Chhath Puja: Vendors doing brisk business

Chhath Puja: Vendors doing brisk business

Patna: Sale of dry mango wood, bamboo baskets, and earthen stoves surged on Monday, as Bihar’s popular Chhath Puja entered its second day - also known as ‘Kharna’ when devotees prepare ‘Kheer’ or rice pudding as an offering.

Vegetables like pumpkin and other items including coconut, banana, sugarcane, apple, pineapple, sweet potatoes, water caltrop - used as an offering to the Sun God - are selling like hot cakes. Shopkeepers and vendors are a happy lot, as they are doing a brisk business without much haggling by customers.

Shobha Singh, another devotee, said that only dry wood from mango trees is used as fuel for cooking the traditional meals. The four-day Chhath Puja began here on Sunday with ‘Nahai Khai’, with devotees visiting the river banks early in the morning for a ritualistic bath, before preparing a traditional meal of boiled rice and pumpkin. “We use bamboo baskets of different shapes and earthen stoves to prepare traditional meals and to offer prayers to the Sun God,” Krishna Devi, another devotee, told IANS at the Collectorate Ghat here in Patna.

She said that different shapes of bamboo baskets, locally known as ‘soop’, are being used by the devotees for Chhath. Colorful idols of the Sun God riding his chariot with seven horses, a new attraction this year, are being sold on the river banks. (IANS)

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