By Rajat Aikant Sharma
The night sky often plays tricks, but some nights it stages philosophy.
On 7 September, the Moon did not rise in its usual silver calm. Instead, it appeared bathed in red-orange firelight – the so-called Blood Moon. Astronomers explain it neatly: Earth slips between Sun and Moon, the atmosphere bends red light into the shadow, and the lunar surface glows like a copper lantern.
But step outside ritual geography and step into Hindu imagination, and this shadowed Moon is not just a scientific event. It is an invitation. For on this night, under this reddened sky, begins the fortnight of Pitru Paksha — fifteen lunar days dedicated to remembering the ancestors, offering them food, water, prayers, and perhaps, something subtler: presence.
The Ancestors’ Fortnight
In Hindu cosmology, life is not a private project. It is a relay of debts. Every human is born carrying three obligations: to the gods (deva-ṛiṇa), to the sages (ṛṣi-ṛiṇa), and to the ancestors (pitṛ-ṛiṇa). Pitru Paksha is about settling that third account.
It stretches from Bhadrapada Purnima (full moon) to Ashwin Amāvasyā (new moon) — a fortnight of descent, when the visible Moon shrinks and the invisible world expands. Each tithi (lunar day) is dedicated to those who died on that date. On the final day, Sarva Pitru Amāvasyā, all ancestors — even those whose death dates are forgotten — are remembered together.
The rituals are simple: rice balls (piṇḍa), black sesame, water offerings, feeding birds, cows, or the poor. But beneath these gestures lies a profound philosophy: memory is an ethical act. To forget is a crime. To remember is to remain human.
The Hills that Remember
In the Garhwal hills, this respect is not a seasonal duty but a living atmosphere. A diya on the veranda is not for light but for lineage. Mist folds over the valley, and you feel your grandparents are walking in it. Local filmmaker Pradeep Bhandari captured this beautifully in Pitrakuda, a film that treats ancestral honour not as superstition but as civic glue. A society that forgets its dead soon forgets its duties.
Our hills whisper that ancestors are not gone. They are behind the veil, watching, sometimes blessing. Pitru Paksha is imagined as a portal — a subtle wormhole through which the departed briefly cross over.
And why not? Physics too entertains portals: wormholes in spacetime, multiverse theories where alternate versions of us live elsewhere, quantum entanglement where particles once linked remain mysteriously connected. If matter can keep strange bonds, why not memory?
The Blood Moon as Parable
Science calls it Rayleigh scattering. The Earth’s atmosphere sifts out blue light, bends red into the shadow, and paints the Moon crimson. But philosophy calls it parable: just as light filters into red, memory filters into tenderness; just as the Moon is veiled by Earth’s shadow, ancestors are veiled by time; just as the eclipse ends and the Moon shines again, remembrance restores continuity.
The Blood Moon is shrāddha written in the sky.
Ujjain and Gaya
Few cities embody this better than Ujjain, the ancient axis of India. It was once the nation’s zero meridian, its astronomical hub. At its heart stands the Mahākāl Jyotirlinga, where Time itself is said to be devoured by Mahākāla. During Pitru Paksha, shrāddha here feels cosmic, aligning personal memory with the rhythm of the universe.
Further east lies Gaya, where Vishnu’s eternal footprint presses into stone. Shrāddha at Gaya is about honour, but also about release — untying karmic knots so the departed can rest, and so the living can walk unburdened. If Ujjain calibrates time, Gaya calibrates tenderness. Both remind us that remembrance is not about clinging, but about continuity with mercy.
A Portal of Consciousness
Strip away rituals, and Vedānta whispers a simple truth: Ātman is Brahman. The same Consciousness that looked through your grandmother’s eyes now looks through yours. Shrāddha is not sending food to the dead; it is polishing the living perceiver. Gratitude reduces ego’s dust. Offering rice balls is less about appeasing spirits and more about remembering that we are entangled in continuity.
Modern physics, ironically, lends its metaphors to the same mystery. Families, like entangled particles, remain linked beyond distance. Rituals restore coherence in lives scattered by noise. Shrāddha becomes a psychic wormhole — a bridge between visible and invisible, a resonance window when frequencies align and the bonds of memory light up again.
The Story Circles Back
As the eclipse deepens, the Moon burns red above us, and the night grows strange. Scientists will say it is the Earth’s shadow and scattered light. Priests will close temple doors, reminding us that shadow time is not for outer ritual. But perhaps this pause is itself the ritual — a moment to turn inward, to feel the presence of those who came before us, not as ghosts, not as abstractions, but as quiet witnesses.
What if our ancestors are not gone at all? What if they live on — in parallel universes, on distant planets, or in subtle forms we cannot yet measure? Pitru Paksha is then a season of resonance, a time when the veil thins, when frequencies align. A fortnight when a secret portal opens and the entangled bonds of memory spark once more. They step close, sense us, bless us, and fade back into the mystery.
Perhaps that is why the Moon turns red — a cosmic lantern hung at the door of the universe, guiding them towards us. Perhaps shrāddha is not about feeding the dead but about remembering that we are never severed, only separated by shadows. Perhaps it is about discovering that to honour them is to polish ourselves — to strip the ego’s dust until gratitude shines through.
And so, the story expands: the hills of Mussoorie where Pitrakuda tells us that forgetting our dead is forgetting our duty. The city of Ujjain where time itself bows at Mahākāl. The stone of Gaya, pressed forever by Vishnu’s foot, reminding us that remembrance must also release. The Blood Moon above, proof that shadow and light are partners, not enemies.
And here we stand in 2025, surrounded by machines that can store more data than all the scriptures combined. Yet they cannot store the warmth of a grandmother’s laugh, or the fragrance of an ancestor’s ritual fire. AI can archive, but only shrāddha can connect.
So let the night be what it is: scientific and sacred, mystical and modern. Let the red Moon remind us that remembrance is not about the past — it is about continuity. Our ancestors do not live behind us; they live through us. And as we whisper their names under the eclipse, we discover the oldest truth of all:
Memory is love, and love is the only immortality.
(Rajat Aikant Sharma is a writer, columnist, and photojournalist whose work spans culture, history, philosophy, and human narratives across the world.)
