For most of the year, the soop is a kitchen tool. For four days in the year, it carries the most important offering there is.
Woven from bamboo
A soop is a flat winnowing basket woven by hand from split bamboo. Rice and grain are tossed in it so that the husk and dust blow away, a sound and movement familiar to anyone who grew up in a Bihari home.
At Chhath
At Chhath, the soop is filled with offerings: fruit, sugarcane, thekua and lamps. Standing in the water at sunset and again at sunrise, devotees hold up the soop to offer arghya to the Sun.
Made by hand
Every soop is woven by hand, and in the weeks before Chhath, markets across Bihar fill with new ones, still pale and smelling of fresh bamboo.