Hindu Mourning Period: Ten, Eleven, or Thirteen Days

The message came at four in the morning your time. By breakfast you had three different answers to the only practical question you asked: when is it, and should I fly.

Your mother's side said the eleventh day. Your father's younger brother said the thirteenth. Somebody on the group call said the tenth, with the particular confidence of a man who has never been wrong about anything in his life. You wrote to me because I am the cousin who looks things up, and you wanted to know which of them was right.

All of them. That is the honest answer, and I think it is worth more to you this week than a date would be.

Nobody is making their version up

There is no single Hindu mourning period. There is a cluster of them, and the cluster is old.

The general account of the last rites has the family inviting neighbours, friends and relatives on the tenth, eleventh or twelfth day to eat a simple meal together in remembrance. Three days offered in one breath, with no attempt to choose between them.

Go to the North Indian rite specifically and you get a fourth. Terahvin — terahvi simply means thirteenth — is described as the ceremony marking the final day of mourning among North Indian Hindus, and sometimes Sikhs, held on the thirteenth day after the death. For Hindu families it can include puja and havan; in Sikh families it closes with a recitation of the Guru Granth Sahib.

And in Bengali Brahmin homes the period of mourning and abstinence is described as running eleven days, closing with the shraddha on the eleventh.

So your mother's side is Bengali and counts eleven. Your uncle counts thirteen because that is what his side has always counted. These are not competing claims about a fact — they are different households keeping different calendars, and the tradition has never required them to agree.

I say this because I know what you are doing, which is trying to get it correct. You cannot. You can only get it right for the house it is happening in — and that house is your father's, so his side sets the day.

What the thirteenth day is actually for

The rite behind the thirteenth day has a name: Pind Sammelan, also called Spindi, and in the North Indian reckoning terahvin is the word for it. Other reckonings put the same rite a day or two earlier, which by now will not surprise you.

The mechanism, as the tradition states it, is a change of status. Before the rite, the departed is a preta. After it, the departed becomes pitr and is counted among the ancestors. That is the whole purpose of the thirteen days: not to mark time, but to move someone from one category to another.

That explains why the family is so insistent about the date when they have been vague about everything else. In their understanding, your father is mid-journey and the rite completes it. Nobody wants to be casual about a crossing. And once he is among the ancestors he is remembered with them — which is why the date you keep in years to come will not be this one.

The food is the part nobody warns you about

This is the part nobody will explain, and it will be the strangest.

In a Bengali mourning household, cooking is permitted only once during the day. Lunch is usually rice and green bananas — kanchkola. The only seasoning allowed is sea salt and a little ghee. At night, mourners may have fruit and milk. That is the whole provision.

It is not symbolic hardship invented for the occasion. It is a complete, functioning diet with everything interesting removed, and it is held for eleven days.

Other regions keep their own version. In Assam the mourning food is Hobisiya — moong dal, rice and potatoes, cooked without oil, turmeric, onion or garlic.

Bengal is a fish-eating country — and during the mourning days fish is precisely what is not allowed. The house keeps strict vegetarian food for the whole period.

And then the rite that ends mourning is named after fish.

It is called matsyamukhi, from matsya, fish, and it is performed after the day of the shraddha. Family and close relatives return to their normal eating, breaking the niyom of taking no non-vegetarian food, and fish is mandatorily served. The day's other Bengali name, niyom bhanga, means simply the breaking of the rules.

A fish is also released into water that day, for the release of the soul. So on one morning a fish goes back into the river and fish goes onto the plate.

The North Indian close takes a different form and has the same shape: the thirteenth day ends in a community function for the mohalla or the village.

Either way the period narrows to a point of austerity and then opens outward into food, shared with everyone within walking distance. I do not think anyone designed that. But I have never found a better description of what grief does, or of what finally ends it.

The turban, and who it falls to

There is one more rite you may be asked to stand for, and it helps to know what it means.

In the north, the Rasam Pagri is a social ceremony in which the eldest surviving male member of the family has a turban tied on his head in the presence of the extended family or clan. It takes place either on the fourth day after the funeral rites — the Uthala — or on the thirteenth day, the Terahvin. In Sikh families the related practice is dastarbandi.

The turban signifies the honour of the family, and the ceremony marks the transfer of responsibility for the family's protection and welfare from the person who died to the surviving eldest male.

It is not a prayer. It is a handover, performed publicly so that nobody can later claim not to have seen it. It is also changing: reform-minded families have begun allowing daughters to receive the pagri.

If it falls to you, it will happen quickly and you will not feel ready. Nobody does. The ceremony is not asking whether you feel ready.

What you can honestly do from eight time zones away

You asked whether to fly, and I am not going to answer that for you.

But I want to be straight about one thing, because people will be kind to you and slightly dishonest. You cannot perform the sapindikarana from your flat. It is a rite with a place and a set of hands, and it will be done by whoever is standing in that room. No video call substitutes for it.

What you can keep requires no priest and no address. You can keep the household's hours. One meal in the day, plainly cooked. Fruit and milk at night. No oil, no onion, no garlic. Sleep lower than you usually do. Do it on their dates, in your own kitchen, for however many days your father's side counts.

That is not a lesser version of the rite. It is the same discipline, and it is the half of it that was never geographic.

I am not a priest and have never been the karta for anyone. I have only sat in those rooms, which is a different thing and qualifies me for very little.

The hours, and why they help

One last observation, and then I will stop.

For eleven or thirteen days, a stunned household is given something to do at a fixed hour, every single day. The rice is cooked once. The lamp is lit. The room keeps the smell of a house where incense has been burning since early morning and the windows have been open a long time. None of it is a treatment for anything, and I would not insult you by suggesting it is. It is a schedule, handed to people who have temporarily lost the ability to make one.

Then, on a day someone else decided centuries ago, the schedule stops and the neighbours arrive with food.

You will not have to decide when that is. The house will tell you. Your only real task is to be inside it, or to keep its hours from wherever you are, and to let the days do the small amount they are able to do.

Write to me when you have landed, or when you have not.