Dhumavati is described with a precision usually reserved for beauty. She is tall, old and pale, with a wrinkled face, missing teeth, dishevelled grey hair and a drooping figure; her clothes are dirty and taken from a corpse; she is hungry and thirsty and never satisfied; her nose is long, her eyes are cruel, her hands tremble. She rides a crow, or stands in a chariot that carries a crow on its banner and has no horses to pull it, holding a winnowing basket.
Every element is a marker of inauspiciousness in Indian terms. The crow belongs to the ancestors and to cremation. The widow's white and the uncovered hair are the state that ordinary ritual life is arranged to avoid. The horseless chariot is a vehicle that cannot go anywhere. The winnowing basket separates grain from chaff, so what she holds is the instrument that discards.
Her nature is not what she does to people but what she is. The texts name her as hunger, thirst, quarrel, poverty, loss, and the moment near dissolution when only smoke remains, which is what her name means, the smoky one. One account explains her widowhood by having her, overcome with hunger, swallow Shiva, who then departs from her; she is a widow because she consumed her own husband, and even that act is hunger rather than malice.