Amāvāsyā

When it falls

The new moon (amāvāsyā), the last day of the dark fortnight, once a lunar month. The amānta reckoning of the south and west ends its month here, so the day is both an ending and the eve of a beginning. Several are named days of their own — Mahālaya, Dīpāvali's, Māgha's — and are kept as those.

The Phala almanac gives the exact day for your own city; the lunar and solar rules above are what it computes from.

The story

The day belongs to the ancestors. The waning moon is read as the path the departed take, and the new moon is when they are held to be nearest; the offering of water (tarpaṇa) is made to three generations by name, with the sacred thread worn over the right shoulder rather than the left.

It is not a day of mourning. The obligation runs the other way: the living owe the dead their name spoken and water poured, and the day exists so that the owing is met rather than felt.

Because the moon is absent, it is also held to be a poor day to begin anything outward — which is the other half of what the almanac is asked about it. The two readings sit together: turn inward, and settle what is behind you.

How the day is kept

• Tarpaṇa at a river or at home, offered with water, black sesame and darbha grass.
• A meal cooked for the ancestors and offered before anyone eats, in many houses on the amāvāsyā nearest a parent's death anniversary rather than every month.
• No new ventures, no travel begun, no house entered for the first time — the almanac's ordinary counsel for a moonless day.
• Bathing places on the Kāverī, the Gaṅgā and at Rāmeśvaram fill at dawn; the Mahālaya amāvāsyā in Bhādrapada is the largest of them.

More ancestors and remembrance