137 and they kill as many Pulayan as they want in revenge, until they grow tired of it, and without any punishment. In certain months of the year, they do as much as they can to touch a nair woman at night, as secretly as possible, just to cause her harm. And so, they wander among the nair houses at night touching women. During these months, the women take great care, but if they should touch a woman, even if nobody sees it and there are not any witnesses, she confesses straightaway, screaming, and she does not want to stay in the house in order not to harm her lineage. What normally happens, is that she will run away to the house of some low caste people, who hide her from her relatives who will kill her. She stays there and is then sold to some foreigner. Very often, women are touched even if they are not spoken to, they can have something thrown at them, a stick or stone, and if it hits, then they are touched and lost. These people are terrible sorcerers; thieves, and evil. The other low caste base people are known as Parayan, who live in the most deserted places, away from other people. They do not interact with others, not do others interact with them. They are considered to be worse than devils and terrible, because one only has to see them to be unclean and excommunicate. They eat yams and other wild roots, they cover their pudenda with leaves and they also eat the meat of wild animals. That is the last of the different castes of gentiles from this country. There are eighteen in all and each is separate and they cannot touch each other or mix through marriage. In addition to these eighteen castes of gentiles who are natives of Malabar, as I have already stated, there are others of foreigners, who are merchants and traders here in this country. They have houses and possessions and already live like locals, but with their own customs, which I shall now describe. Thefirst of these people who I call foreigners living in Malabar are a caste known as Chettys, who originally come from Coromandel, which I shall talk about below. They are brown almost white-skinned men
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