The Sixteen Days Before the Goddess
Pitru Paksha runs for sixteen lunar days in the fortnight before Mahalaya. For those sixteen days, the Bengali calendar is technically in mourning. No auspicious ceremonies. No weddings. No new beginnings. The dead are understood to be close, not as a metaphor, but as a cosmological fact that the Hindu almanac takes seriously enough to reorganise daily life around. You do not start things when the dead are visiting. You feed them instead.
