The Cow That Fed the Anthill

When Lakshmi left him and went down to earth, Vishnu followed her, and could not find her. He came at last to the Venkata hill, by a pool in the forest, and there under a tamarind tree he found an anthill and crept into it, and stayed. He did not eat. He did not sleep. He waited.

Up in their own heavens Brahma and Shiva watched him and were sorry for him.

"He will starve in there," said Brahma.

"Then we will feed him," said Shiva.

So Brahma became a cow and Shiva became her calf, and the sun god Surya went to Lakshmi and told her where her husband was and what they meant to do. Lakshmi, who was still angry and still loved him, dressed herself as a cowherd woman and led the cow and calf down to the Chola king's palace, and sold them to him.

The king put the cow in his royal herd, and every day the herd went up to graze on the Venkata hill.

And every day the new cow left the others and went off alone into the trees, to the anthill under the tamarind, and stood over it, and let all her milk run down into the earth.

At the palace the queen began to notice that the best cow in the herd gave nothing.

"She is dry," said the queen. "Or someone is milking her before she comes home. Find out which."

The cowherd took the scolding badly. The next day he followed the cow up the hill and hid behind a rock and watched her. He saw her go to the anthill. He saw the milk pour out of her and vanish into the ground.

He was so angry that he did not think. He ran at the cow with his axe raised, to strike her.

Out of the anthill the Lord rose up, and the axe came down on his head instead.

The blood ran down his face. The cowherd looked at what he had done, at the god standing bleeding where the anthill had been, and fell down dead with the shock of it.

The cow ran bellowing down the hill and into the palace with the god's blood on her, and the king, terrified, followed her back up to the tamarind tree. There the Lord was waiting for him.

"Your servant struck me," he said, "and a servant's sin falls on the master. You will be born again as a demon for it."

The king fell on the ground and begged.

"Then it will end," said the Lord, "when you are born again as Akasha Raja, and give me your daughter Padmavati in marriage."

So it did, and that is another story.

The pilgrims add one thing. The axe, they say, took away a patch of the god's hair where it struck, and the hair would not grow back.

Neela Devi, a princess of the Gandharvas, came on him one day asleep on the hill, and saw the bare place on his head. She did not wake him. She took a knife and cut off her own long hair, and laid it on the wound, and it grew there as if it had always been his.

When he woke he found her shorn, and knew what she had done.

"I will give it back to you," he said.

"Keep it," she said. "Only promise me this. Whoever climbs your hill and gives you their hair will be giving it to me, and that will be enough for me."

He promised. That is why the hall where the heads are shaved is called the Kalyana Katta, the place of blessing, and why nobody who gives their hair there is thought to have lost anything. Mothers bring their babies for the first shaving of their heads. Old men bring the last of theirs. Women who have prayed for a cure or a child or a job come back when it has been granted, and give their hair as they promised, the long plait cut off at the nape.

So the barbers' halls at Tirumala never close, and every day tens of thousands of men, women and children have their heads shaved before they go up to see the god. Some say the hill itself, Neeladri, the Neela hill, is named for her. And some say the white camphor on the image's chin is still there for the wound.