Three Days of Rest for the Earth

On the day before the festival the grandmother was grinding spices, and she would not stop.

"Enough for three days," she said, when the girl asked why there was so much. "The stone must not turn tomorrow. Nor the day after, nor the day after that."

The whole house had been scrubbed, the kitchen most of all. This day of getting ready has a name of its own in Odisha. It is called Sajabaja.

"And the plough?" asked the girl.

"Your father has put it away. Nobody ploughs during Raja. Nobody digs. You will not even scratch the ground with a stick, do you hear? The Earth is resting."

Every child in Odisha is told why. Bhudevi, the Earth, is a woman, they say, and the wife of Lord Jagannath. In the middle of June, when the summer has baked the fields hard and the first clouds are building, she has her monthly days, as every grown woman has. For those three days she must be left in peace. Then she will bathe, the rain will come, and she will be ready to bear the rice.

So for three days the land is not cut, and the girls of the house do no work either.

The first day is called Pahili Raja. The girl was up before dawn. She rubbed her skin with turmeric paste and oil and bathed in the pond, and then she put on a new sari. Her mother painted her feet with red alata.

"No going barefoot today," said her mother. "You will not press on the Earth with bare feet." In some villages the girls tie on soles cut from the bark of the banana plant.

Nothing was cooked that needed cutting or grinding. There was podapitha, the slow-baked rice cake with its dark crust, made ahead of time, and there were fruits, and Raja paan, the betel leaf of the festival.

Then came the best part. From the big banyan at the edge of the village the men had hung rope swings, dressed with flowers and leaves. The girls climbed on in twos and threes and flew up into the branches, and they sang. The Raja songs are made up on the spot, about love and teasing and the monsoon, and some have been sung for so long that nobody knows who made them. The boys and men played kabaddi in the dust and ate well. They knew that once the rains came they would be knee-deep in mud for four months.

The second day is Mithuna Sankranti, the first day of the month of Asadha. The third is called Bhudaha or Basi Raja. On all three days there are swings and cakes and visits to friends, and the ground is left alone.

On the fourth morning the grandmother called the women of the house into the kitchen.

"Now we bathe her," she said.

She meant the grinding stone. In an Odia kitchen the flat stone stands for Bhumi herself. The women washed it with water and turmeric paste, marked it with red sindoor and laid flowers on it. They set the season's fruits in front of it. This is Basumati Snana, the bath of the Earth.

"She has rested," said the grandmother. "Now she is clean, and the rain may fall on her."

That day the father took out his plough again.

On a hill above the Brahmaputra, near Guwahati, stands the temple of the goddess Kamakhya. There is no statue in its inner room. The goddess is worshipped there as a cleft of rock with a natural spring running over it.

The festival falls in the Assamese month of Ahar, about the middle of June, at the same turning of the sun that Odisha marks. The monsoon has come and the great river is in flood. The people of Assam say that in these days the goddess has her yearly days of rest, and that she is the Earth herself, whose power to give life gathers at this spot.

So the priests close the temple door.

For three days it stays shut. Nobody goes in and no worship is offered inside. Pilgrims come all the same, in very large numbers, householders and holy men from every part of India, and they wait on the hill. They sing, and they keep the rules of the three days. No food is cooked. No holy book is read. And in the villages no farmer puts a plough into the ground, for the same reason the door is shut. The Mother is resting, and she is not to be disturbed.

"When will it open?" a child asks his father, among the crowd on the steps.

"On the fourth day. First she is bathed."

On the fourth day the goddess is bathed and the rites are done that return the temple to its ordinary state. The door opens, and the pilgrims go in. Each of them hopes to carry home two gifts. One is water from the spring. The other is a small piece of the red cloth that covered the rock during the three days. People keep it as a blessing.

Then the ploughs come out, and the sowing begins.

On the coast of Karnataka, in the country of the Tulu speakers, the Earth's days of rest come at a different time of year. Keddasa falls in February, on the last three days of the Tulu month of Ponni. It marks the turn of the seasons, before the next round of farming begins.

The belief is the same as in the east. Bhumi Devi, people say, has her monthly days and becomes ready to bear again. For three days she rests. Nobody ploughs or digs. The three days are called Keddasa, Nadu Keddasa, which means the middle one, and Kade Keddasa, the last.

The household cooks kudu ari, a roasted and spiced mixture of horse gram, rice and other grains, and gives it out to neighbours and well-wishers.

The chief rite belongs to the eldest woman of the family, and she does it early on the last morning.

She spreads fresh cow dung around the tulsi plant in the yard and lights a lamp there. Before it she sets kumkum, and shikakai, the soap pod that women use to wash their hair. She lays out a special rice dish on a banana leaf.

"What is the soap pod for?" her granddaughter asks.

"For her bath. She washes her hair today, like any woman."

Then the old woman pours coconut oil onto the bare soil. That is the Earth's oil before bathing. Only after that does she go to bathe herself.

In the old days the men of the village went out together on a hunt during Keddasa, to clear the animals that raid the fields. And only when Keddasa is over may a farmer take up his spade again.