There are many rules of etiquette prescribed for the young girl-wife if she would show that she has been properly trained by her parents. For example, she must never speak of her husband by name, nor may she use a word with the same syllable as her husband’s first name. A friend of mine has a husband whose name begins with the same syllable as that used in the word sugar. She always speaks of sugar as “the substance you put in your tea,” and she generally refers to her husband as “he.” Nor would the man say “my wife,” but “my house,” or some word denoting the home. A man in Hyderabad met his doctor on the street and said, “I wish you would come and see me. My house has a boil on its neck.”
This same wife would not sit in the presence of her mother-in-law or her husband if others were present. It would show extreme lack of respect; nor would she speak if her husband were in the room. We called upon the wife of a high official of Bangalore, who came into the room with her daughter-in-law and her young daughter, an extremely pretty girl. The daughter-in-law would not sit down in the presence of her husband’s mother, nor did she speak, and looked extremely awkward and self-conscious, as she stood with her sari drawn across her mouth and watched us with her big black eyes. The little daughter played the veena, the national instrument, and as she sat upon the rug, gorgeously arrayed in an elaborate red and gold sari, with jewellery on arms, neck, ankles, toes, and with diamonds in each tiny nostril, she made a picture never to be forgotten.
In some of the big households where the sons bring their wives to live beneath the family roof-tree, the married quarters are not large enough to allow a separate room for each couple, and the women sleep in one room and the men in another. The mother has the right of assigning the couples who are to inhabit the married quarters for the week. But even the eagle eye of the mother-in-law cannot always watch the young people, and many a girl-wife steals across the courtyard to find her husband, who is waiting for her in the shadows. A crowd of young men in a school were asked to give their idea of what was the most beautiful music in the world. One answered, “The song of the bul-bul,” another, “The plaintive strains of the zither,” a third, “The cry of the night bird,” but a young bridegroom said, “The music of my wife’s anklets as she tries to suppress their sound when she steals to meet me in the moonlight.”