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Soon she is helping to polish the brass cooking pots and to follow her mother and older sisters, earthen waterpot on hip, on their morning and evening pilgrimages to the river. Being only an average girl, Meenachi will never go to school. There are ninety and nine of these "average" unschooled girls to the one "above the average" to whom education offers its outlet for the questing spirit.
What of to-day? TO-DAY: The Average Girl. Meenachi of Madura, if she could become articulate, might tell us something of the life of the average girl to-day. Being average, she belongs neither to the exclusive streets of the Brahman, nor to the hovels of the untouchable outcastes, but to the area of the great middle class which is in India as everywhere the backbone of society.
"What I have seen, what I have heard, what I have felt" there experience ends. From personal unhappiness there is no escape into the world current. Meenachi is twelve and the freedom of the long street is hers no more.
The mother-in-law's house is a hundred miles away, and the mother-in-law's face is strange. Will Meenachi be sad or happy? The answer is complex and hard to find, for it depends on many contingencies. The husband what will he be? He is not of Meenachi's choosing. Did she choose her father and mother, and the house in which she was born?
There were rollicking babyhood days when Meenachi, clad only in the olive of her satin skin with a silver fig leaf and a bead necklace for adornment, wandered in and out the house and about the looms at will. With added years came the burden of clothing, much resented by the wearer, but accepted with philosophic submission, as harder things would be later on. Toys are few and simple.
So Meenachi, the bride, passes out into the unknown of life, and later into the greater unknown of death. No one has taught her to say in the valley of the shadow, "I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me." The terrors of life are with her, but its consolations are not hers. Widowhood. Of widowhood I shall say little.
The palmyra rattle is exchanged for the stiff wooden doll, painted in gaudy colors, and the collection of tiny vessels in which sand and stones and seeds provide the equivalent of mud pies in repasts of imaginary rice and curry. Household duties begin also. Meenachi at the age of six grasps her small bundle of broom-grass and sweeps each morning her allotted section of verandah.
The family exchequer is drained to the dregs to provide the heavy dowry, the burdensome expenditure for wedding feast and jewels, and the presentation of numerous wedding garments to equally numerous and expectant relatives. Meenachi is carried away by the splendor of new clothes and jewels and processions, and the general tamash of the occasion.
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