In Nepal the equivalent festival, Bhai Tika, forms the elaborate final day of the multi-day Tihar festival and is kept with considerably more ritual complexity than the Indian Bhai Dooj it corresponds to: sisters apply a distinctive seven-coloured tika to their brothers' foreheads, garland them with specific flowers including the makhamali that is not supposed to wilt, and perform a longer sequence of blessing rites intended to ward off Yama himself, while brothers who have no living sister sometimes receive the tika from a substitute or visit a temple instead, a formal accommodation for an occasion the culture treats as close to obligatory.
Bhai Tika is a nationally significant public holiday in Nepal in a way Bhai Dooj is not uniformly across India, where its prominence varies more by region and community, illustrating how the same underlying brother-sister blessing tradition, sharing a common mythological root in the Yama and Yamuna story, has been elaborated into a markedly more central and ritually complex occasion in one Himalayan country than in the plains regions where the simpler tilak-and-sweets version of the day remains the norm.
In West Bengal the timing of the phonta is treated with particular astrological precision: local panjika almanacs calculate and publish an exact auspicious minute, not merely a day, for applying the mark each year, and this specific muhurta is widely reported in Bengali newspapers and broadcast media in the days beforehand, so that families across the region apply the sandal-paste mark within the same narrow window rather than at any convenient point during the day.