City Faith – Praying for The Children, Behram Khan Tiraha
Mother’s festival.
[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]
They were performing a sacred ceremony in the middle of the road.
One early morning The Delhi Walla saw about half a dozen barefoot women at Behram Khan Tiraha, a three-way avenue sheltered by a giant peepal tree in Old Delhi. There were also a few children.
The women were carefully arranging small earthen bowls on the road. Some of those bowls were filled with uncooked rice grains, some with yellow lentils, and some with tiny deep-fried pooris; others had sweets of different kinds. A few also had rose petals.
One woman told me, “Today is the festival of Basora. It comes after Holi. The winter has ended and the hot season is about to start. We are here to pray for our children.”
Some of the mothers were very young and had new-born babies in their protective arms. A little boy was wearing a garland of dry fruits.
An elderly woman offered holy water to the ground.
Soon, the women left, along with the children. Within seconds of their departure, a sweeper of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi arrived in his rolled-up trousers and swept away the earthen bowls.
For our young ones
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That’s great! Make a mess in the middle of the road, turn around and just walk away. Why care about civic responsibility when you have such important things as prayers and divine merit to worry about? All good Hindus know that the physical world – with its institutions, codes and contracts – is just an illusion.
Yes! Not to mention the wastage of perfectly good food.
That’s the point, if we live in a society and use its resources we offer it to the almighty as a mark of respect and after that cleaning it up is one of the the prime responsibility. But all of it could have been done in a separate place where the sanctity of the whole endeavor is maintained.
I loved how meticulously you arranged the last two photographs where the sweeper cleans off all the worship and beliefs of those women. Hard hitting.
Happy to read sweeper cleaning the rubbish. Achhe din kab ayenge for such “gandgi failane wale log?”