Narayan Bali Puja

Some deaths do not allow the rites to be done. A person is lost far from home, or in an accident, or in water, and there is no body to give to the fire. A family learns of a death years late. A child dies before the naming. A death happens abroad and the ashes never came back. In each of these the household is left with something unfinished, and the Garuda Purana provides for exactly this: Narayan Bali is the rite in which the last rites are performed symbolically, on an effigy of darbha and rice flour, so that what was owed can be given.

The rite runs over three days on the bank of the Godavari at Trimbakeshwar. Five deities are invoked — Vishnu, Brahma, Shiva, Yama and the preta itself, the departed being addressed directly. The effigy receives the offerings, the pind daan and finally the symbolic cremation, and the family observes the ashaucha that would have followed a death in the house. On the second day the Nagbali is performed where the family keeps that observance, and on the third the shraddha and tarpan are completed at the Kushavarta ghat.

Families come to this rite carrying a specific kind of grief — the kind that has had nowhere to go, sometimes for decades. It is not a remedy for anything. It is the last rite, given late.