I met an elderly Paliyar tribal woman from Meghamalai village in Theni district, Tamil Nadu, India. Her name is Mrs. Vanathai and she has three other children. She is a small grain farmer and a very active woman. She always works on her farm with her husband and produces many things that are needed for their daily lives. She has a small hut filled with useful items like vegetable seeds, grain seeds, groundnut seeds for sowing next season and a box to keep the title deeds of her farm. First she took me to see the farm, which has fruits, vegetables - how she grows and sells them for daily needs like sugar, oil and salt, and for some time she buys dry fruits like coconut, karak, methi from her garden. She prepares this home medicine, keeps it under her control carefully and eats it for her fitness during winters. It is a good food habit of the tribals in winters. However, due to poverty, not all women get this opportunity in their household consumption. It is customary to share food with family members. In particular, children cannot be missed, so women prepare as much winter food as possible. It is called kurak, which means a hearty meal consisting of fenugreek seeds, cooking oil and jaggery, coconut and karakg or dried dates. Vanathayi does not ask her son to provide her with food for her survival, however, she always gives them the surplus from her field. While explaining, she quickly picked a guava and gave it to me to taste. We returned to her hut and sat on the ground. There, her husband Kumaresan was sitting on the bed cleaning coriander seeds. He was very happy to talk to me and said that his sister-in-law Gandhiammal had been in jail for four months in a case falsely filed by the police for opposing the government, and that he had given her bail and that she had returned to her village yesterday. Then the people gathered and accepted her into their community, as going to jail was not considered decent by the tribal community. So, they sacrificed four chickens, appeased their main gods, and asked Gandhimati to take them back to their community. Then she alone entered her house. Kunjari entered the hut to light the sula or wood-burning stove and made tea for all of us. She invited me into the hut, saying that the door was low and that I should enter carefully. She got a little angry with her husband and said that this hut was too small for anyone to sit inside the hut while she was lighting the sula. The smoke was spreading all over the hut. She was not comfortable making yam or ragi roti inside the hut. She did not respond and seemed reluctant to tie a big eye. Two years ago, she had already lost an eye while beating a pestle. She wanted to cure her eye, so she went to a camp in the nearby small town of Udaynagar for an eye surgery. There she was told that she would have to be admitted to a big hospital for four days. The camp did not have the facilities to operate on her eye. She thought she would need money for the treatment, so she planned to sell her cow and go to the big city of Theni. She was free to deal with small matters on her own, but for serious matters the whole family had to help. Every woman had to sell some of her belongings, such as chicken, goat, milk and vegetables, to meet her needs. She told me that she had a relative in the big primary health hospital in Meghamalai who acted as an agent between the patients and the doctors. He could help Vanathay. She wanted to know how much money would be needed to treat the eye. I could not tell her exactly how much the hospital would cost. While we were drinking tea, we were busy in our discussion inside the smoke-filled hut. She opened the box, took out the documents of her farm and asked how much land was written on the papers. The paper said about three hectares of land, but no one understood exactly what a hectare meant. She looked at me and asked me how much land there was in local terms, which was in bighas. I couldn't answer right away because I didn't know the local size, but she explained that she had a ten-bigha farm.