During the period of labour the barber's wife watches over the case,
but as delivery approaches hands it over to a recognised midwife,
usually the Basorin or Chamarin, who remains in the lying-in room
till about the tenth day after delivery. "If delivery is retarded,"
Mr. Marten continues, [63] "pressure and massage are used, but coffee
and other herbal decoctions are given, and various means, mostly
depending on sympathetic magic, are employed to avert the adverse
spirits and hasten and ease the labour. She may be given water to
drink in which the feet of her husband [64] or her mother-in-law or a
young unmarried girl have been dipped, or she is shown the _swastik_
or some other lucky sign, or the _chakra-vyuha_, a spiral figure
showing the arrangement of the armies of the Pandavas and Kauravas
which resembles the intestines with the exit at the lower end."
The menstrual blood of the mother during child-birth is efficacious as
a charm for fertility. The Nain or Basorin will sometimes try and dip
her big toe into it and go to her house. There she will wash her toe
and give the water to a barren woman, who by drinking it will transfer
to herself the fertility of the woman whose blood it is. The women
of the family are in the lying-in room and they watch her carefully,
while some of the men stand about outside. If they see the midwife
coming out they examine her, and if they find any blood exclaim,
'You have eaten of our salt and will you play us this trick'; and
they force her back into the room where the blood is washed off. All
the stained clothes are washed in the birth-room, and the water as
well as that in which the mother and child are bathed is poured into
a hole dug inside the room, so that none of it may be used as a charm.