The Woman Lakshmi Visited

Parvati asked Shiva one day which vow a woman should keep for the good of her house, and Shiva named the vow of Varalakshmi, the giver of boons, and told her about the woman who kept it first. So the vrata books begin, and this is the story he told.

In the city of Kundina there lived a woman called Charumati. She rose before the sun. She served her husband and his old parents, she kept her house, and she kept her temper, which the books count as the harder of the two. Every day she worshipped Lakshmi with whatever the house had to give: a flower, a lamp, a handful of rice, and the goddess, who sees every house, saw hers.

One night Lakshmi came to her in her sleep. Charumati saw her as she is, bright and seated, and the goddess spoke to her by name.

"I have watched your house, Charumati. On the Friday before the full moon of Shravana, keep a vow for me. Worship me that day, and I will come to whoever keeps it."

Charumati woke before dawn with the words still in her ears, and she told her husband first.

"She came to me. She named a day."

"Then keep it," he said. "And tell the others. A thing like that is not for one house."

So she went from door to door and told the women of the town, her neighbours and her friends and her husband's kin, and they said they would keep it with her.

On the Friday they bathed early, swept their houses and put rice flour patterns on the floor. In Charumati's house they spread rice on a tray and set a pot on the rice. They put mango leaves in its mouth and a coconut on top, rubbed with turmeric, with the goddess's face drawn on it. Round the neck of the pot they tied a thread yellow with turmeric. Then they sat down in front of it and worshipped the goddess in the pot with flowers, lamps and sweets, and they sang to her, every song they knew.

When the songs were done the thread was taken off the pot and cut, and a piece of it tied on every woman's right wrist. They went home with the thread on their arms.

The books do not take long over what happened next, because it did not take long. The houses filled. There was grain where there had been none, and gold where there had been grain, and the women who had sat in front of the pot found that they had never been short of anything.

They came back to Charumati.

"You could have kept the dream to yourself," they said. "You gave it to all of us."

"She said whoever keeps it," said Charumati. "Not whoever dreamed it."

"That is the vow," Shiva said to Parvati. "It began with a woman who was given a dream and handed it on."

The books add that married women keep it still, in Andhra and Telangana, in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, on the same Friday with the same pot and the same thread, and that at Tiruchanur, where the goddess rose from a lotus, she is dressed as Varalakshmi that morning.

In the great temple at Puri, Lakshmi has her own shrine beside her husband Jagannath and his elder brother Balabhadra, and the Odia poem of Balarama Dasa says she went out of it one morning on her own day, to see how the town was keeping it.

The rich were not keeping it. She walked their street and found the doors shut and the day forgotten. She put on the look of a brahmin woman and went in to a trader's wife, and taught her, step by step, how the day is kept.

Then she walked out past the edge of the town, where the people lived whom the town called outcaste, and found Shriya. Shriya had nothing. Her hut was swept and her floor was washed, and she was worshipping the goddess with what she had, which was that. The goddess went in through the low door, sat down and blessed her.

Then she went back to the temple, and the door was shut.

"You have been inside a chandala's house," said Balabhadra. "Wash, and then come in."

Jagannath, at his brother's urging, said the same.

"I will not wash," said Lakshmi. "There was nothing in that house to wash off."

She took off her jewels, one by one, and laid them down, and kept only the marks of her marriage.

"Hear me, both of you. For twelve years you will know hunger and thirst. It will end on the day you eat food cooked by the woman you called low."

And she went.

The brothers went out after her as brahmin beggars, from house to house, and what was put into their hands the wind took out of them. People saw it happen and drove them off. "Lakshmi has left you," they said. "Go." So it went, year after year.

At last, starving, they came to a palace, and the attendants at its gate told them whose it was.

"It belongs to an outcaste woman."

"We will eat," said Jagannath.

They were served, each dish they liked, in the manner used in the temple, and halfway through the meal they knew the hand that had cooked it.

"Ask her back," said Balabhadra.

Lakshmi named her terms. She would go to any devotee she chose, and nobody would shut a door on her for it. And the temple's food would be eaten by everyone together, brahmin and chandala from the same leaf. Jagannath gave his word, and she went home.