As the temple tells it
Tirumala temple legend: the garden and the fortune-teller · 2 min read
One day Srinivasa rode down from the hill to hunt, and a wild elephant broke out of the trees in front of him. He chased it down through the forest until it crashed through a hedge into a garden, and he rode in after it.
In the garden a group of girls were picking flowers. The elephant had scattered them. One of them stood her ground, and he looked at her and forgot the elephant.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"Who are you," said her maids, "to ride into the king's garden on a horse and stare at the king's daughter? Get out."
He did not move. So they picked up stones from the garden path and threw them at him, and he turned his horse and rode home up the hill.
He would not eat that night, or the next day. He lay on his mat and looked at the roof, and his foster mother, Vakula Devi, could get nothing out of him except a name: Padmavati.
Down below, in the palace of Akasha Raja, the princess was ill too. She would not eat or sleep, and the physicians could find nothing wrong with her.
Then an old woman came to the palace gates, a fortune-teller of the hill tribes, with a basket on her head and a stick in her hand, calling out that she could read the past and the future. The queen had her brought in.
The old woman took the princess's hand and turned it over and looked at it a long time.
"You are not ill," she said. "You have seen a man in the garden, and you have not stopped thinking of him since."
The princess went red. The queen sent the maids out.
"Who is he?" said the queen.
"He is no hunter," said the fortune-teller. "He is Vishnu himself, the lord of the Venkata hill, and your daughter was born to marry him. Give her to him, and she will be well."
The queen did not know that the old woman was Srinivasa himself in disguise. She took the news to the king.
Soon after, Vakula Devi came down the hill to ask for Padmavati for her son. The king asked his own teacher, who read the stars and said yes, and the wedding day was fixed.
Padmavati got up, and ate, and was well.
As the temple keeps it
Narayanavanam and the daily wedding · 1 min read
The wedding was held at Narayanavanam, below the hill. Srinivasa had nothing, and borrowed the cost of it from Kubera, the lord of wealth, with Brahma and Shiva signing as witnesses.
The gods came down to the wedding. Akasha Raja gave his daughter to the bridegroom, and with her a crown, and as he gave her the old curse on him, the curse of the Chola king whose servant struck the god, was lifted at last. A newly married couple, the old custom says, should not climb a hill for six months, and so the bride and groom waited below, at Srinivasa Mangapuram, where the god is still worshipped as Kalyana Venkateswara, the god in his wedding clothes. Then they went up the hill together, to live on Tirumala.
"Stay," the people of the hill asked him.
He has stayed. And the temple has never let the wedding end.
Every day at Tirumala the Kalyanotsavam, the wedding festival, is performed again. Pilgrims pay to sponsor it, and a married couple sits before the god, and the priests bring out the processional images of Srinivasa and his two consorts, and marry them, with every rite of a real wedding, the garlands, the sacred thread, the fire and the rice. Then the couple goes home with a share of the blessing, and the next morning the god is married again in front of a new crowd.
Below the hill the Narayanavanam temple keeps the place of the first wedding, and the grinding stone, people say, on which the turmeric was ground for it.