Festival of Lights

Just a quick one before I head to the airport and get to spend 2 weeks with my family (!!!)

I've been celebrating Tihar the past 3 days, and it's been unbeatable fun. The first day was Kukur Pooja, which means the day to worship dogs. As a result, there were embarrassed looking dogs all over the place with big red blotches on their foreheads and wearing yellow flower necklaces. They must have been confused by all the attention. We had to wrestle to the ground one of the stray dogs that sleeps in front of our house to get the flowers around his neck and even then I think he only put up with it because we also gave him crackers. Day 2 was Gai Pooja (the day for worshipping cows) and the dogs went back to being ignored or kicked out of the way. Today was Bhai Tika, which is a celebration between brothers and sisters. There’s special multi-coloured tika, which I gave my host brother along with malla (flower necklaces), fruit, nuts and blessings to wish him a long, happy life and success in everything he does. He also gave me tika and gifts. So we’re now officially brother and sister, dai and bahini.

At night throughout the festival everyone hangs up multi-coloured lights and groups of people will go from house to house dancing and singing so that people will give them money and a special type of bread. Lots of groups of children will practice performances in advance, but with the big group of friends I went out to do this with last night it was a much more spontaneous decision. The typical Tihar song / chant has one person say a couple words and the rest of the group all sing / shout “dyosi re!”, all the while dancing around in a big cluster. My voice is still hoarse. “Dyosi re” doesn’t really have a direct translation, but is along the same lines as “hear, hear!” in English and is used to give blessings at each of the houses.

New pictures on the right!