BIRATNAGAR: The Siruwa festival is being marked in an upbeat mood from early morning hours today in the Terai districts.

The festival held to mark the start of New Year sees revelers seeking blessings from elders, worshipping the cooking stove and cleaning up the streets and maintaining environmental hygiene.

The specialty of the festival is worshipping the cooking stove and daubing the kitchen floor. In the festival widely celebrated by the Maithili community it is believed that kitchen should also be given rest for at least one night per year. So the foods are cooked in the day and eaten in the evening.

The household gods are also worshipped and presented with food cooked a day before along with curd and sugar. The 'stale rice' as an offering is cooked in a pot made up of mud. The revelers also clean up the streets, wells, canals and water the trees so as to keep them hydrated during the dry month as the main motive of the festival is to keep the environment clean and aware the community to do the same.

In the course of jontly cleaning the environment, there is also a tradition of playing with the mud as the revelers express their joy by throwing mud at each other.

The festival is marked by Maithili, Tharu, Rajbanshi and Satar communities as per their own respective traditions. Other communities apart from Maithili also eat meat on the occasion.