When the gods and the demons churned the cosmic ocean for the nectar of immortality, the sea did not give up its treasures gently. Poison came first. Then jewels, a moon, a divine physician, a wish-granting cow. And long before Lakshmi — radiant, lotus-seated goddess of fortune — stepped onto the foam, another woman is said to have emerged from the same waters. Her name was Alakshmi. Daridra. The goddess of misfortune.

We light lamps for the younger sister every autumn. We have, quite deliberately, forgotten the elder one.

The goddess we lock out

Alakshmi is everything Lakshmi is not. Where Lakshmi brings abundance, Alakshmi brings want; where one is beauty, the other is decay. On the night of Diwali, the old instruction was twofold — open every door and window so Lakshmi may enter, and make noise, light, and sweetness so Alakshmi keeps walking. She is the goddess you greet by asking her, gently, to leave.

It would be easy to read her as a villain. But the people who first told her story were not careless. They understood something we keep relearning: that you cannot have a goddess of fortune without naming her shadow. Luck only means something against the possibility of loss.

Every culture that keeps a goddess of luck quietly keeps one of loss.

What the elder sister was really asking

There is a tenderness hidden in her myth. Alakshmi is not punished or destroyed — she is acknowledged. She is given her season, her offerings, her place at the threshold. The household does not pretend misfortune doesn't exist; it makes room for it, honours it, and then asks it, with full sincerity, to move along.

Perhaps that was the older, wiser way of holding hardship. Not to deny the difficult years, but to name them — to set a plate for them at the door, and trust that they, too, would pass on. We became a culture obsessed with only the radiant sister. The elder one waits, patient, in the stories we stopped telling.

A whisper of myth — Alakshmi appears across Puranic and folk traditions as the elder sister or twin of Lakshmi, born of the Samudra Manthan. Details vary by region; what stays constant is the idea that fortune and misfortune are kin. Told here with a mindful lens — for wonder, not instruction.