The Elder Sister

The sages wanted to know about the elder sister, and Suta told them.

Vishnu, when he set the world going, made it in two sets. On one side he put the brahmins, the Veda, its virtue, and Padma, who is Shri. On the other he put the men who live outside the Veda, and sin, and Jyeshtha. And he made the second set first. That is why misfortune is called Jyeshtha, the elder.

So when the ocean was churned she came up in her turn, after the poison and before the nectar. Padma came up later and went to Vishnu's breast. The elder sister had nowhere to go.

A sage called Dussaha married her. He had watched her and found her steady, and thought that was enough. They set out to walk the world together, and it went wrong within a day.

Where someone called out the name of Vishnu, she put her hands over her ears and ran. Where the Veda was recited, she ran. Smoke went up from a fire offering, and she would not go near it. A man came down the road with ash on his forehead, and she fled as if he carried a sword.

"What is it?" Dussaha asked her, when he caught up. "What are you afraid of?"

"The sound," she said. "The smell. The white on his face. I cannot bear any of it."

He took her to a forest and sat down to do penance. She would not sit. She went from house to house in the villages instead.

The sage Markandeya came through that forest, and Dussaha bowed to him.

"Lord," he said, "this wife of mine will not stay with me by any means. Tell me where a man can live with her, and where I may not go."

Markandeya looked at her and gave her her names. "Akirti, who is ill fame. Alakshmi, who is misfortune. Atula, who is never at rest. Jyeshtha, the elder. That is who you have married."

Then he told Dussaha where she could not go: no house where the names of Vishnu or Shiva are said aloud, where the Veda is sung, where the fire is fed, where the linga is bathed, where a guest is fed and a teacher honoured.

"And where may she go?"

"Where a husband and wife quarrel," said Markandeya. "Where no guest is fed and no teacher is greeted. Where the food is eaten and the children go without. Where the floor is dirty and the people are dirty. Where the lazy lie about all day and the merciless do as they please. Where the dice are thrown and the drink goes round. Under thorny trees. Those houses are hers." And one thing more. "Keep her out of the houses of women who worship her with flowers and incense. They are keeping her content so that she will pass by."

Dussaha took her to a hermitage beside a lake.

"Wait here," he said. "I will go under the earth and find us a place to live."

"And what shall I eat?" she asked him. "Who will give me my offerings?"

He told her what Markandeya had said, went into a crevasse in the rock and down into the world below, and the Purana says he is there still.

She waited by the lake a long time, and then she did the only thing left. She went to Vishnu.

Lakshmi was beside him. The elder sister stood before her younger sister's husband, with her sister looking on.

"My husband has gone down under the earth and left me. I have no one. Tell me how I am to live."

Vishnu smiled, and his answer was a real one.

"The wealth of everyone who speaks ill of Rudra and of Amba is yours," he said. "And of those who call themselves mine and despise him; they are not mine. Their houses and their fields are yours. Go to them."

He told his own devotees to give her her offerings, and the women of every house to keep her content. She has a place, the Purana says, and he gave it to her.

In Odisha the month of Kartika has its own book, and the book tells the elder sister's story from a different beginning.

When the last world was dissolved, everything pure went back into Narayana and everything that was not stayed behind as mud in the water. Brahma made a new world, and dharma came first in it, and the mud had no place. It waited. In time it was born as a daughter to Varuna, lord of the waters, and he called her Alakshmi.

Then the ocean was churned and Lakshmi came out of it, and Vishnu married her at once. Varuna had married his younger daughter first, which no father does, because nobody had asked for the elder.

Vishnu went himself to the sage Uddalaka.

"Marry her," he said. "She is the worthiest of brides." The gods and the sages came to the wedding.

Uddalaka took her home to his hermitage, and the hermitage was quiet, and the quiet hurt her. The chanting at dawn hurt her. Before long she had run out of the gate and into the street.

"What is wrong with my house?" Uddalaka asked her.

"Everything," she said. "It is clean. It is calm. There is a fire and there are mantras and everyone is content. I can live only where people shout and steal and talk behind one another's backs. That is what I am made of. I cannot breathe here."

He saw that they could not live together, and that she would bring shame on his line. He took her into the forest one day without saying why.

"Wait here," he said. "I will fetch us something to eat." And he did not come back.

She waited three days. Then she wept, and she wept so loudly that the sound reached Vaikuntha, and Lakshmi heard her sister's voice.

"Go to her," Lakshmi said to Vishnu. "Comfort her. Settle her somewhere, or bring her here to me."

Vishnu went down into the forest and found her.

"Come to Vaikuntha," he said. "Your sister will look after you there."

"No," said Alakshmi. "I was born from what was left over. Your Vaikuntha would choke me. And I would watch my sister with everything she has, and I would burn. Find me a place that is like me."

So he did. He gave her the houses where people quarrel and cheat and lie, where they enjoy another's pain, where women are insulted, where the dice are thrown, where nothing is washed. And he gave her one thing more. Every Saturday, he said, she would be worshipped beside him under the pipal tree, because the pipal is his own form, and so wherever that tree stood she would never be far from him.

Narada was asked once which of the two sisters was more beautiful. He said that it was beautiful when Alakshmi left a house, and beautiful when Lakshmi came into it.