and turmeric. Three ordinary earthenware cooking-pots are piled, one above the other, in the kitchen. The upper-most pot contains cooked rice, the middle one rice boiled with jaggery, and the lowest curry. The pots must be new, and are marked with perpendicular daubs of chunam. Seated on a low wooden stool to the west of the pots, the girl, facing the east, touches each pot with a knife. When the first of all these menstruation