Tall bamboos, festooned with palm leaves and cotton, are erected on the shore at Elpanam, and the tamiluanas take their place beneath. After scattering stones and ashes, they run about, uttering a mouse-like squeak the while, until they capture the spirit and imprison it in a bunch of leaves. Several men then grasp the bunch, and placing in it a small figure, made in human likeness of coco-palm leaf, twist up the whole, and throw it into the sea.
From time to time villages go through ceremonials somewhat similar, for the purpose of expelling such devils as may be haunting the place.
Shaving the head is sometimes indulged in as a sign of mourning, together with frequent bathing and abstinence from work. A man will also change his name to show grief at the loss of a friend, and will take another title if it comes to his knowledge that a namesake, even a comparative stranger, is dead.[212]
It was customary for widows to have one of their fingers cut off, and if they refused to submit to the operation, the posts and doorway of their houses were gashed and notched.[213]
Accounts of two interments which differed somewhat from the usual practice may be worth giving here.
The first is that of "Distant," headman of Sáwi, who was buried with much pomp.
The corpse was dressed in a good suit of English clothes, and silver wire was wound about it from head to feet. This was because he was once a mafai, and the usual ceremony of Luinj-lare (renunciation of the character) had not been performed. Upon the wire, thirty-two pairs of spoons and forks were placed crosswise. Necklaces made of two-anna pieces (240 to each, and two dollars) were attached to head and neck, and the body was wrapped in forty yards of red cloth.
The corpse was then borne in procession by twenty-four men and women to the house of the relatives (contrary to custom), and was then taken to the graveyard. Two very large and four ordinary pigs were burnt alive as a sacrifice, and seven pigs and eight chickens were buried with the body after their blood had been sprinkled over the corpse.
The following night, the ceremony of Fota Elmot (wiping away tears) was performed, on which occasion fifty pigs and twenty fowls were slaughtered to feed the guests, and thirty-two pairs of spoons and forks, necklaces of silver coin and wire, and teakwood boxes full of the dead man's property, were broken up and thrown into the sea.