4. Birth and death ceremonies.
The Kīrs usually burn their dead, but children under twelve are buried. The ashes and bones are either sent to the Ganges or consigned to the nearest river or lake. Children have only one name, which is given on the seventh day after birth by a Brāhman. During the birth ceremony the husband’s younger brother catches hold of the skirt of the child’s mother, who on this pays him a few pice and pulls away her cloth. If this custom has any meaning it is apparently in symbolical memory of polyandry, the women bribing her husband’s younger brother so that he may not claim the child as his own.