The dead keep a busy diary. For about two months every autumn, from Kolkata to Phnom Penh and from Galway to Oaxaca, they are expected home. And almost everywhere they are expected, someone is up before dawn or long after dark doing two things at once: lighting the road for the dead they love, and making sure nothing else follows them in.
In Bengal, where I grew up, the season starts with a radio. Before sunrise on Mahalaya, the new moon of the month of Ashwin, households across the state switch on the same broadcast they have played for generations: Birendra Krishna Bhadra chanting Mahishasura Mardini, the goddess’s battle hymn, in a voice every Bengali can hear in their sleep. Down on the ghats of the Hooghly, thousands stand in the river at first light to offer water to their ancestors. The ritual is called tarpan, and it closes Pitru Paksha, a whole fortnight set aside for the dead. Only when the ancestors have been fed does the goddess’s fortnight begin.
Around the same weeks, Cambodia opens the gates of hell. During Pchum Ben, a fifteen-day festival of the ancestors, the spirits of all thirty-two Khmer hells are let out into the world of the living, and they arrive starving. Many have mouths so small that only a pinch of sticky rice will fit, and they cannot bear the light. So before dawn, temple grounds fill with families tossing little balls of rice into the darkness, “almost like a tennis ball or a boomerang”, as one Cambodian put it to Atlas Obscura. Feed them, and they go back content on the last day, sent off with tiny banana-leaf boats loaded with sweets and candles. Neglect them, and the living can expect to be cursed.
That is the first thing these festivals agree on. The dead are not all the same. Some are family, coming home. Some are simply hungry. Nearly every tradition makes room for both.
By the last night of October, the season reaches the Atlantic edge of Europe. In Ireland, Halloween was the eve of Samhain, one of the four great turning points of the old calendar, the night summer gave way to the dark half of the year. The spirits of the dead were expected to come home, and so were things that were not your relatives at all. Sensible people stayed away from fairy forts and lone trees. Guisers went from house to house in masks and costumes, and the old explanation for the disguise is that anything met on the road might take you for one of its own. And in the window sat a lantern carved from a turnip, its face lit from inside. The National Museum of Ireland keeps one of these “ghost turnips” in its folklife collection, and it is genuinely alarming. The pumpkin only took over in America, where it was easier to carve.
Irish folklore added a warning for the morning after. Once Halloween passed, the púca, a shape-shifting spirit, was said to have spat on the wild fruit, so nobody should eat the berries. By November they have usually gone over anyway. The púca still gets the blame.
The same night, a thousand miles east, Belarusian and Polish villages were laying the table for Dziady, the Forefathers. Honey, groats, eggs and vodka were set out at home or carried to the graves, and a little of everything was spilled onto the table or the ground for the dead. You did not clear the table after supper, in case someone was still eating. You did not spin, weave or sew, in case you trapped a soul in the thread. You did not throw water out of the window without warning whoever might be standing beneath it. Beggars were fed generously, because they too were called dziady, and a stranger at the door might carry your prayers to the people you had lost. The poet Adam Mickiewicz turned the rite into Forefathers’ Eve, the great drama of Polish Romanticism. In Poland today, on 1 November, the cemeteries glow with candles from end to end. The old belief was that later that night the dead hold a mass of their own, and no living person should be there to see it.
Then the mood flips. In Mexico, on 1 and 2 November, the dead are not something to wait out by the fire. They are guests of honour, and there is a party.
Families build ofrendas, home altars crowded with photographs, candles, bread and the favourite things of the person being welcomed back, whether that is mole, a bottle of tequila or a packet of cigarettes. Then they lay a road. The flower is the cempasúchil, the Mexican marigold, whose name comes from the Nahuatl words for “twenty” and “flower”. Its orange is loud enough and its scent strong enough that the dead are said to follow it, so families scatter petals from the front door to the altar, and in some towns all the way from the cemetery to the house.
One part of the festival is younger than it looks. The giant skeleton parade that now winds through Mexico City was invented for the opening scene of the 2015 James Bond film Spectre. Visitors arrived the next year expecting to see it, so in 2016 the city held a real one. A film set became a tradition in twelve months.
Japan does all this in the heat of August, and it shows the part of the job everyone else is too polite to mention: getting the dead to leave. Obon begins with welcoming fires and ends with sending ones. On the night of 16 August, five enormous bonfires are lit on the mountains around Kyoto, one of them in the shape of the character for “great”, visible across the city. They are called okuribi, send-off fires. On rivers, paper lanterns are set on the water to carry the visitors gently away.
Which brings the dead back to Bengal, for the darkest night of their year.
On Bhoot Chaturdashi, the night before Kali Puja, Bengali families light fourteen small earthen lamps around the house, one for each of fourteen generations of ancestors. The lamps do both jobs at once: they show the family’s dead the way home, and they keep out anything that should not come in with them. Many households eat choddo shaak, fourteen kinds of leafy greens, the same day. Ask a Bengali grandmother why fourteen and you will get a story. Ask three and you will get three.
When I was small, I used to help my mother set the fourteen lamps out around the house. Now, a long way from Bengal, I light them on my own.
The next night, which this year falls on 8 November, belongs to Kali. Outside India she is often misunderstood because of how she looks: dark-skinned, wild-haired, a garland of heads around her neck. To Bengal she is Ma, the Mother, whose fury is aimed at evil and never at her children. On the blackest new moon of the year, the whole of Bengal lights up for her.
None of these traditions borrowed from the others. A Khmer grandmother tossing rice before dawn has never heard of the púca, and a Kyoto family watching the mountain fires has no idea that Belarusian villagers once refused to clear the supper table. Yet they move through the same steps, in the same order. Open the door. Light the road. Feed whoever turns up hungry. Then, when it is time, send them home again.
So if you pass a window this autumn with a lamp burning in it long after bedtime, it may not have been left on for you.
Related reading: the full story of Mahalaya, the Bengali dawn that begins Durga Puja, and what Durga Puja really celebrates. If this made you curious about Bengal’s stories, Folktales from India is a good place to wander.
From the author: if you like your autumn nights a little darker, my gothic folk-horror novel No One Belongs to a House is out now on Kindle, and The Land Demands Blood, three folk horror tales, is free with Kindle Unlimited. My crime novel Archive of the Dead releases on 13 November. All three are also on my Books page.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Discover more from Shin Stories
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.