The Lotus at Tiruchanur

The temple at Tiruchanur starts its story at the same moment as Bhrigu's Kick, with a sage's foot on Vishnu's chest, and it does not send her west to Kolhapur. It sends her down.

The sage Bhrigu struck the Lord on the chest, the temple says, and the chest is where Mahalakshmi lives. The Lord did not answer in anger. He answered with service, and rubbed the foot that had struck him. And the goddess, who had watched both things, was angry for him and for herself, and she rose from his side.

"That was my house," she said. "Keep rubbing it."

She left Vaikuntha, and she did not go to any heaven, and she did not go to any shore. She went down, through the worlds, to Patala, the world under the earth, where nobody would look for her and nobody did.

How long she sat in the dark the temple does not count. What it tells is that a voice came to her out of the sky.

"On the banks of the Swarnamukhi," the voice said, "a pool has been dug. Go there."

She came up out of the ground and found the river, the one whose name means golden face, running past a small town in the south, and on its bank a pool had been dug, and nobody was beside it. She went to the edge of the water and sat down.

Nobody had sent her to do penance. Nobody had told her how long. She sat because she chose to sit, with the pool in front of her and the river behind, through the heat and the rains and the short cool months, and she did not get up. A year passed. Then another. The pool did not change and she did not change, and the town behind her went about its business and did not know who was sitting at its water.

Twelve years she sat.

In the thirteenth year the month of Karthika came round, and the bright half of it, and the fifth day of the bright half, and the moon stood in the star called Uttarashadha. On that morning something moved at the centre of the pool.

A lotus came up out of the water, and it was gold.

It rose on its stem and opened, petal by petal, in front of the bank where she had sat, and when it was fully open the goddess was standing in it. The town had a name for her from that hour: Padmavati, the lady of the lotus, Alamelumanga in the old tongue. The pool became the Padma Sarovaram, the lotus lake, and the town became Alamelumangapuram, her town, and the river went on past it as before.

"I am here," she said, to the water and the town and anyone who was listening, "and I am staying."

Srinivasa came to her there. How he came, and the lotus field, and the wedding, and what the wedding cost him, are told in Bhrigu's Kick; the temple at Tiruchanur does not need to tell them again. It knows that the Lord of the hill came for her, that the temple over the pool was built in the days of Tondaman, the king who was her elder brother, and that she has not left the water's edge since.

And it knows one thing more, which the priests say to every pilgrim who arrives at the gate.

"Her first," they say. "Then the hill. Nobody goes up to him without coming to her."

The day she rose is kept every year, and the keeping is the story.

For nine days in the bright half of Karthika the town is in festival, the Brahmotsavam, and on the tenth morning, the Panchami, the elephants come down the hill from Tirumala. They are the Lord's elephants, and they carry what he sends his wife: silk, turmeric, and the rest of a husband's gifts, brought the five kilometres from his temple to hers.

Then the goddess is carried out of her temple to the Padma Sarovaram, the pool she came out of. The discus of Vishnu is bathed in the water, and her image with it; the temple calls this the Chakra Snanam, the bath of the discus. When it is done the pilgrims go into the pool after her, lakhs of them, until the whole lake is people, and the name of the morning is the Panchami Theertham, the Panchami bathing.

"This is her birthday," a woman in the water will say. "This is the morning the lotus opened."

The rule the first telling ends on holds all year, not only in Karthika. Tiruchanur first, then Tirumala; a journey to the seven hills that has not stopped at the lotus lake is not finished. And on the Varalakshmi Friday in the month of Shravana the goddess is dressed as Varalakshmi, the one who grants what is asked, and taken through the town in a golden chariot.

The hill has its own book, the Venkatachala Mahatmyam, and the encyclopedias give its line of the story a little differently. There the kick is the same and the leaving is the same, but Lakshmi goes to the forests of Kolhapur, and it is Srinivasa who does the twelve years of penance, in the forest of the seven hills; and the girl is found by Akasharaja when his plough strikes a lotus in a field. That line cites the Padma Purana for her coming. So the twelve years are hers at the pool or his in the forest, depending on who is telling it, and the pilgrims who stand in the water on Panchami morning do not mind which.