As Badrinath tells it
Badrinath, Uttarakhand · 3 min read
Vishnu was lying down, and Lakshmi was rubbing his feet.
Narada arrived the way he arrives everywhere, without warning, and stood and looked at the two of them for longer than was polite.
"So this is how it is," the sage said. "The lord of the worlds on his back, and the goddess at his feet like a servant girl. Is this what you do all day?"
Vishnu sat up.
"Say what you came to say, Narada."
"I have said it. People sit in the cold and the rain to reach you, and you lie here and are rubbed. A god who lets himself be served like this has forgotten what it is to sit alone."
Lakshmi's hands had stopped. She said nothing. She looked at her husband, and her husband, who had once taken a sage's kick in the chest and thanked him for it, took this as well.
"He is right," he said to her, and got up, and went.
He did not go to any of the places where he is worshipped. He went north, into the Himalaya, up the Alaknanda river through the gorges, to where the mountains stand so close on either side that the valley is only a crack between them. There, on the bank, he sat down in the lotus posture, with his legs folded and his hands in his lap, and shut his eyes, and went into himself.
The cold came. The river ran grey beside him with the melt off the glaciers, the wind came down off the peaks and the snow came with it, and the snow lay on his shoulders and on his hair and did not melt. He did not notice. That is the whole point of the story, and the temple says it in a line: he sat there and did not know the cold.
Lakshmi knew it.
She had not been asked to follow, and she had not been told to stay. She came up the river after him on her own, alone, and found him with the snow on his head and the ice forming where the spray from the river reached him, and she stood in front of him and looked at him for a long while.
"You will not get up," she said, "and I will not ask you to."
Then she did the thing the place is named for. She did not sit down beside him; a woman beside him was what the sage had objected to. She became a tree. A badri, a jujube, a small tough thorny tree of the kind that grows where almost nothing else will grow, and she rooted herself at his back and put her branches out over his head, and from then on the snow fell on her.
Years went by. The temple does not count them; it says a long time. The wind that had struck his face struck her leaves instead. The snow that had lain on his shoulders lay on her branches and slid off. In the short summers the tree put out its small sour fruit, and in the long winters it held on, and under it the god sat with the snow kept off him and did not know who was keeping it.
Then one day he opened his eyes.
The first thing he saw was not the mountain and not the river. It was branches over his head, bare and thorny, with the snow on them, and he knew the tree.
"You came," he said. "You came and I did not know."
He named the place for her, the temple says, pleased with what she had done: Badrika Ashrama, the hermitage of the badri, and the god of it is Badri Narayan, Badri Vishal, the Narayana of the jujube, to this day. The image in his temple sits as he sat then, cross-legged, under the tree, and beside him among the others stands Narada, the sage who sent him there.
It was not the last time he went away and stayed. The next time he stayed away it was at a demon's door, and what she did about that is The Thread on Bali's Wrist.