Number 12 was one of the tidier houses on Nether Oak Close, though not in the brittle, over-curated way of its neighbours. It had softness to it. The lawn was cut but not fussed over. The hedges were kept low but never squared beyond what was needed. Through the front window you could see lamps rather than spotlights, books rather than ornaments. People said the house felt welcoming, though few could have explained why.
The Patels lived there. They were, in the language of certain politicians, “one of the others.” The phrase was said with malice, and it simmered away with other less pleasant euphemisms used by people scared of difference. In the Close itself there was no malice they were just the Patels of Number 12.
Aarav Patel had come to Northern Ireland in the early 1960s, when the Belfast was calm and the population felt capable of inclusion. He was a tailor by trade, trained in Gujarat, and he brought with him little more than a case of needles, a sheaf of paper patterns, and a gift for seeing how cloth wished to fall. Belfast men, unused to being properly measured, found themselves standing straighter in his suits. Word spread. Aarav Patel’s name became shorthand for tweed that moved when you did, linen that forgave the body its slight failings.
Then the Troubles arrived, uninvited and unmendable. The Patels were Hindu, which placed them outside the familiar binaries, though this proved no protection.
“Hindu?” people would ask, eyebrows knitting. “Aye, but are you a Protestant Hindu or a Catholic Hindu?”
It was seldom meant as a joke. Aarav learned to smile and not elaborate more than “Just a Hindu”
They moved north, where the sea softened things and the lines were less sharply drawn. On the coast they raised their children: Vihaan, practical and inward; Prisha, sociable and quick to laugh. The shop followed them, then slowly receded, as retirement does. The house at Number 12 filled instead with birthdays, family lunches, the ordinary wealth of family life.
Faith became quieter. Aarav and Hiral kept a small pooja mandir in the study, shelf dressed carefully with cloth and patience. Ganesha sat plump and genial. Shiva, serene. Krishna, eternally poised. Lakshmi stood among them, palms open, coins forever falling yet never spent.
For Vihaan and Prisha, raised among school assemblies and council forms, faith was more archival than urgent. They knew the stories. They liked the festivals. The rest was filed away under old things, handled gently but infrequently.
Still, Diwali mattered.
Once a year, the house was thrown open. Lights were strung, sweets laid out in careful excess, neighbours welcomed without distinction. It was the one evening Nether Oak Close reliably gathered without suspicion. People liked Diwali even if it was foreign. It asked little of them beyond appetite and mild wonder.
This year, Vihaan and Prisha organised it together. Aarav and Hiral were content to watch from the edges, offering advice that was politely ignored.
By late afternoon everything was ready. Food warming. Fireworks stacked safely in the shed. Vihaan did one last walk-through, checking sockets, doors, the small rituals of hosting.
It was then he noticed the gap.
The mandir shelf was as it always was, except it wasn’t. Ganesha, Shiva, Krishna: present. Lakshmi’s place was empty.
At first, he assumed he was mistaken. He checked the cloth beneath, the drawer below, the nearby cupboard. Nothing. His chest tightened. This was her festival. This was wrong.
He searched the house with increasing urgency, opening drawers that had never held anything sacred, peering behind framed photographs, disturbing the careful neutrality of everyday storage. Lakshmi did not reappear.
He found Prisha in the kitchen, halfway through rearranging sweets that were already perfectly arranged.
“She’s gone,” he said.
“Who’s gone?”
“Lakshmi.”
Prisha frowned. “That’s not funny.”
“I’m not joking.”
They stood, listening to the quiet house. Somewhere outside a car door slammed. The evening was beginning.
Before either could speak again, the doorbell rang.
Vihaan went, more to escape the look on his sister’s face than out of hospitality. When he opened the door, the words he’d prepared dissolved.
A tall woman stood on the step, wrapped in an opulent sari the colour of late sunlight on water. Beside her was a man of easy elegance, dark-haired, well-dressed, carrying himself like someone accustomed to being welcomed.
“Good evening,” the man said, offering his hand. “I’m Lugh. I believe you’ve lost something.”
Vihaan shook his hand automatically.
“And I’m here to help you find it.”
Something in the air shifted as they stepped inside. Not dramatic, just enough to be felt by those who paid attention. The house seemed to draw a careful breath.
Aarav and Hiral appeared from the sitting room, took in the visitors, and bowed his head a fraction lower than politeness required.
“You are welcome,” he said, and meant it.
The woman smiled, and it felt like prosperity, quiet, durable, unflashy, settled itself into the corners of the room.
Lugh accepted the cup of tea Aarav handed him with an ease that suggested long familiarity with kitchens and their quiet negotiations. He examined the mug appreciatively, turning it slightly as though weighing not the drink but the moment.
“You’re wondering,” he said to Vihaan, “why I’m here at all.”
Vihaan nodded. Prisha had taken a seat opposite the woman in the sari, who sat with her hands folded loosely in her lap, observing the room as if it were both entirely new and long known. Aarav and Hiral sat holding hands, smiling and watching their children and the unexpected guests.
“I’m Celtic,” Lugh went on cheerfully, as if explaining a preference for music. “Six thousand years, give or take. Long enough to have learned that gods survive by being adaptable. We’re not particularly fussy about the people we manifest to. Life’s complicated enough without the divine insisting on paperwork.”
Aarav smiled at that, a small private smile, as though an old irritation had just been kindly acknowledged.
“The mistake people make,” Lugh continued, “is imagining that belief is a fence. It isn’t. It’s more like a path, trodden often enough, it stays visible, but it still runs alongside others all heading the same way”
“You have, I believe, an unexpected gap on your mandir shelf. Hanuman explained that to me once. Very patiently. We were fishing for salmon at the mouth of the Boyne.”
Prisha blinked. “You know Hanuman?”
“Know him?” Lugh laughed. “We argue about bait. He’s convinced worms are beneath the dignity of the fish. I say salmon don’t care about dignity.”
The woman in the sari inclined her head, amused.
“He taught me about Tantra,” Lugh said, growing momentarily serious. “Not the misunderstandings people cling to, I blame Sting and that whole sex thing, but the real thing the weaving. That all living things are connected. Interlaced. Gods included.”
He made a small gesture with his fingers, as though tugging invisible threads.
“The Hindu gods are woven into the same tapestry as the Irish ones. Different colours, different patterns, but the same loom. When one thread is neglected, the tension changes elsewhere.”
Vihaan felt something settle in his chest a memory of childhood listened to his mother tell him the stories of the Bhagavad Gita.
“And Lakshmi?” he asked quietly.
Lugh met his gaze. “Prosperity doesn’t like to be taken for granted,” he said gently. “She prefers to be invited, sincerely.”
He turned then to the woman beside him.
“This,” Lugh said, with a small, formal inclination of his head, “is Lakshmi.”
The room seemed to soften around the name. The woman did not speak. She only smiled, as though speech were something that required permission rather than breath.
“She’s silent,” Lugh added, “because her words only come when they’re invited to speak, and to stay.”
Prisha rose without quite deciding to. She crossed the room, knelt before the woman, and bowed her head, pressing her palms together, fingers pointing up.
“Namaste,” she said, the word finding its way out of some older place in her chest. Then, more carefully, “Mara gharam apnu svagat chhe.”
Lugh nodded once, satisfied. “Well done. A formal welcome was in order.”
Lakshmi leaned forward and placed her hand gently on Prisha’s head. The touch was warm, steady, entirely without weight.
“Stand, little sister,” she said.
From the folds of her sari she withdrew a lotus flower, pale and perfectly open, and placed it in Prisha’s hands.
“Put this in the temple,” Lakshmi said.
As Prisha did so, Lakshmi continued, her voice calm and unadorned. “We are only as strong as the belief given to us. Not loud belief. Not constant belief. Just attention, offered freely.”
She glanced around the house.
“This Close is… special,” she said. “Here, the weaving of the world is loose. All gods move easily where the fabric thins.”
Lugh nodded. “This is where Dian Cécht grew his herbs,” he said. “Collected them to heal the heroes of myth. Me included, once or twice when things got stabby. As a result reality’s a bit thin here. Makes coming and going simpler.”
He looked at Vihaan and Prisha and smiled.
“Now, you may be wondering if this is real,” he went on lightly. “Or if the cheese you had for lunch has turned against you.”
He spread his hands.
“With that, I can’t help you, except to say this: real is what you think it is. We may be the after-effects of dairy negligence, or we may be Lugh of the Long Hand and Lakshmi, goddess of prosperity.”
He winked. “My best advice is to go with the flow.”
Vihaan nodded slowly, lips pursed. “All right,” he said. “But what do we do?”
Lakshmi answered her voice like soft velvet.
“You do what you have always done,” she said. “You celebrate my day with your friends and family. You place joy in your heart. And occasionally, you say ‘thank you’ to the gods who mind the house.”
She smiled. “That is all. Plain and simple.”
At that moment, the doorbell rang and then rang again. The first guests arrived, coats shrugged off, voices rising. The house filled with laughter and stories, with music and the easy choreography of people who knew where the cutlery lived.
Lugh and Lakshmi joined in as though they had always belonged there. Someone taught Lugh a reel he pretended not to know. Lakshmi danced with Aarav, who found his feet lighter than he remembered.
At the end of the evening, the fireworks were set off in the garden. Colour blossomed against the dark. From the kitchen door, Lugh and Lakshmi watched, shoulder to shoulder.
Lugh looked at her and smiled.
Prisha turned, caught the moment, and bowed her head. “Anahara,” she said softly and then in English “Thank you, this evening but was worth more than gold, this is real wealth”
When the last guests had gone and the Close settled back into itself, the house was quiet again. Lugh and Lakshmi were nowhere to be seen.
In the mandir, the lotus flower had become once more the small, familiar figure of Lakshmi.