Lakshmi Charan: Footprints at the Threshold

On Diwali evening, someone in the house kneels at the front door with a bowl of rice paste and draws a pair of small feet on the floor.

Then another pair, a little further in. Across the threshold, down the passage, sometimes all the way to where the puja is set.

They are Her feet. And they are coming in.

Her feet, small, made in rice flour thinned with water to about the consistency of cream. The heel is the pad of a thumb or the side of a closed fist; the toes are five quick presses of the fingertips. Then the next pair, a stride further on.

Some of our houses use kumkum instead, for red feet rather than white. Some use chalk, some a stencil, and in a good many now a carved stamp does the work, which is the only part of this that has really changed.

The trail begins at the threshold. Where it ends is up to the house, just inside the door, at the foot of the stairs, or all the way to the puja room.

This one our families carried without writing it down. We have not found it in a Purana, a Dharmashastra or a vrat paddhati, and the wider family of threshold drawing it belongs to is recorded no better - nobody can say when any of it began, and the one scriptural line that gets quoted for it is repeated without a source wherever it appears. These are practices with long memories and no paperwork, which is how a great deal of what we actually do has reached us.

What is written down is the occasion around them. Lakshmi is the deity we welcome at Diwali, and the whole evening - the lamps, the open door, the house cleaned through, is built on a guest arriving. That much is well established, and it is scored on the Diwali guide rather than here.

The footprints are how our households say the same thing with their hands.

Thin the rice flour until it runs off a finger without dripping. Too thick and the toes close up; too thin and the whole foot spreads.

Make the heel first, press the pad of the thumb down and lift straight up. Then five fingertip presses above it, the big toe nearest the centre line. A foot takes about three seconds and it looks better for being done quickly.

Space the pairs about a stride apart, alternating left and right if you are being careful, and let the trail wander a little. A perfectly straight line of identical feet reads as a pattern rather than as somebody walking.

They will be walked over before the evening is out, and gone by the next day. That is not a failure of the practice, it is the normal end of it.

A rangoli at the door is a composition. A toran hangs across the frame. A row of diyas runs along the parapet or the boundary wall. All of them are arrangements - they sit, they are looked at, they mark where the house is. Whatever else they do, none of them has a direction in it.

The footprints are the only element in the house that records movement, and they only ever record it one way. Nobody draws Lakshmi charan leading out of the door. Nobody draws them running along the corridor past it. They begin at the threshold and they go in, and that is true wherever the trail form is kept.

Which means this is not really a decoration. It is a record of an arrival, drawn before the arrival, by the people hoping for it. The house is not saying welcome. The house is saying she came in, and she came in this way.

The practice has relatives all over. Threshold drawing is kept across our regions under its own names - alpana in West Bengal and Bangladesh, jhoti and chita and muruja in Odisha, kolam in Tamil Nadu, muggu in Andhra and Telangana, mandana in Rajasthan and Gujarat. In the Bengali Lakshmi brata alpana Her feet appear too, but as a single pair at the foot of the drawing, marking Her descent onto it rather than a walk in from the door. The same motif, doing something else. Our houses do not all mean the same thing by it, and that is worth knowing.