¹ According to the revised edition of Vasudev Shivaram Apte’s Practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary, the word eka-veṇī (“a single braid of hair”) is used to refer to it being worn by a woman as a mark of her separation from her husband. As we will learn from Canto 5, Sītā-devī wears an eka-veṇī in Rāvaṇa’s aśoka-vana grove. Kālidāsa in his drama Abhijñāna-śākuntala depicts Śakuntalā as wearing an eka-veṇī when she was separated from her husband. Eka-veṇī is not a braid but a style of braiding one’s hair to indicate the woman’s state of mourning. A scholar A.B. Gajendragadkar notes in his annotated translation of the Mahābhārata-based Veṇī-saṁhāra of Bhaṭṭa Nārāyaṇa that it refers to a woman’s hair tied in a single mass, allowed to hang loosely on her back. It should be distinguished from the ordinary threeplait braid called tri-veṇī and the fiveplait braid called pañca-veṇī, both of which are worn by happily married women in communities that followed Vedic dharma. Here we see Kaikeyī wearing the eka-veṇī to give her husband the impression that he has rejected her.