The Two Sisters of the Sky

It is the last hour of the night, and a priest is standing in the dark, waiting to light the fire.

He is watching the east. He has seen this a thousand times, and he still watches. A thin brightness has come along the edge of the sky. It is not the sun yet. It is the one who comes before the sun.

"This light has come," he says, "the fairest of all lights."

What he sees next, he sees as a meeting between two women.

One of them is dark. She is Night, and she has had the whole sky to herself for hours. The other is bright and arrives with a shining child beside her. She is Ushas, the Dawn. They are sisters, daughters of the same father, the Sky.

The dark sister does not fight for her place. She gives it up. The poet says that Night has made room for the morning, that the Dark One has handed over her house to the Bright One. Another poet watched the same moment and noticed something small and kind in it. The sister leaves her place to her elder sister, he says, and she looks at her once before she goes.

Then the priest says the thing he has understood from watching them.

"The two sisters have one road, and it has no end. The gods taught it to them, and they walk it by turns. They are not the same colour, but they are of one mind. Night and Dawn do not collide."

Now the bright sister goes to work.

She throws open the doors of the sky. She wakes whatever is curled up asleep. The priest counts the sleepers as they rise: one gets up to rule, one to win a name, one to chase his profit, one simply to do his day's labour. Dawn wakes them all and sends each to his own business. She has the fires lit in every house.

There is one sleeper she leaves alone. The priest says it without fuss. Dawn urges on everyone who is living, and she does not wake the dead.

That thought stays with him. He looks at her, young and red in her bright clothes, and he knows she is older than anyone he has ever met.

"She is the last of all the dawns that have gone," he says, "and the first of all the dawns to come. The people who watched the earlier mornings are gone. We are the ones who see her now. And others are coming who will see her after us."

He does not stay sad for long. The sky is too bright for that, and there is a fire to light.

"Get up!" he calls to the house. "Breath has come back to us. Life has come back. The darkness has gone and the light is coming. She has cleared the road for the Sun."

By evening the road will belong to the other sister again. The hymn to Night, far away in the last book of the Rigveda, picks up the story from her side: when the dark sister arrives, she in turn sets Dawn in her proper place. Neither of them ever keeps the sky.

On the sixth day after the new moon of Kartik, the riverbanks of Bihar fill with people before sunset.

This is Chhath, the great festival of the Sun. The ones keeping the vow have eaten nothing all day and have not drunk even water. They walk down into the river and stand there in the water, facing west. Beside them are flat bamboo baskets heaped with fruit and with thekua, the sweet cakes made for this day. Nothing in the baskets has been cooked with salt, onion or garlic.

The first offering of Chhath is not made to the rising sun. It is made to the sun as it goes down.

Ask on the bank why that is so, and this is the answer you will hear.

"The Sun has two wives, and his strength comes from them. Usha is the first ray of the morning. Pratyusha is the last ray of the evening. This evening's offering is for Pratyusha."

So the baskets are lifted towards the red sun, and water is poured, and the last light is thanked before it goes.

Then comes the night. The fast continues through it.

Before the next sunrise everyone is back at the river, standing in the water again, this time facing east. They wait in the dark for the first line of light. When it comes, the baskets go up a second time.

"This one is for Usha," people say.

Only then is the fast broken, with the blessed food from the baskets, shared out on the bank.

Many also call the goddess of the festival Chhathi Maiya, Mother Sixth. Some say she is Usha herself. Others say she is the Sun's sister, who guards small children. The two offerings stay the same whichever is said: one to the light that is leaving, and one to the light that comes back.