The Thread on Bali's Wrist

Vaikuntha was empty.

Not empty of light, or of servants, or of the sound of the sea of milk on its shore. Empty of him. Vishnu had gone down to the house of a demon king, and he had not come back.

It had happened like this. Bali, the asura whom the dwarf had sent under the earth, had given up everything he owned without a hard word, and the god who took his kingdom was moved by that giving more than by any sacrifice. So he made the king a promise.

"I will stand at your door," he said. "Whoever comes to Sutala will find me there before they find you."

A god's word is not a thing he can take back. Vishnu left Vaikuntha and took his place at Bali's gate like a doorkeeper. The days went by. The months went by. The doorkeeper did not come home.

Lakshmi waited, and then she stopped waiting.

Nobody sent her. No sage came to tell her what to do, and no god offered to fetch her husband. She looked at the empty seat beside her, and at the road down into the earth, and on the full moon of Shravana she went down it herself.

At the gate of Sutala she passed her own husband. He did not leave his post, and she did not ask him to. Inside, Bali sat in his hall with the ease of a man who had nothing left to lose.

Bali rose when she came in.

She had brought a thread with her. She took his right hand, turned the wrist up, tied the thread round it and knotted it.

"What is this?" said Bali.

"A protection," she said. "Against sickness, against harm, against anything that means you ill. And a bond. From today you are my brother, and I am your sister."

The king of the asuras looked at the thread on his wrist for a long moment. Then he looked at her.

"A brother does not let his sister go home with empty hands," he said. "Ask me for something. Whatever it is, it is yours."

"Give me my husband back."

She said it plainly, the way she said everything.

"He stands at your door, and I sit in an empty house. He is alive, and I am living like a widow. Give him back to me."

Bali was caught, and both of them knew it. The god at his gate was there by his own promise, and that promise had been the king's whole reward for giving away three worlds. To send him home was to give that up. To keep him was to refuse the sister who had just tied a thread on his wrist.

He did not refuse her. The tellings say it simply: he had offered a boon, and he kept his word, as he had kept it when the dwarf asked him for three paces.

But Vishnu could not break his word either. "I said I would guard this door," he said, "and I will."

It was Brahma and Shiva who found the way through. Each of them took four months at Bali's gate. Vishnu kept the four that were left, the months of the rains, from the eleventh day of Ashadha to the eleventh day of Kartika. For those four months he stands at Bali's door. For the other eight he is at home.

Lakshmi went back up to Vaikuntha with her husband, and the thread stayed on the king's wrist.

That is why, on the full moon of Shravana, a sister ties a thread on her brother's wrist, marks his forehead with kumkum and rice, and takes from him a gift and a promise. In Gujarat the day has a second name, Baleva, for Bali, who gave everything to the god and got the god for his doorkeeper. And when a priest ties the thread on a devotee he says the words the festival has kept: this is the thread with which Bali, the strong king of the demons, was bound, and it must not fail.

What she looks for when she comes to a human house, and not a king's, is told in Who Is Awake?