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One day they brought home the first fruits and offered them to the bongas, and they invited the monkey boy and his mother to come to the feast which followed the offering.
CL. Lakhan and the Bongas. Once a young man named Lakhan was on a hunting party and he pursued a deer by himself and it led him a long chase until he was far from his companions; and when he was close behind it they came to a pool all overgrown with weeds and the deer jumped into the pool and Lakhan after it; and under the weeds he found himself on a dry high road and he followed the deer along this until it entered a house and he also entered.
Let us, in the first instance, suppose that the consumers of buyo, in the whole of the Islands, do not exceed one million of persons, and that each one makes use of three bongas per day, this consumption, at the end of the year, would then amount to 1,095,000,000 nuts.
This friend saw that the food must have been given by bongas and it was through the friend that the story became known. In spite of this the young man never gave up his bonga wife until his family married him properly.
He may first appear as a man and then change into a leopard or a bear or a pig or a cat: very few escape when attacked by such a being. It is said that the spirits of young children become bhuts and those of grown-up people bongas and those of pregnant women churins. CLXXIII. Hunting Custom.
About supper time he saw a number of women who were witches collect from all sides at the jahir than: at this sight he was more frightened than ever; the witches then called up the bongas and they also summoned two tigers; then they danced the lagre dance and they combed the hair of the two tigers.
Ramai asked for the power to see bongas and to understand the language of ants.
Pregnant women are not allowed to go about alone outside the village; for there are bongas everywhere and some of them dislike the sight of pregnant women and kill them or cause the child to be born wry-necked. A pregnant woman may not make a mud fireplace for if she does her child will be born with a hare-lip; nor may she chop vegetables during an eclipse or the same result will follow.
Men who practise sorcery dig up the bones of such murdered infants and use them as rattles when doing their sorceries and are helped by them to deceive people. CLXXII. The Dead. Santals are very much afraid of burial grounds; for dead men become bongas and bongas eat men. If a man meet such a bonga in a burial ground it is of little use to fight for the bonga keeps on changing his shape.
In December when we thresh the rice the bongas carry off half of it; but Ramai could see them and would drive them away and so was able to save his rice.
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