Sohar & Chhathi — welcoming a child

On the sixth day — Chhathihar — the mother and newborn take their first formal bath and the home is purified. In the evening the women worship the goddess Shashthi (Chhathi Maiya), protector of infants, who is believed to enter silently around midnight to write the child’s destiny.

So a lamp is lit and a pen and paper left beside the baby through the night for the goddess; in the morning they are removed and kept. There is usually no priest — it is a women’s family rite, often led by a senior woman or the maternal aunt.

On the twelfth day the period of birth-impurity (sutak) closes. The house, bedding and the mother’s and child’s clothes are washed, the mother bathes and is reincorporated into normal household and ritual life, and new clothes are given to mother and baby.

Festive food is prepared and kin received in a formal welcome of the newborn, with more Sohar sung. Among Maithils the Namkaran (naming) is often fused with this day for a son, so Barahi and the naming frequently coincide as one celebration.

The child is bathed and dressed, an aripan is drawn, and the priest (or the father) worships the household deities and the Navagraha (nine planets) for the child’s long life. The rashi / birth-nakshatra is computed and the auspicious starting syllable derived, and a name to fit it is chosen.

The father takes the child in his lap, recites the naming verse, and speaks the chosen name into its right ear; the elders bless it, “Ayushman bhava.” By Maithil convention the naming falls on the twelfth day for a son and the eleventh for a daughter, though it may be deferred to a later auspicious day.

Around the sixth month the child is given its first solid food. At an auspicious moment, after a short puja for good digestion, speech and intellect, a senior of the family — often a grandparent or the maternal uncle — feeds the first morsel of kheer (rice-and-milk pudding) from a silver bowl.

Often a tray of symbolic objects — a book, pen, coin, soil, food — is set before the child to “choose,” foretelling its inclinations. A family feast follows. In Nepali Maithil usage the rite is called Pasni.

The welcome of a child is sung into being: the sohar birth-songs are an old women’s repertoire, set against the births of Rama and Krishna so that every birth, for a few days, is sacred. Its tender heart is Chhathi, the sixth day, when the goddess Shashthi (Chhathi Maiya) is believed to enter the home to write the child’s destiny — so a lamp is lit and a pen and paper left beside the baby. Why the sixth day, and why a goddess of children? Because infant mortality once made these first days the most perilous of a life, and so the most carefully guarded by rite and song. Chhathi opens a sequence — Barahi, Namkaran, Annaprashan and later Mundan — by which the community marks, and protects, a young life; the songs and rites are kept widely still.