The woman chosen to tie madi in those times would usually be a widow. There used to be at least one widow in every brahmin household due to the common practice in those days of marrying off young girls to old men for a negotiable sum of money called kanyasulkam. Young means young--at ten years a girl would be considered past marriageable age. And old means old--at the time of the wedding itself the groom would be waiting for death. So it used to be common to see widows of sixteen or younger.
In Andhra when a girl or woman became a widow, her family shaved off all the hair on her head, smashed her bangles, wiped the bottu off her forehead, yanked off her chains and her nose and toe rings and her anklets, and stripped her of her blouse and saree. The violence with which all of this was done--which was traumatic both to the widow and her family--was prescribed by ritual. The family gave her a cheap, coarse, threadbare saree of white cotton to wear--with no blouse--from then on, and she was never allowed to grow back her hair or put on makeup or ornaments.
These young widows may have been forbidden to decorate their bodies, but youth is a decoration that no one can remove, and though they were forbidden to act on their desires, no one can stop them from having them. A famous Telugu poet said of them:
Thalalu bodulu kani,
Thalapulu bodi kadu.
The heads may be bare, however
The thoughts are not [bare of desires].
Because widows were considered useless, inaupicious burdens, they were expected to earn their keep by doing all the work of the house. They were often used as sex slaves by men in the family. Truth is, far from being a burden, a widow was an asset to a family. And despite their exploitation it was widows who were the most superstitious and reactionary of all, the staunchest upholders of custom, especially of the practice of untouchability. Maybe that's because, having no way to escape their own oppression, it consoled them to think it was necessary and right. The older they got the worse they would become--pathetic, forsaken old witches.
Kanyasulkam has since been replaced by dowry, but the oppression of widows continues to this day in its old forms in villages and among very traditional people even in larger places.
Every morning on their way to school Satthi, Carey, Papa, and their untouchable friends would run into the young brahmin widows, most of them in their early twenties, returning from their madi baths at the rayvu where they would purify themselves for the tasks of the day. They performed this ritual with pious sincerity. When they reached the pond they chatted or gossiped for a while before solemnly immersing themselves and bathing in their white sarees among the red and white lotuses. When they got out they would relax in the shade of the trees on the bank, fill their polished brass and copper pitchers with drinking water, and turn back home. They couldn't change out of their cleansed wet sarees and into unclean dry ones until they finished cooking. Because of spending most of the day in wet clothes, many of these women used to die of pneumonia.
The untouchable children would see the young brahmin widows strolling down the long street that led back to their houses in drenched sarees with their smooth-shaven heads shining in the morning sun. With every step they took, water from the pitchers balanced on their hips would spill onto their bellies and flanks, making them even wetter. Their white cotton sarees, transparent with wetness, would outline the young women's firm, healthy bodies. They would slide, as the women walked, into the cracks between their buttocks and in the front make a V-shape below their bellies. Every morning Satthi would make eyes all over his body to watch the blouseless curves revealed by their dripping sarees.