Celestial Candle Holder

48.00$

Where it goes. Bedside, definitely. Puja shelf if you want a tealight there instead of an open diya, the base catches the wax. Bathroom window ledge, oddly, because the frosted glass suits a bathroom. Study desk. Not the dining table, it is too small, it gets lost among the plates.

Dry cloth only. Don’t use Pitambari or any brass polish on it, that will strip the pewter finish and turn the sun’s face shiny in patches. The stones are glued, so no soaking.

Approx 10 cm tall, 15 cm wide, 7 cm deep.
Cast metal, pewter finish, frosted glass back panel.
Five blue rhinestone stars.
Holds one standard tealight in the base recess, tealight not included.
Finish varies a little piece to piece.

Sun on the left, moon on the right, both with faces. The sun is grinning, the moon has that half asleep look and there are five little blue stones set between them like stars. The whole front is cast metal in a dull pewter finish, not shiny silver, more like an old paisa that has been in a drawer. Behind the metal there is a half circle of frosted glass, and the base has a round recess for one tealight. Light the tealight and the glass panel glows from behind the sun and moon, that is the whole trick of it, in daylight it is a nice ornament, at night it is a different thing.

It is small. About 10 cm tall, 15 cm wide, 7 cm deep. Sits on a palm. Don’t expect it to fill a console table, it is a bedside or a windowsill piece.

Now, why I picked it for the site. Surya and Chandra together is not a new idea for us. We have been praying to both for three thousand years, Surya Dev gets his arghya at dawn on Chhath, the Karwa Chauth vrat breaks only when the moon is sighted through the sieve and half of India waits for the same moon on the 29th night of Ramzan to know whether Eid is tomorrow.

In the Navagraha both sit side by side, sun and moon, the two lights and if you walk into any old temple in Karnataka you’ll find them carved above the door. So a sun and moon on the bedside table is not a western zodiac thing for us, it is closer to a small Surya Chandra yantra that happens to hold a diya. I have one on the sill of the room where my mother reads in the evening and she lights it before Maghrib without thinking about it, that is the kind of object it is.