| caption: |
drinking in various houses |
| text: |
An old man, one of the gaonburas we had met in the morning, makes signs to me to come into his house. I enter and see a very dark room which is more than half filled with huge baskets. I sit down on the long bed while my host washes out a small gourd container and fills it with madhu. I drink the pleasantly sweet beverage and, as is required by custom, I let him fill it again. We laugh at each other in a friendly manner and with gestures of thanks I return to the outside. But in the meantime a neighbour of my host had come, also a gaonbura, and he asks me to enter his house as well. (43) There I had to undergo the same ceremony with the difference that the woman of the house offered me the madhu, in this case in a pewter cup. |
