Context & Background: 

My friend who is almost like my grandmother and my late grandfather’s family friend acts as the informant to tells me a weird superstition they had in their small childhood town. 

Performance: (via phone call)

In the small town in rural Uttar Pradesh, India, where I grew up, there was a saying that you shouldn’t start traveling anywhere on Wednesdays. Even for me, this is hard to believe, but the town followed it, and so did I. It was impossible, though, to halt all travel on Wednesdays. So the shortcut to that was on Tuesday, you had to leave your shoes outside the house. If your shoes were outside, maybe at someone else’s house, you could travel on Wednesdays. 

Analysis:

This folk belief was very interesting to find out because there was an oikotype right in the story. The informant told me that it was hard to keep following this belief so the town revised it to be more doable. The oikotype being that if you had shoes outside your house already, you could go and travel. The meaning behind this is that because some part of you – your shoes – are already travelling on Tuesday, then you can go and travel on Wednesday. You are not starting a new journey, you are simply continuing it. A very interesting belief, and one that is from the part in India where my family is from, so my mom knew of this belief, but my family does not follow it.