Tomorrow is our Grihapravesham ( House warming ceremony) for our new home. The function starts at 3:00 a.m in the wee hours of the morning. The ceremony will easily last more than 5 hours with priests sitting around the sacred fire chanting mantrams. The home’s gonna get pretty smoky, for sure.

An important part of the ceremony is Ganapathi Omam, where the cow’s urine is sprinkled all over the house! Normally a real cow with its calf is brought inside the house and everyone waits until the cow natually urinates. Since it’ll be a tricky job getting a cow and a calf to climb two storeys up to our home, we settled just for the cow’s urine alone !