Anant Chaturdashi & Vishwakarma Puja

Katha · The story

Why we keep it

When the Pandavs were in exile, Krishna told Yudhishthir to keep the Anant vrat: worship Vishnu as Anant, the endless one, and tie a thread of fourteen knots, for the fourteen worlds, on the arm. The katha tells of a Brahman's daughter Sushila whose husband Kaundinya threw her anant thread into the fire in anger and lost everything, and regained it only by wandering until he found Anant and tied the thread again.

The same week, on Kanya Sankranti, is Vishwakarma Puja, the day of the divine architect who built Dwarka and Lanka and forged the gods' weapons. In Malinagar that means Bhaiya's mill, every tractor, every tube-well pump and every bicycle gets a marigold garland and a smear of sindoor, and nothing with an engine is started until the puja is done.