Going all moony over a solar eclipse

Window Seat

Surya Grahana, the Solar Eclipse, is a useful thing. For one, the time that the Sun, Moon and the Earth get aligned in the sky is a good time to check if your own family is aligned — to your beliefs and worldview. What you do (or not do) on the day of an eclipse can be a barometer of “What type of Indian are you?” My own home was a good testing ground.

We are no Suryavanshis, just three generations under one roof of a Bengaluru flat – the Mother, we the MiddleAger couple, and our son, the Millennial.

The evening before the eclipse last Sunday, mother came from her mother’s place with the darbe (a kind of grass also called Darbha, scientific name Desmotachya bipinnata). These straws, I knew from habit and three dozen eclipses, were to be dropped during the eclipse duration into foods that usually ferment. There are those who keep the darbe in places that challenge the very disinfectant power the grass is believed to have against harmful rays; like on top of the fridge – as if a kind of wholesale insurance cover for all food that is inside, that may date back to even a few days.

So far, so fine, but Ma pronounced a set of other instructions: Breakfast the next morning was to be light and had to be consumed en masse before 8.30 am so that the food is digested well before the eclipse start time; each of us had to have our bath close to 2 pm after the official declaration that it’s all over; and only then the cooking would start for the Sunday lunch.

As kids growing up in a South Indian family in a little town in Uttar Pradesh, I did not recall any such ‘Eclipse Manual’ in place in our home. My same mother, younger and married to a roaming husband whose government job took us across North India, had been clueless about any must-do lists on Moon-eats-Sun days or Earth-blocks-Moon nights. We girls, along with our father, therefore spent such celestial days in ignorant bliss. In any case, father was no good as a knower of rules; it was only during his LTC-granted annual holidays to Chennai and Bengaluru that Appa, a jollygood omelette-relisher from a pure-veg family, would get reminded of his roots and rituals, all of which were forgotten once we were back in the Hindi heartland.

But the 2020 Surya Grahana was way more codified. If you didn’t know the code via Whatsapp University and felt an absolute Eclipsidiot – like that other new term Covidiot – you just had to turn on the TV. Astrologers, not scientists or solar eclipse experts, had taken the throne in each of the Kannada channels that I scanned, over the dos and absolute don’ts, the stars that you were born under that were in danger now, saved only if you gave away a cow in charity. On Instagram, actor Danish Sait of the lockdown laughriots, asked if eclipse “pe miniRoza rakhi?”

On a friends’ group, a debate raged on how eclipse restrictions are all superstitions. Then someone shared a video clip of a new-age guru saying how there was “phenomenal death of microorganisms that occurred in oceans, in our bodies and fasting makes scientific sense”. The trashers rubbished it, the believers didn’t care, the young set who wanted to believe but were scared of being ‘uncool’ seemed happy with the validation. Elsewhere on social media, a friend’s husband went live declaring that he was having Pandi curry (pork delicacy) exactly at the same forbidden hour.

I read how Prof MN Vahia at the Nehru Science Centre, Mumbai, said that though we call it a Solar Eclipse, the sun is completely unaware of its occurrence. The sun is too big to be bothered about where the moon’s shadow falls.

But when I went to a friend’s house that evening, the Sun was still the centre of our talk. She said Grahana rites are all bunkum but her son, newly-married and now in New York, had called a couple of days before to ask her, “Amma, what is the name of that grass grandma would put to purify the food during eclipse? I am checking if we can buy that online.”