Gauri Comes Home

The morning after Holi the colour was still in the girl's hair when her grandmother called the women of the house into the inner room.

Two clay figures stood on the low shelf, made new that spring: Isar and Gauri, Shiva and his wife, side by side like a bride and groom. The girl's elder sister had been married at the winter weddings and had come back for this, because a new bride keeps the whole festival, all eighteen days of it, the first spring after her wedding.

"Who begins?" said the grandmother.

The song went round the room a line at a time. Her mother sang a line, her aunt the next, her sister the one after, and when it came to the girl she had none, so her grandmother gave her one and she sang it back.

"Sixteen days," her mother said. "One meal a day for the girls. For your sister, the whole thing, until the goddess goes."

So the days went. On the seventh evening after Holi the girls of the lane came for her with the ghudlia, a clay pot pierced all over with a lamp burning inside, so that the light came out in spots. She carried it on her head through the lanes behind a drum, singing, and at every door they were given something: a sweet, a coin, a spoon of ghee, a lump of jaggery. They went out again the next evening, and for ten evenings after that. Then the pots were broken into the well and everything they had been given was eaten together.

Every night the grandmother told stories in front of the shelf, and the girl asked for the same one.

"Shiva and Parvati were walking, with Narada," the grandmother said. "They came to a poor village. The poor women ran out with what they had, a little grain, a little water. Parvati took water in her hand and sprinkled them with it, and on them it was nectar. Then the rich women came, late, in good clothes, with rich food on trays."

"Did she sprinkle them too?"

"There was no water left. She cut her finger and sprinkled them with her blood, and on them it was nectar too. Then she made a linga of sand in the river, and Shiva said that any wife who worships the two of them on the third of Chaitra will keep her husband. So we do."

In the last three days the clay pair were dressed anew, in fresh cloth and small jewels, and the women put henna on their hands. And the songs changed. They were songs about Gauri leaving for her husband's house. The girl saw her sister crying while she sang, and understood for the first time what the festival was about. The clay girl on the shelf was going away to her husband, and so, in a week, was her sister.

"Why do we send her away, when we sang so long to bring her?" she asked.

"Because she is married," said her grandmother. "A daughter visits. Then a daughter goes home."

On the last day, the third of bright Chaitra, the married women lifted the pair onto their heads and walked. At Tripolia Gate the whole city was waiting, because the palace sends its own Gauri out that day: from the Zanani Deodhi of the City Palace, in a palanquin, with a royal aarti at the gate and the procession going on through Tripolia Bazaar and Chhoti Chaupar and Gangauri Bazaar to Talkatora. The girl saw her go past from her father's shoulders. Then the family walked on to the water with their own small pair and gave them to it, Isar and Gauri together, and went home and ate ghewar.

"In Jaisalmer," her grandmother said on the way, "they carry a Gauri alone. Bikaner took their Isar four hundred years ago, and they are still waiting for him to come back."

On the third day of bright Bhadrapada a young wife came to her mother's house, as she had done every year of her life until the last one, and was let in as a guest.

She bathed. Her mother dressed the small girls of the house in new clothes, and on a plate heaped with rice she set the Gauri: a cone of turmeric, under a little canopy of banana stems and mango leaves.

"She has come home," her mother said. "Like you."

Her brother worked in another city and could not come, but his parcel had: turmeric, kumkum, a blouse piece, bangles, the things for the worship, so that his sister would not sit before the goddess empty-handed. Her mother tied the thread on her right wrist, sixteen knots, and worshipped every knot before she tied the next. Her niece, too small for knots, wore a plain turmeric thread with a yellow chrysanthemum.

Then the baaginas. On a painted winnowing tray her mother laid out the gifts: turmeric and kumkum, black bangles and black beads, a comb and a mirror, a coconut, a blouse piece, grain, pulses, jaggery. One set was for Gauri. The rest were for the married women of the lane, who came one by one through the afternoon.

"Sixteen pairs this year," her mother said. "You are a new bride. Next year, five."

"Where does Gauri sleep tonight?"

"Here, with us. She has one night."

Her husband came in the evening and was fed, because the newly married are fed at the wife's house on this day, and they stayed.

In the morning there was a noise at the door and her father came in with a clay Ganesha in his arms, bright with paint, and set him down beside the turmeric cone.

"Here is your son," her mother told the Gauri, "come to take you home to Kailash."

The young wife looked at the two of them, the mother and the boy who had come to fetch her, and then at her own husband waiting at the door, and laughed, and went to pack. She had one more thing to say to her mother first, and she said it. In Kashmir they tell what Shiva said to Parvati when at last he had her alone, and that is The Secret at Amarnath.