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in character. Bride and bridegroom are daily dressed out in their wedding toilette. Early in the morning the bridegroom must repair to the meunasah of the bride's gampōng, where, as we have seen, all the young men of the village are congregated. He is escorted by a number of his male peunganjōs, who bear behind him an unusually large and well furnished sirih-bag. He must now greet each of these young men seperately, and hand him the great sirih-bag (bungkōïh). He must also walk through the gampōng from time to time, and wherever he sees a number of men sitting together, must hasten up to them and proffer sirih.
Should he fail in these civilities towards his new fellow-villagers, the young folk punish him by smearing the steps of the bride's house with ordure[1] by night, the intention being that the bridegroom should step on the unclean thing when first leaving the house in the morning. As a rule, however, he is forewarned in time and escapes this disagreeable material consequence of his shortcomings; it is considered a sufficient revenge to make him ashamed.
About 9 A.M. this peregrination is completed and he returns again to the house of his parents-in-law, to enjoy his morning meal with the bride and the peunganjōs in the jurèë. The rest of the day, however, he spends in his own gampōng.
During these first seven nights the young married pair always sleep under the surveillance of a peunganjō. Should the extreme youth of the bride render living as husband and wife difficult in the earliest days, and even where this would cause no hindrance, the Achehnese are averse to such great intimacy in the beginning, and call it "adopting the institutions of the Arabs"[2]. In other Mohammedan countries also, as in Java for example, we find this same dislike of the full use of marital rites early in wedlock.
All that the husband bestows on his wife before she is thrown on him for her support is called biaya, and the custom requires that he should give her no biaya until the seventh evening after marriage. This first biaya may be in kind[3]; it then consists of such things as fish,
- ↑ Keunòng èʾ = "he has obtained filth" is the technical expression for this punishment. It is also applied in other cases, as for instance where a young man neglects constantly to attend the noisy trawèh-recitations in the meunasah during the fasting month. See p. 234 above.
- ↑ Peutōʾ hukōm arab.
- ↑ This is called biaya masaʾ (lit. "ripe" or "cooked").
