striking the long looms set in the open air, brings out the blue and
mauve, the deep crimson and purple and gold of the weaving.

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. 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.
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. She looks with curiosity at the books her brother brings home
from high school, but the strange, black marks which cover their pages
mean nothing to her. Not for her the release into broad spaces that
comes only through the written word. For, mark you, to the illiterate
life means only those circumscribed experiences that come within the
range of one's own sight and touch and hearing. "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.