Who Is Awake?

The rains were over. The sky had been washed clean, the moon of Ashwin came up full, and the people of the east say that on this one night its light is not light at all but nectar, poured down on anything left out under it.

Lakshmi comes down on that night. That is the belief, and the night is named for it: Kojagari, the night of the one who is awake. She goes from house to house in the moonlight, and at every door she asks the same question.

"Who is awake?"

Where no one answers, she moves on. Where the lamp is lit and someone is sitting up, she goes in, and the house is hers for the year.

So picture her on the road. The first house is dark. The door is shut, the lamp went out at dusk, the floor was not swept, and everyone inside is asleep. She asks her question in the yard, nobody answers, and she goes on.

The next house has a lamp in the window. The gods on the shelf have been dressed in white for the night. A woman who has fasted all day, and waited for the moon before eating, is sitting by the lamp with a book open on her knee. She is reading the Lakshmi Panchali aloud, the way Bengal reads it every year, and the goddess at the door stops and listens to her own story.

The Panchali tells how Narada came to Lakshmi one day with bad news.

"Come back to the earth," he said. "There is famine. There is sickness. People bury their children, and poverty drives them from their own families. Come back."

"I never left the houses that kept me," said Lakshmi. "Look at the ones that fell. The lamp is not lit at dusk. The floor is not swept. The children are not fed, and the grown people quarrel until the night is gone. I do not go where those things are, Narada. But show me a woman who rises before the sun, lights her lamp and feeds her house, and I will stay with her, and I will not be moved."

Then the Panchali tells of a rich merchant with five brothers, who laughed at the women of Vidarbha keeping the vow, and of his son, who laughed louder.

"Wealth comes from work," said the son. "Not from sitting up all night with a lamp." And he loaded his ships and sailed.

The goddess's anger went out after him. The mast came down, the cargo went into the sea, and at home a fire took the mansion. The woman by the lamp reads this part slowly, and the goddess at the door does not correct a word.

Westward, in Mithila, the same moon is shining on a house with a new bridegroom in it, and here the night is called Kojagra, and it is his. A basket has come from his bride's family: fruit, sweets, khaja, makhana, batasha, paan. He is wearing the clothes his in-laws sent. The women of the house have done the chumavan over him, and five old men have chanted the blessing of the durva grass. Now he is playing pachisi with his brother-in-law, with the dice that came in the basket, and the women are singing.

Out in the courtyard a bowl of makhana porridge sits in the moonlight. Before morning they will feed it to him, and the moon's nectar in it, the house says, will give him a long life.

"Who is awake?" the goddess asks at this door too.

"All of us," says the house.

Here they call her Annapurna, the one who fills the pot, and they say she walks into the house that night and stays. Janaka of Mithila kept the night first, they say, for his daughter Sita and the son-in-law who came for her. And since the goddess and the moon came out of the same ocean on the same full moon, Mithila calls them brother and sister and worships them together.

She goes on until the moon goes down. In the morning every lamp is out and the houses look alike, but she knows which were awake.

The vrata books say the sage Valakhilya taught his pupils this story, and that it is the reason the night is kept.

In Magadha there lived a brahmin named Valit. He was learned and devout and very poor, and he had a wife, Chandini, who opposed him in everything. If he said yes, she said no. If he was quiet, she found something to shout about.

When the day of his father's shraddha came round, Valit was tired.

"I will let it go this year," he said. "There is nothing in the house to offer."

"You will not let it go," said Chandini. "Call the brahmins. Do the rite."

So he did it, and when the rice balls for the dead had been offered he gave them to her.

"Take these to the river," he said, "and put them in the water, so that my father has them."

She walked out of the house with them and threw them into the cesspool behind it.

Valit saw it. He did not shout, since shouting had never done any good. He left the house and walked into the forest, and he did not say where he was going.

It was the full moon of Ashwin. Deep in the forest he came on three women sitting up in the moonlight, and they were not women of the earth. They were naga maidens, daughters of the serpent people, and they were keeping the Kojagari vigil as the goddess asks, awake under the moon.

"Brahmin," said one. "Sit with us. It is a long night. Play dice."

He sat and played. The dice fell his way, and kept falling his way, and the vrata books say why: Lakshmi was awake that night too, and the brahmin who had kept her night in a forest, with nothing, pleased her. By morning he had won gold and wealth beyond counting.

He went home with it. Chandini saw him at the gate with his load and welcomed him gladly, and the books say nothing of what either of them said about the rice balls. They say the two of them lived in plenty from that day.

The books add that the Skanda Purana calls this the best of all fasts, and that on the night the goddess is pleased by coconut water and by the game of chausar, which is what the naga maidens were playing under another name.