Is it any wonder that the coconut has become an emblem of fertility and prosperity and all good luck?  When a new house is building you will see a high pole over the doorway, bearing coconuts at the top, with an umbrella spread over them.  Do not ask the owner the meaning of the sign, for he does not know.  He does not think about such matters, but he feels about them and he knows that that is the right thing to do.  Besides, he might ask you why you nail a horseshoe over your door.  The difference between us and him is that we do such things in jest, no longer believing in them.  They are the husks of a dead faith with us.  But the Hindu’s faith is very living still.  So, when he breaks a coconut at the launching of a pattimar, he is a gainer in hope, if nothing else; while we squander our champagne and gain nothing.  That nut follows him even to the grave, or burning ground, with mystic significances which I cannot explain.  I have been told that, when a very holy man dies, who always clothed himself in ashes and never profaned his hands with work, his disciples sometimes break a coconut over his head.  If the spirit can escape from the body through the sutures of the skull instead of by any of the other orifices, it is believed to find a more direct route to heaven, so the purpose of this ceremony may be to facilitate its exit that way.  In that case the breaking of the nut is perhaps only an accident, due to its not being so hard as the holy man’s skull.

XVI

THE BETEL NUT

One half the world does not know how the other half lives.  Noticing a pot of areca nut toothpaste on a chemist’s counter, I asked him what the peculiar properties of the areca nut were—­in short, what was it good for.  He replied that it was an astringent and acted beneficially on the gums, but he had never heard that it was used for any other purpose than the manufacture of an elegant dentifrice.  I felt inclined to question him about the camel in order to see whether he would tell me that it was a tropical animal, chiefly noted for the fine quality of its hair, from which artist’s brushes were made.  Here was a man whose special business it is to know the properties and uses of all drugs and their action on the human system, and he had not the faintest notion that there are nearly 300 millions of His Majesty’s subjects, and many millions more beyond his empire, who could scarcely think of life as a thing to be desired if they were obliged to go through it without the areca nut.  For the areca nut is the betel nut.