Our first Griha Pravesh

We rented an apartment in Toronto (Canada), in the Wellesley neighborhood, better known as The Village, or the LGBT neighborhood. We really like that, what place if not the one full of rainbow flags where we can finally live our love story at km 0? That's right, nowhere else!

We entered our apartment when it was still empty and two weeks of quarantine awaited us, mandatory for those arriving from abroad.

It is the first time that we have our own place, all of our own, that we can call home.

As we become IKEA furniture experts, thinking about how to fill the house, Shreyank reminds me that there is something to do first.

Shreyank suggests that I do a Griha Pravesh, the auspicious ceremony for the house, from the Sanskrit griha, house and pravesh, entrance. Usually, the ritual is practiced by the spouses after the wedding, when they enter their new home.

Wait a second! Shreyank and I are not married (honestly it's not very common to live together before marriage for an Indian). But we both believe in Gods and think that not everything depends entirely on us and that maybe we deserved a little ceremony(read here why)!

For the readers more experienced of Hinduism, it is good to say that there are different types of Griha Pravesh, based on the type of house, time, day and a thousand other reasons that only Hindus know.

The gods are thanked for the life lived up to entering the house and they are asked to come and visit us, to ward off negativity and bring "abundance" into our life. 

Think how cool: Vishnu was our first guest!

In fact, during the ceremony, we pray with the "Satya Narayana ” (satya, truth and narayana, how to explain? There are many things, summarized with the name of the God Vishnu), practiced by a pandit (we can say, a "priest"), surrounded from close friends and family.

We did things slightly on a smaller scale and in a more pop version: we listened to the prayer on the mobile phone, with a link that Shreyank's father sent him for the occasion.

We placed the altar of the Gods in the kitchen, and we used what we had in the house as an offering.

We hope that for Vishnu this will be enough: some grapes, two apples, two bananas.

There are many important elements during the ceremony: coconut, milk and fire.

For the first, we lacked the raw material, so we went directly to boiling the milk.

"But did you buy the saucepan?"

“No!”

…

“Ok, come on! Let's use the moka! " (Italian coffee machine)

We are on stage. The fire was interpreted by the electric stove and I, as tradition says, played the woman of the house and boiled the milk, adding sugar and almonds.

The milk must come out to represent the abundance of beautiful things that life will give us. And luckily for us (or thanks to chemistry) it did!

I had wet hair and Shreyank was wearing a Coldplay t-shirt, we both closed our eyes for a prayer that makes sense to Shreyank and maybe even more to me, because I don't understand it. The YouTube advertisement that starts in the middle of the ceremony makes us laugh, the burnt milk and the stove to be cleaned brings us back to reality, we open our eyes.

Here below, a mini video:

Now I'm curious: how do you celebrate new beginnings?