As promised in our last post about Dashain, here’s a new post about the end of the festival. At the date of this posting, we’re actually celebrating yet another festival – Tihar and Diwali – so we’ll write more about that in future blogs! By the way, both photos in this post were taken by the children – they’re getting to be good photographers.
On the tenth day of the Dashain festival, a mixture of rice, yogurt and vermilion is prepared by the women. This preparation is known as “tika”. Elders put this tika on the forehead of younger relatives to bless them with abundance in the upcoming years. The red also symbolizes the blood that ties the family together. This continues to be observed for five days till the full moon during which period families and relatives visit each
L to R: Samjana, Bonnie, Laxmi, Uma, Santosh and Ashok after tika.
This ritual of taking tika from all the elder relatives (even the distant relatives) helps in the renewal of community ties – it’s especially important to us with our Ama Ghar family. As you can see in these photos, some of our older Ama Ghar “graduates” came back to give tika to their younger brothers and sisters.
Sarada, our medical student, gives tika to Laxmi as Bindu, a nurse at Patan Hospital, looks on.