Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/490

466 saying,—"Here is a child that Guru-sidaba has sent to you." The father takes it, and hands it to his wife, who wraps it in her cloth and nurses it as if it were a baby. This lime is kept very carefully in some secret place. The offering to Lamjasara lathokpa is left until the morning, and then thrown away.

Should an outbreak of sickness cause people to think that some Suren has not been appeased, enquiries are made, and, if the offending parents can be found, they are compelled to carry out the ceremony. If the enquiries lead to nothing, the ceremonies are performed by public subscription among the members of the Sagei (i.e. those who can trace their descent back to a common ancestor). From a note supplied to me by the Rev. W. Pettigrew, who has been many years working among the Tangkhuls (a clan of some 26,000 souls inhabiting the hills between the valley of Manipur and the Chindwin), we learn that the bodies of children dying in infancy are buried promiscuously in shallow graves, and they are not represented in the annual ceremony in honour of those who have died during the year. Their spirits are supposed not to become honey bees, like those of other folk, but house flies, and to live on the refuse of other spirits' plates in Kazai-ram, the abode of the dead. A piece of a shrub called mangrahai, (a species of cock sorrel,) is placed in the hand of the infant before burial, in order that the little one may suck it and appease its hunger on the way to Kazai-ram. Among the Kabuis, a tribe inhabiting the hills to the west of the Manipur valley, the bodies of such infants are buried behind the house, without ceremony, other burials taking place in front. The village is unclean for five days, during which no one may go out. Among the Shans in the Upper Chindwin valley, if the youngest child of a family dies while still an infant, it is buried without any ceremony. After death the corpse must not be laid down, but must be carried in the arms of some relative. A week later the mother squeezes some of her milk on to the place where the child used to sleep, and some milk and boiled rice is sent to the phongyis (priests) in place of the usual funeral feast. Among the Lusheis,