Where Fortune Dwells

Bhishma lay on the bed of arrows through another slow afternoon, and Yudhishthira, still turning over what he had been told about cattle, asked the question underneath it. Why cows, he said. Why should this one animal carry so much holiness that men touch her and then touch their own foreheads?

"Because Sri lives in them," said Bhishma, "and there is a tale about how she came to, which you will not have heard, and which is the strangest thing in the whole body of our teaching about wealth. Fortune had to ask permission. And she was refused."

He let that sit for a moment.

"Sri," he said, "Lakshmi, fortune herself, the goddess for whom kings burn ghee and merchants keep lamps lit all night. She is not a petitioner anywhere in the three worlds. Gods court her. Demons have gone to war for her. The ocean was churned for a thousand years and she was what came out of it, and Vishnu himself took her hand. Nobody says no to Sri, because saying no to Sri is saying no to every good thing that can happen to a house.

"One day she came walking to a herd of cows.

"They were grazing in an open place at the hour when the light goes long and gold, ordinary cattle doing the ordinary thing, and she came into that field in her own form, and the grass under her feet went bright. The cows lifted their heads and looked at her, and went on chewing, which is the first and funniest fact of the story.

"And the goddess said to them: I have come to ask a favor of you. I wish to dwell in you. Let me live in your bodies, and wherever you are, I will be, and the world will honor you as the seat of fortune forever.

"It was, on the face of it, the most generous offer ever made to livestock."

"The cows conferred," said Bhishma. "That is how the old telling puts it, and I have always liked that they did not answer at once. They talked it over among themselves the way villagers talk over an offer from a great house, and then one of them spoke for all of them, and what she said was no.

"We do not want you, said the cows.

"Consider what it took to say that. Every being that has ever existed has wanted precisely this and has never been offered it, and a herd of cattle in a field turned it down.

"And why, said the goddess, and she was not yet angry, only astonished.

"Because you are fickle, said the cows. That is the whole of it and we will not soften it. You are famous for it. You go to a house and the house rises, and men who were nothing become great, and they build and they marry well and they are praised in the streets, and then one morning you are gone, and nothing whatever is left of them but the habit of having been rich. You abandon your hosts. You went from the gods to the demons and back again. You leave without a word and without a reason anyone can name, and the ones you leave are worse off than if you had never come, because now they know what it was to have you.

"We are content, said the cows. We eat grass. We are milked. We give what we have and we are not anxious about tomorrow. If you dwell in us we shall begin to be afraid of your going, and fear of losing you is a heavier burden than poverty ever was. We want no guest who abandons her hosts. Go, goddess, and be welcome somewhere else.

"And they put their heads down and went on eating."

"Sri stood in that field," said Bhishma, "and something happened to her that had never happened before. She was ashamed.

"Understand what that shame was made of. It was not the wound of a refused offer, though it was that too. It was that the refusal was just. The cows had not slandered her. They had described her accurately, in front of her, without heat, and she could not answer it, and the one honest account of her character in all the worlds had come from a herd of animals who did not particularly care whether she stayed or went.

"So she asked twice. That is the heart of the tale and you should hold on to it: the goddess of fortune, refused once, did not curse them and did not leave. She asked twice.

"Do not send me away, she said. There is no place in the three worlds where I have been turned back, and I find that I would rather be with you than with all the ones who wanted me. Let me stay on any terms at all. I do not ask for the seat of honor. I do not ask to be worshipped in you. Let me dwell in the lowest part of you, in your dung and in your urine, in what is swept out of the byre and thrown away, and I will not call it an insult. I will count it honor.

"The cows conferred again.

"Then stay there, they said. On those terms, stay. Live where we would not have thought to put a guest, and be as useful there as everything else about us is useful, and we will not think about you, and you may do as you like.

"And Sri, who had been the prize of an ocean and the cause of wars, went gladly to the floor of a cattle shed and made her home there, and has not left it since."

"Now you know something you have seen your whole life and never asked about," said Bhishma. "You have watched a woman in the poorest village mix cow dung with water and smooth it over the floor of her house and over the courtyard before a festival, and you have thought it was a custom of cleaning. It is a custom of cleaning. It is also a theology.

"That floor is fortune's own dwelling, put there by her own request. The house has no gold and no lamp of silver and nothing to give the guests but curds, and it does not matter, because Sri is already living in the ground the guests will sit on. The paste dries hard and keeps the dust down and the insects out and the fire's ash from spreading, and while it does all that it is also the goddess of wealth, in the place she chose, doing the work she asked for.

"So when the priests say the five products of the cow are purifying and men are surprised that dung is counted among them, this is the reason, and it is not a squeamish one. Fortune sanctifies wherever humility placed her. The substance does not make the place holy. The choice does. She could have taken the horn or the eye or the sweet breath of the animal and been honored there forever, and she asked for the sweepings, and by asking for the sweepings she made them the one part of the byre that a brahmana will not step over carelessly.

"There is a hard lesson folded inside the pretty one, Yudhishthira. A thing is not made sacred by being expensive. It is made sacred by what consented to live in it. Your palace floor is worth more than that woman's courtyard and is not worth as much, and the difference is nothing you can correct with gold."

"See the inversion at the center of it," said Bhishma, "because it is the whole teaching, and everything else in the tale is decoration.

"Sri begged from the humble what the proud beg from Sri.

"Kings stand at her door. They perform rites for a year to have her look at them once. And she stood in a field and asked twice, and the ones she asked were cattle who did not want her. Wealth goes where it is not worshipped. It runs from the man who chases it and settles in the house of the man who is not thinking about it, and the herd got the goddess for keeps precisely because they were the only ones in creation willing to live without her.

"So keep fortune the way the cows kept her, and I can give you no better instruction for a treasury.

"Keep her useful. She lives in the dung because the dung is used, on the field and on the floor and under the pot. Wealth that does nothing is not wealth, it is a hoard, and a hoard is where fortune begins to get restless.

"Keep her honored. The cows did not despise her once she had come. Do not be squalid with money, do not grudge it, do not handle it meanly.

"And never enthrone her. Do not put her at the head of the hall and make the kingdom's business the increase of the treasury, because the day you begin to worship her you have begun to be afraid of her leaving, and the fear will make you cruel long before the money goes.

"Be a little indifferent, Yudhishthira, the way that herd was indifferent, with their heads down in the grass while the goddess of all fortune asked them for a corner. That is not contempt for wealth. That is the only posture in which wealth has ever consented to stay."