shouts "Devi ki Jaya" (Victory to the Goddess). Then Moti takes the tray
and, balancing it on her head, dances slowly with long swinging stride
round the Mother, while the music bursts out with renewed vigour, urging
the other women, the human tabernacles of the cholera deities, to follow
suit. Thereafter the camphor-cake is handed round to both women and men in
turn who plunge their hands in the ashes and smear their faces with them;
and so, after distribution of the offering of cocoanuts, sugar, and betel,
the celebration closes. A few girls still dance and jerk their shining
bodies before the altar, but Rama who is getting weary touches them with
his hands, commanding the frenzy to cease, and with a sigh they withdraw
one by one into the dark shadows of the palm-grove.

* * * * *

Such is in brief the ceremony of propitiation of the Cholera-Goddess. What
does it signify? It appears that according to Bhandari belief the disease
is the outcome of neglect of the Mother. The present conditions of life in
the cramped and fetid chawls of the city, the long hours of work
necessitated by higher rentals and a higher standard of living, leave her
devotees but little leisure for her worship. She is maddened by neglect and
in revenge she slays her ten or fifteen in a night. Yet is she not by
nature cruel. Fashion for her a pleasant shrine, flower-decked, burn
incense before her, beat the drum in her honour, let the women offer
themselves as the sport and play-thing of her madness and of a surety will
she repent her of the evil she hath done and will stay the slaughter. In
spirit-parlance a woman chosen by the spirit, into whom as into a shrine
the mother enters, is known as a "Jhad" or tree: for just as a tree yields
rustling and quivering to the lightest breath of the gale, bends its head
and moves its branches to and fro, so the women, losing all consciousness
of self, play as the breath of the Mother stirs them, quivering beneath her