The Garland She Wore First

In Srivilliputhur, in the Pandya country, there lived a Brahmin called Vishnuchitta, whose whole life was the garden of the temple. Every day he picked flowers and tulasi and wove a garland for the god, Vatapatrashayi, Vishnu who sleeps on a banyan leaf, and carried it to the temple. His songs made him one of the Alvars, and people called him Periyalvar, the great Alvar.

One morning, digging in the garden, he found a baby girl lying under a tulasi bush. He took her home and raised her as his daughter, and called her Kodhai. She grew up hearing her father's stories of Krishna, and by the time she was a girl she had decided she would marry no one but him.

Each morning, when the garland was finished and laid out ready, Kodhai crept in and put it round her own neck. Then she stood before the well and looked at herself in the water. "Am I beautiful enough for him?" she asked her reflection. Then she took the garland off and put it back, and her father carried it to the temple and never knew.

Until one day he came back too early and saw her with it on. He was horrified. "What have you done?" he said. "This was made for the god, and you have worn it first. It is spoiled." He threw it away, wove a new one and took that to the temple instead.

That night the god came to him in a dream. "Why did you not bring the garland she wore?" he asked. "That is the one I want. Her garland is the only one with her scent on it."

When Periyalvar woke he went to his daughter and bowed to her. From that day she was called Andal, she who rules the god, and Sudikkodutta Sudarkodi, the bright girl who gave the garland she had worn.

As Andal grew up her father began to talk of a husband for her. "I will marry no man," she said. "If I am to be married to a mortal, I will not live."

In the month of Margazhi, the cold month before the harvest, she took up the vow the cowherd girls of Krishna's village once kept. She imagined herself one of them, rising before dawn and going from house to house to wake her friends, and walking with them to the river to bathe, and then to Nandagopa's house to wake Krishna and ask him for the drum of the vow. Each morning for thirty days she made a song of it, and the thirty songs are the Thiruppavai.

Periyalvar was in despair. "Which god will she have?" he wondered. He told her of all the forms of Vishnu in all the temples, and when he came to Ranganatha, who lies on his serpent at Srirangam between two arms of the Kaveri, her face changed.

That night Ranganatha came to Periyalvar in a dream, and to the priests of Srirangam in theirs. "Bring her to me as a bride," he said.

So the temple sent a palanquin and musicians, and Andal was carried to Srirangam dressed as a bride, with her father walking beside her. She went into the sanctum where the god lay. She went up to him, and touched his feet, and was not there anymore. She had gone into him.