The distance of the puzhars from the huts in which the people live depends on the degree of sacredness of the village. According to Breeks, the distance is greatest in those villages [[314]]which have a dairy of the conical kind, but it seems that there is no real difference between these villages and any other etudmad. In some cases when the dairy has a high degree of sanctity, the puzhars may be at an adjacent village; thus, a pregnant woman of Kiudr goes into seclusion at Molkush, about a quarter of a mile away, and at this village the seclusion-hut ([Fig. 45]) is about a hundred yards from the house in which the people live.
FIG. 45.—THE ‘PUZHARS’ AT MOLKUSH.
I may mention here that the objection to the presence of a pregnant woman in one of the more sacred villages may extend to a time when she is not in the seclusion-hut. When I [[315]]visited Kiudr for the purpose of testing the people of the village for colour-blindness, Sintagars, who was pregnant and was living at Molkush, was not allowed to come to the hut to be tested like the rest, but sat on the mound shown in the foreground of [Fig. 7], about thirty yards away.
The features of the hand-burning ceremony as performed by the Tartharol differ considerably from those for a Teivali woman, and I will begin with a description of the former.
On the day of the new moon, the woman goes to the puzhars. The husband (or in his absence his brother or other near male relative) cuts six sticks of the kind called kwadrikurs and sets them up so as to represent a dairy with two rooms, which is called pülpali. He then cuts four bamboo-reeds called wadr, about eighteen inches long, which represent dairy vessels; two of them are called patatpun, and the other two ertatpun. He fills these with water taken neither from the pali nipa nor from the ars nipa, for if he touched the water of either of the streams, they would be defiled and their water could not be used. He therefore fetches the water from a stream at some distance from the village.
The husband brings the reeds half filled with water and places those called patatpun in the inner room of the pülpali. He takes the other two—the ertatpun—to a two-year-old female calf (pòl), and pours out the water from one reed on the left side of the middle of the back (ûv) of the calf, and catches the water in the other. He then gives two leaves (kakuders) to the woman, who makes a leaf vessel, into which he pours three times from the ertatpun the water which has flowed from the back of the calf. The woman raises the leaf vessel to her forehead and then drinks, and the man puts the two ertatpun into the outer room of the pülpali.[1] The woman then bows down with her forehead to the threshold of the pülpali, and the man takes up the sticks forming the imitation dairy and the four reeds and throws all away. [[316]]
The woman has brought with her a new earthenware pot called mâtkûdrik, into which she puts food (rice or grain) and water, and places it on a small oven made on the spot with stones. When the food is cooked, the woman takes two leaves called pelkkodsthmuliers, i.e., leaves used in the ordination of the palikartmokh, and portions out the food on the leaves. She then brings two pieces of wood called parskuti (Eleagnus latifolia), puts them in the ground and covers them with a blanket. The two leaf-plates with the food are now placed on the two pieces of wood, one on each, and the woman asks Pîrn podia, Piri podia? (podia = have you come?) My informants could tell me nothing about Pirn or Piri, except that the former was supposed to be male and the latter female.
The woman throws the parskuti into the bushes, this procedure being called tapi kûrs vutpimi, “bushes stick throw we,” and then makes a little roll of threads which is called pashti, puts it in the fire and burns herself with the roll in four places, two on each hand, once on the prominence formed by the carpo-metacarpal joint of the thumb, and once on the prominence formed by the styloid process of the radius. The burning is sometimes done for her by the woman who is to stay in the puzhars with her[2] during her period of seclusion. When the ceremony is over, the woman goes into the hut with her companion and stays there for nearly a month, till three or four days before the next new moon. While in the seclusion-hut, the woman is visited by relatives and friends, who do not, however, come near the hut, but stand some way off and say kaitütudpatia? (“Have you had hand-burning?”) They leave a present of rice for the woman and go to the people of the village, by whom they are entertained.
When the woman comes out of the puzhars at the end of the month, there is a ceremony called marthk maj atpimi, “To the village buttermilk we pour.” Early in the morning of the appointed day a man of the Melgars clan comes to the village and milks one of the ordinary buffaloes (putiir) into the vessel called kabanachok. The buffalo must not have [[317]]been milked by any one else since the time it last calved. The Melgars man places the milk in front of the hut where the woman usually lives, and then goes away, and the milk is taken by the people of the village. In the evening, after the day’s work is over and the buffaloes are shut up for the night, a woman is chosen who has had no contact with the secluded woman, and she takes the milk drawn by the Melgars man to the puzhars, together with the leaves of the kind called parsers. She pours out the milk three times into these leaves and gives to the pregnant woman to drink. The latter has previously bathed and put on a new mantle, and after drinking she returns to the ordinary hut and may resume her household work.