Purdah [noun]

At the end of the room was a purdah or curtain, and behind it people were talking.

He had not been backward, however, in awakening his grandfather to purdah manœuvres.

Anybody would think, to listen to some people, that the purdah flourished in Chelsea.

The purdah rustled, and the speech was cut short by the entry of a little, thin woman with big rings round her eyes.

A male doctor attending a zenana lady would put his hand between the purdah to feel her pulse.

With these words she left Ahmed as he lifted the purdah, having followed him as far as her woman's feet were permitted to go.

The friendliest were baffled by her incomprehensible lack of social instinct, the fruit of India's purdah system.

"You see the child came regularly to my purdah parties," she explained to Roy, who was impatient no longer, only absorbed.

Half-a-dozen of them screamed that two of us were white men who had trespassed within the purdah, and that we should be killed.

Purdah, pur′d, n. a curtain screening a chamber of state or the women's apartments: the seclusion itself.