After the crop of the chena or field has been gathered in, a small offering of the first-fruits is made at the local Dēwāla, or demon temple, and cleaned rice is also presented to the resident monk at the local Buddhist temple.
When the crop is placed in the store, the household supply of food for at least a great part of the year, and commonly for the whole year, has been provided for. Such additions as salt, sun-dried fish, and some of the condiments used in curries are obtained by bartering coconuts, or paddy, or millet, at little roadside shops which are established at a few places along the main roads throughout the country. These are kept by Muhammadan trades—commonly termed Tambi, with, in village talk, the honorific addition ayiyā, “elder brother,”—or Sinhalese from the Low Country districts, or Tamils from Jaffna; and rarely or never by Kandians. From these shops, also, clothes are procured at long intervals in the same way, or a special journey is made to the nearest town or larger shopping centre.
As a general rule, in the interior it is all a matter of barter, and very little money is used, so little indeed that if the crops be less satisfactory than usual the villager often has difficulty in paying the tax of a rupee and a half (two shillings), which is collected by Government each year from adult males, towards the cost of keeping the roads in order. In the poorer districts, the payment of this, the only direct tax of the villager, is like a recurring annual nightmare, which worries him for weeks together, and unfortunately cannot be charmed away, like his other nightmares, by a magic thread.
Village life is on the whole a dull one. Its excitements are provided by demon-ceremonies for the cure of sickness, occasional law-suits, and more especially by weddings, which afford a welcome opportunity for feasting, and displaying clothes and jewellery, but sometimes also cause quarrels owing to caste or family jealousies. It would be too long a digression to attempt to describe these here. Pilgrimages to important Buddhist temples are also undertaken, about nine-tenths of the pilgrims being women, a proportion sometimes observable in church attendance in England.
One of the pleasantest features of village life is the family re-union at the Sinhalese New Year, April 11 or 12, when all the members meet at their old home if possible, and make little presents to each other, and pay ceremonial visits, dressed in their best clothes, to their relatives and friends. The men also call on their local headmen, who in the same way visit their superiors. I have known considerable numbers of villagers tramp ninety miles on hot dusty roads, with an equally long return journey in prospect, in order to be present at this home gathering.
For three weeks before the day, the whole village life is disorganised by preparations for this festival. The houses are furbished up, plantains and palm sugar are collected, often from places many miles away, new clothes are purchased, and every one’s mind is given up to anticipation of the event and provision for it, to the complete exclusion of all ordinary work. It is also a busy time for astrologers, who are required to fix a suitable day and a lucky hour for the first lighting of the New Year’s fire, the first cooking of food, and, three or four days later, the hour at which the heads of all shall be anointed, pending which important ceremony no work is begun or journey commenced.
In many villages the women produce from some dark hiding-place the little board with fourteen little cup-shaped hollows, in two rows each consisting of seven cups, on which the ancient game called in Ceylon “Olinda” is played. Four bright red seeds of the Olinda creeper are placed in each cup, and the two players, who sit on opposite sides of the board, “sow” them one by one in the holes. As a rule, only the women play at this game, at which many of them are adepts, carrying it on for hours at a time with the greatest rapidity and skill. At the conclusion of the New Year’s holiday, or soon after it, the boards are returned to their hiding-places, and often are not used again for another year. In the villages where Low Country influence has penetrated, many of the men find gambling a more attractive amusement, as well as a more exciting one, at this time.
About once in a couple of years a party of Gypsies who speak Telugu, and broken Tamil and Sinhalese, come along the high road, and settle down on a patch of open grass near a tank. The talipat palm leaves with which their diminutive oblong huts are roofed, and strong creepers or bamboos curved in a semicircle, for making the skeleton framework, are transported on small donkeys, the women and children carrying the other few household goods and cooking utensils in bundles on their heads. Some take about with them large numbers of goats.
As soon as they have raised their little huts, each about four feet high, and surrounded by a shallow channel for carrying off rain water, the adults leave them in charge of the children and old women, and spread through all the villages of the neighbourhood in order to collect food or money. The man carries in a round, flat, black basket slung in a cloth from his shoulder, a cobra or two, which are made to “dance,” a term which means merely sitting coiled up (the head with the hood expanded being raised about fifteen inches from the ground), and making attempts to strike the moving knee or hand of the crouching exhibitor. The women tell fortunes by the lines on the hands.
All the village girls endeavour to raise the requisite three halfpence or twopence so as to hear, often for the third or fourth time, of their past and future experiences, and to be promised handsome husbands possessing fields and cattle. The adults pay a little rice for the exhibition of the cobras.