Balachaturdashi Festival

For one night, on the Balachaturdashi festival, they come to honour the dead with fire. At the Pashupatinath temple near Kathmandu, Nepali's from across the country come to pay their respects to their deceased family members. From dusk to dawn they tend fires and butter lamps, keeping the flames alive in rememberance of the dead. As I approached the temple complex - dedicated to Shiva, the god of destructuion and reproduction - funeral pyres cast glowing orange reflections in the Bagmati river. Hundreds of yellow firelights flickered between the temples, as family groups huddled around the commemorative flames. The place seethed with people and I was caught up in a crowd entering the temple compound from the river. Inside, the place was full of people keeping their fire vigils through the night. Amidst the firelight, music was played, bhajans (religious songs) were sung, incense was burned, and the intermittant clang of the temple bells sounded across the crowd. At dawn, devotees take satbeej (seven different seeds of rice, barley, sesame, wheat, gram, maize and millet) and scatter it on the earth in the belief that departed souls attain salvation from the cycle of life and death.