Who Lakshmi is
Lakshmi is the goddess who arrives. In the stories she is never simply there, the way a mountain is there. She comes up out of the sea, or in through a door, or into a dream, and the moment she comes the house fills, the fields green over and the gods get their strength back. And she goes. That is the other half of her, and the stories are honest about it. She leaves Indra when he throws a sage's garland in the dust. She leaves Bali when he stops washing his hands before the offering. She leaves her own husband's chest when a man kicks it and her husband says thank you.
People call her the goddess of wealth, and she is, but in her own stories wealth is never the point. It is what follows her in. What she is looking for, when she walks the shore of the churned ocean with a garland in her hands, or goes round the earth on the autumn full moon asking who is awake, is a certain kind of house and a certain kind of person: clean, grateful, awake, not quarrelling. She tells Rukmini exactly whom she stays with and whom she leaves, and it is a long list, and money is not on it.
She is pictured on an open lotus, in red and gold, with two white elephants pouring water over her, and gold falling from one of her four hands. In Bengal and Odisha an owl sits at her feet. On Vishnu's chest she sits beside the Kaustubha jewel, which came out of the same sea a little before her. In the south she is Thirumagal and Padmavati of Tiruchanur, in Maharashtra the Mahalakshmi of Kolhapur, at Badrinath the tree that kept the snow off her husband. Her elder sister is Jyeshtha, called Alakshmi, misfortune, who rose from the sea before her and who is sent out of the house with a broom on the night the lamps are lit.
Her nights are the ones when the house stays up for her: Diwali in the north and west, the Kojagari full moon in the east, the Friday of Varalakshmi in the south, the Thursdays of Margashira in Odisha. The oldest prayer to her asks only one thing, and it is not for gold.
Bring me, Agni, the Lakshmi who does not go away: the Shri Sukta's last verse.
