The first thing that struck us on the morning of 20th August was that the geysers had not been installed in the bathrooms and we needed to have our baths before the panditji comes for the Griha Pravesh Puja. It’s 14 degrees and bathing with cold water was out of the question. But as a saviour comes the good old immersion water heater rod that we used decades back.
Nonetheless, it served the purpose. The panditji who was supposed to have come at 10 am arrived pretty early, much to our surprise. While he prepared the area to perform the puja/hawan, Deepa was busy in the kitchen preparing the food that was to be served after the puja. I on the other hand was installing one of the beds so that once everything is done I could catch up on my much-needed sleep from the previous night (which of course was not to be).
Must say our contractor was pretty helpful in giving us a couple of guys from his workforce to do the various chores – the entire house was crying for attention.
At 10 the puja started and by then our caretaker had taken control of the kitchen and our room was absolutely ready for us to crash-out whenever we felt like.
The panditji was meticulously setting up the mandap for the puja. It was nice to seem him taking pride on the job at hand. In fact he took his own time to describe to us the significance of every single thing – something you don’t get to see in the city where everything is a hurried affair. It was indeed a cleansing experience as the house reverberated with the mantras recited by the panditji followed by the occasional blowing of the shankha, the voice of which echoed on the mountains.
By 2.30 hungry that we were, we all had devoured our bhogs and bid aideu to our panditji. Thought will rest for a while, but lot of chores to be done before the sun goes down, so off to doing an analysis of the damage done by the relocation company by opening, setting up the items at their designated places from a mountain of cartons.
The soft mattress and the thought of resting our heads on the pillow and curling up underneath the warm blanket seems a long way.
