ay and evening meals.

20. Furniture

Ordinary cultivators have earthen pots for cooking purposes and brass
ones for eating from, while the well-to-do have all their vessels of
brass. The furniture consists of a few stools and cots. No Kunbi will
lie on the ground, probably because a dying man is always laid on the
ground to breathe his last; and so every one has a cot consisting of
a wooden frame with a bed made of hempen string or of the root-fibres
of the _palas_ tree (_Butea frondosa_). These cots are always too
short for a man to lie on them at full length, and are in consequence
supremely uncomfortable. The reason may perhaps be found in the
belief that a man should always lie on a bed a little shorter than
himself so that his feet project over the end. Because if the bed is
longer than he is, it resembles a bier, and if he lies on a bier once
he may soon die and lie on it a second time. For bathing they make a
little enclosure in the compound with mats, and place two or three flat
stones in it. Hot water is generally used and they rub the perspiration
off their bodies with a flat stone called Jhawar. Most Kunbis bathe
daily. On days when they are shaved they plaster the head with soft
black earth, and then wash it off and rub their bodies with a little
linseed or sesamum oil, or, if they can afford it, with cocoanut oil.

21. Food

The Kunbis eat three times a day, at about eight in the morning,
at midday and after dark. The morning meal is commonly eaten in the
field and the two others at home. At midday the cultivator comes home
from work, bathes and takes his meal, having a rest for about two
hours in all. After finishing work he again comes home and has his
evening meal, and then, after a rest, at about ten o'clock he goes
again to the fields, if the crops are on the ground, and sleeps on the
_mara_ or small elevated platform erected in the field to protect the
grain from birds and wild animals; occasionally waking and emitting
long-drawn howls or pulling the strings which connect with clappers
in various parts of the field. Thus for nearly eight months of the
year the Kunbi sleeps in his fields, and only during the remaining
period at home. Juari is the staple food of the caste, and is eaten
both raw and cooked. The raw pods of juari were the provision carried
with them on their saddles by the marauding Maratha horsemen, and the
description of Sivaji getting his sustenance from gnawing at one