The Dakṣa household looked like an aviary. Sixty daughters and even more maids. Just one man, the austere father, immersed in his rites. There was an air of expectancy, preparations for the party, whisperings that some powerful ṛṣis, were already on their way, from the Himālaya, from the banks of the Sindhu and the Sarasvatī. The maids brought word of the suitors, who was the most handsome, who the strongest, who the most rigorous at tapas. Even King Soma was expected, from the moon. Dakṣa knew perfectly well, having spent a long time over the matter, which daughter was destined for which ṛṣi. Everything was going ahead according to plan. But behind the habitual severity, there was a shadow in his eyes. All the time, obsessively, Dakṣa was thinking of just one of his daughters, the one he’d always watched, and not just with a father’s affection either, the only one he would speak to, at night, when all the other women slept: Satī, She-who-is.
It had been difficult, indeed tortuous, to bring Satī into the world. She-who-is, she who would one day become the concretion of reality, seemed unable to make her appearance. Until then, birth had never happened as a result of sex. Brahmā went on generating his born-of-the-mind children but was unable to overcome his perplexity. There was something unsatisfying about that world before the world. It began to look as though there might be another level of reality to discover: more opaque perhaps, perhaps less meaningful, but then again perhaps more appealing too. There Satī would be born—and one day the place would be called “reality” without further specification. One day everything would become so opaque that nobody would remember what had come before that level of reality. The thing now was to reach that level, by cunning. But Brahmā couldn’t act alone. He needed a minister, who would be forever the minister: Dakṣa.
Dakṣa had a long face, furrows on each side of a hooked nose, hollow cheeks, serious, protruding eyes, and a thick, pendulous lower lip. His bearing was noble, studied, severe. But he could not efface a look of animal affliction that hung around him, an invisible burden that weighed on his mind. There were moments when you might even have imagined that Dakṣa’s eyes, well practiced as they were in the art of concealment, concealed, among so much else, an intense, perhaps violent, sensuality. His features were haunted by an underlying resignation to something yet to happen, the kind of look you see in those goats who graze alone.
What was the difference between Satī and his other daughters? wondered Dakṣa. Why did the mere fact of his looking at her touch him in the only spot where he felt entirely vulnerable? She was no more beautiful than the others; just—perhaps—her face had something more serious about it. Something hidden too. And something that filled Dakṣa with amazement: a lofty sadness, for which there was no apparent reason. As if, with Satī, one sensed what the mind is like when it is internalized, concealed. Something the world knew nothing of as yet, thought Dakṣa. And he remembered the vacuous motley of his brothers, who had disappeared.
Before Satī was born, reality was less real. Dakṣa sensed that at once—and made no remark. Watching the girl grow up, he tried not to distinguish her from the other fifty-nine. But often he would feel how she followed him with her eyes, peered at him from behind doors as he celebrated the rites. Satī reminded Dakṣa of his secret. Before being a priest and the head of a family, with wife and servants, Dakṣa had been a solitary fanatic; with no experience of women, he obstinately pursued a single, never-confessed, desire: that Devī, the Goddess, she who lives in the body of Śiva, should reveal herself to him.
One day, when quite unusually he had surrendered to drowsiness, a condition akin to illness for Dakṣa, he saw the darkness grow bright and throb. There were two points of light, in the darkness: a blue lotus flower—that was what it was—and the sparkle of a blade. They moved ever so slowly: until finally Dakṣa saw the hands that held them and two other hands, unburdened in the air. Then he glimpsed the body of the Goddess. She was crouched on a lion, as if since time began that lion had been the earth. Suddenly Dakṣa felt more watchful than he had ever been. He felt the bold rashness of a warrior, something quite out of character for him. He said, “O thou, Devī, Dark One, I beg you to be born as my daughter. I beg you to find once more, through me, the one in whom you are.” Those last few words were to torment Dakṣa, for years. He knew he had spoken two sentences to the Goddess, but the second had been lost, like something spoken in a dream, though what did remain, etched in his memory, was the conviction that those words were the most important of his life. Dakṣa would never cease to search for them.
Satī’s maid curtsyed before Dakṣa and said: “Master, I feel it’s my duty to tell you that Satī, my mistress, is odd. All her sisters are passing around miniatures of the ṛṣis and King Soma—and trying to guess who will marry whom. They invent charades where they dress up as ṛṣis and play out the scenes of their future lives. They laugh—and sometimes they’re sad and cry. But Satī keeps herself to herself. While her sisters squabble, she doesn’t seem to care at all. She hasn’t tried on any new clothes. She hasn’t asked for a new makeup box. She wanders around the gardens for hours. But I know what she does there, I’ve caught her at it more than once. Satī sings—or rather she hums. And the songs are always about a dark man. His name is Śiva. Or if she doesn’t sing she draws. Always the same face, a frightening face. Or she practices tapas, something no one has taught her. Or whispers, as if there were a ghost beside her. Master, it was my duty to tell you all this.”
Dakṣa and Vīriṇī, their faces noble and time-worn, though with something gloomy about them too, an expression almost of dismay, sat by the fire after their daughters and servants had gone to bed. Dakṣa said: “This man who has come, this stranger, this woman-stealer, this enemy of our rules and rites, this wanderer who loves the ashes of the dead, who speaks of things divine to the lowest of the low, this man who sometimes seems crazy, who has something obscene about him, who grows his hair long as a girl’s, who bedecks himself with bones, who laughs and cries for no reason, why should I give my daughter Satī to him of all men, why should I give She-who-is to someone who, every time I see him, seems to me the opposite of everything I wanted to be myself, of everything I want life to be? Why did I compose so many rites, so many signs, so many words, why did I generate She-who-is, just to have everything stolen from me one day by the one who is its living negation?”
When the suitor stepped forward, Dakṣa, the impeccable priest, devotee of ritual precision, considered him with contempt: he was a wild beggar, with sweaty pigtails, cloaked in the stench of the pyres. One long, strong hand held Satī’s tight, the other fiddled with a necklace of bone. Beside him, the unrecognizable Satī was barely covered by filthy rags, while her skin—Dakṣa was shocked to notice—seemed to have turned darker. Her eyes were bright and radiated happiness: shut up in her rooms, practicing tapas as a child, she had always dreamed of a man like this who would carry her off. She stroked Śiva’s blue neck, mixed her oils with the ash that covered his chest like soft armor. They set out at once for the highest mountains. They had no home, nor even shelter. The beasts welcomed them and guided them. Then left them alone.
Satī had the feeling that this was the first time her body had really existed. It wasn’t as if Śiva was penetrating her but as if he opened himself up to her like a huge cavity, welcoming her into himself. The contact with the surface of his body absorbed her into it. Enchanted in the darkness, Satī touched Śiva’s walls. She pressed on toward the center of him, as though toward the glow of a fire in the depths of a cave. She was lost, but felt she was about to find herself. Or rather: she felt that what was happening was a return.
Śiva and Satī’s embrace lasted twenty-five years, without his ever emptying his seed into her. Like a tethered elephant, Śiva couldn’t move without brushing against Satī’s body. When they spoke, they joked. Using moss, Śiva drew on Satī’s breasts, sketching what looked like bees buzzing around a lotus. If Satī looked in the mirror, Śiva hid behind her so that Satī thought she was alone. Then one of Śiva’s eyes popped up in the mirror.
One day Satī wanted to free herself from that endless embrace. “I want you to explain what the Self is,” she said. “Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve practiced tapas, looking not for freedom but for slavery. All I wanted was to get your attention. Now you are my husband and I have been taught that you are release itself. During the marriage ceremony a brahman whispered to me that you had only accepted me because you were devoted to your devotees. But what does this devotion mean? I want knowledge.” Śiva said: “In eras of weakness, such as the present, devotion is a name for knowledge. Learned men have identified nine types of devotion. One devotion is listening to my stories. But it is also devotion to water the bilva tree. Something that never occurred to those learned men.” Śiva rambled on and on about devotion with a vague, vacant expression. Satī’s face darkened. Her body closed up like a box, cheek on knees drawn tight to her breast. She tried to see Śiva as a stranger, a beguiling intruder. “Why do you keep talking about devotion, and never mention knowledge and detachment?” said Satī. “Because they’re out of date now,” said Śiva, and he laughed. “But I know that the ancients spoke of nothing but knowledge,” said Satī stubbornly. “Right, the ancients,” said Śiva, hardly paying attention. “But does devotion bring us release?” insisted Satī. “Devotion helps,” said Śiva, less and less interested. “Devotion to you doesn’t satisfy me,” said Satī. “You don’t need it. You are me. That is knowledge. Just three words,” said Śiva. “And who are you?” said Satī, suddenly gentle, eyeing her lover. “I am that,” said Śiva. “What is that?” Satī insisted like an obstinate child. “That which tells us we’re talking. But we mustn’t talk too much,” said Śiva, and, as hundreds of times before, he began to slip the bracelets from Satī’s wrists.
When she went for walks in the woods and glades of Mount Kailāsa, when Śiva was unapproachable, that is, immersed in tapas, Satī became aware of how she would soon feel a wedge of grief piercing her breast. She thought of her father, of Dakṣa. She knew that Dakṣa hated Śiva. She had always known. In that palace in the distant plain, a dogged mind was keeping track of her every moment, abhorring every gesture of love she made, shivering every time Satī’s body brushed against Śiva’s. She remembered how as a girl she had hardly ever touched her father’s body. Eye contact had been enough for both of them. The only part of him she remembered touching was his hand, nervous and clawlike as it led her to some ceremony or other. But what else would it touch her for? Her father lived for ceremonies. It was as if he were always officiating. His anger, which could be terrible, was only ever roused when someone made some mistake in the liturgy.
Now there was nothing but silence between them. But one day a Yakṣa, one of the many Genies who visited the slopes of Kailāsa, mentioned a story that she immediately sensed would prove fatal. He thought Satī already knew it. So his tale was all the more cruel. There had been, the Genie said, a grand sacrifice. All the ṛṣis were there. Likewise Śiva. Finally Dakṣa arrived, solemn and severe as ever. Everybody stood up. Except Śiva. Upon which, claimed the Genie, Dakṣa had been seized by fury and said terrible things. That Śiva had the eyes of a monkey, that they were not worthy to meet the gazelle’s eyes of his daughter. That giving Satī to Śiva had been like giving the fragrant word of the Vedas to a wretched outcaste. Satī hadn’t wanted to hear more. She pretended she knew the story, which actually Śiva had kept hidden from her. She felt such a sharp desire to return to her father, to look once again into his deep-set eyes. When, as a little girl, she would meet those eyes, even if only obliquely or at a distance, she felt something slide across her skin, like a soft ribbon it seemed sometimes, sometimes like a noose. She would tell him in a few brusque words that all his rites did not add up to knowledge.
Satī felt sure that Dakṣa’s aversion to Śiva was not reciprocated. Śiva—she thought—couldn’t have an aversion to anything in the world. Aversion was something too weak for him. In theological terms, Satī was right, but there was an episode she knew nothing of that dated back to before the time Śiva appeared in her life. It had happened one day when Śiva, like Brahmā, had decided he would create new beings. But immediately he had felt a pang of nostalgia. For water, for motionlessness. He went down into a lake and stood on the bottom. A stake. Meantime, Dakṣa got down to it. If the world was empty of beings, he would make it his business to procreate. He was the officious priest, busying himself around the altar of the vagina. Beings were born. When Śiva came out of the lake, still heedless, his mind elsewhere, he heard a rustling in the forest, a hush of voices. There were already plenty of beings about. Dakṣa had tricked him. He had dared to forestall Śiva. “Since you have been so zealous as to help me and even carry out my work before I could do it myself,” Śiva said cuttingly, “one day it will be my pleasure to help you complete your work.”
On another occasion Satī noticed some unusual movement on the slopes of Kailāsa. Processions of Genies, gods and demigods were floating down on the breeze. Where were they going? she asked, admiring the sumptuous clothes and jewels of the goddesses. Dakṣa has announced a great sacrifice,” they said. “We’re all invited. All your sisters will be there. Twenty-seven of them are already on their way down from the moon. We’ll see you there,” they said and went off on their chariots.
Then Satī asked Śiva if they had been invited to Dakṣa’s sacrifice. “No,” Śiva said. Dakṣa didn’t invite me because, when I roam the world, I use the dome of what was once one of his father Brahmā’s heads as a bowl.” “I’ll go anyway,” said Satī. “You’re a god, so you have to be invited. But I’m just a woman, and I don’t need an invitation to go and see my family. I feel homesick for the land where I was born. It’s hard to bear the beauty of life with you. Let me go and chat with my sisters awhile. The only company I have here are Nandin the bull and the snakes you coil around your neck and arms.” “If you go, no good will come of it,” said Śiva calmly, but he looked away, because the attar of sadness was sifting down on his eyes, like rain on a lake: “You say you have made of me the one who inhabits half of your body. Grant me this boon, let me go,” said Satī. “I can’t keep you,” said Śiva.
Satī felt a sullen resentment toward Śiva that had her weeping tears of rage. He had never spoken to her like that, tight-lipped and toneless. And at the same time Satī felt a nagging rancor toward Dakṣa. Her father, her husband: they’d staked out her entire mind. Or were they two lovers, fighting it out to the death inside her? That was another thing that made her weep with rage. She decided to leave without saying good-bye. She walked along feverishly, at once gloomy and defiant. But soon she heard a bustling sound behind her. Śiva’s servants were escorting her. Mirrors, birds, white sunshades, fans, garlands, chariots, cymbals and flutes: caught up together in a cloud, all these things were following her.
But Satī wanted to be alone when she reached the house where she was born, when she crossed the threshold of the place of sacrifice. She entered in silence, superimposed herself on the silence. Terrified as they were of Dakṣa, none of the celebrants dared so much as nod to her. Only her mother and sisters flocked around like a swarm of birds. They sobbed and laughed, having all been convinced that they would never see her again. Face set in an expression of severity, Satī looked more than ever like her father. Her cheeks were white as white. Refusing the place of honor Vīriṇī had immediately offered her, Satī looked around, with the eyes of one long accustomed to taking in every detail of the ceremony.
The offerings for the gods had been laid in a line side by side. One for each god, but not for Śiva. Satī’s eyes came to rest on the empty place. Then, with horror, they saw she was walking over to Dakṣa, who was still unaware of her arrival, absorbed in the sacrificial ritual. But for the first time in his life, Dakṣa broke off from the sacrifice. They saw him turn slowly toward his daughter. It was as if he had been expecting her. Satī began to speak in a quiet, tense voice, a whisper that could only just be heard. “You and only you may dare be the censor of that which is. Thus do you condemn me, whom once you called Satī, ‘She-who-is.’ You and only you may list the offenses of he of whom the world is but a breath. You chase off fullness like some disreputable vagabond. You believe the world is made up of your rites. You believe these motions contain the whole. You have excluded wholeness from your invitation list. You offer sacrifice to all, but not to sacrifice itself. The flowers of your rituals are rain falling from Śiva’s feet. When the blue-necked god dallies with me and calls me ‘Dakṣa’s daughter,’ I am overcome by shame. For this body of mine is juice of your body, all I can do is expel it, spew it out like a vile food. You cannot live without performing sacrifice, but I am the sacrifice.”
Dakṣa listened, rigid and pale. He whispered a few words only Satī could hear: “Where shall I find you again?” Never had his voice been so soft and helpless. Satī replied in an almost identical whisper that only Dakṣa could hear: “You will find me everywhere, in every time, in every place, in every being. There is no thing in the world where I shall not be.” Then she crouched down to one side of the altar. She looked north, wrapped in her yellow robe. She wet her fingertips in a bowl of water and drank a sip or two. She closed her eyes. She remembered tapas, how she had first practiced it here as a child, evoking Śiva, the invisible lover. Now it was enough to evoke his feet. A heat rose from the depths of her body. Satī saw no one, though they were all staring at her. Her arms, her face turned thin mother-of-pearl over a shadow flickering behind. It was the flame that burst from within and consumed her, leaving her standing erect, a statue of ash.
The officiants, her sisters, her mother, the servants, the gods, the Genies, the children, Dakṣa: they all stared at what was left of Satī. When the thin crackling of hidden flame ceased, the silence settled heavily. Not a breath of wind. Far away across the plain to the north, a black clot formed in the air, a tiny flaw in the enameled brilliance of the sky. It grew slowly, spiraling. “Where does this dust come from?” the women whispered. “It’s the god who shreds the constellations,” said one of Dakṣa’s wives, as an evil wind lifted her robes. The place of sacrifice, which had been a dazzle of light, was filled with a gloom of dust. All became shadow churning shadow. Right around the enclosure, red and brown figures suddenly stood out stark like scarecrows, menacing sentinels, but turned inward rather than outward. Each one held an unsheathed blade. They were the Gaṇas, Śiva’s soldiery. Behind them snarled packs of dogs. In the center of the clearing, amid the whirl of dust, a huge shadow could just be seen, braid upon wheeling braid. “Who is it?” everybody asked. They couldn’t have known, because this monster had only just been born. When Satī burned, Śiva, watching from Kailāsa, had torn off one of his coiling plaits. As soon as the hairs fell on the rock, there was a roar and Vīrabhadra was formed. Mild and devout within, his appearance struck terror in them all. He moved toward Dakṣa’s sacrifice. Tall as a mountain, he was a flailing multitude of heads, arms, feet, swords. Laden with jewels, dripping with blood, decked out with snakes, tiger skins, and wreaths of flowers, he set about killing every creature he came across with indiscriminate ferocity. But there were those he was looking for in particular. He was looking for Sarasvatī, Brahmā’s wife, and he pulled off her nose, so that she looked like a slave. He was looking for Pūṣan, who had laughed while Dakṣa was railing against Śiva, and he broke his teeth. He was looking for Agni, to cut off his hands. As for Bhaga, he left it to Nandin the bull to gouge out the eyes that had narrowed in agreement at Dakṣa’s words. Kicked about by the Gaṇas, the gods rolled on the ground like sacks. No one bothered to touch the brahmans: a hail of stones smashed in their breastbones. There was not one ceremonial object that the Gana did not crush to pieces. They urinated in the hollows that should have held the fires. They splattered the colorful foods, now soggy, on the open wounds of the dying.
The sacrifice contemplated the massacre. Then it took the shape of an antelope and flew off into the sky. But an arrow from Vīrabhadra sheared off its delicate head. Now Vīrabhadra was looking for someone else. He went to the altar. Pressed against the bricks, Dakṣa huddled there, trembling. One of Vīrabhadra’s many hands gripped him by the back of the neck and dragged him through the dust to the sacrificial pit. A soiled head stuck out from the shapeless bundle of the body. Vīrabhadra cut it off. Dakṣa’s head was seen to disappear in the fire. Then Vīrabhadra laughed. A rain of flowers fell from the sky through an air now suddenly clear again. They settled on the broken bodies, drifted in pools of blood.
The destruction of Dakṣa’s sacrifice, the most radical criticism of sacrifice, came from within sacrifice itself: it showed how irresistibly sacrifice is transformed into massacre, and thus looked forward to the whole course of a history no longer yoked to sacrifice.
The premise was a simple breach of etiquette, of terrifying eloquence. If Śiva was not invited, sacrifice could no longer bring together the totality of the real. Thus he who was excluded took revenge. And the form of revenge he chose was once again the sacrifice. But this time a funereal sacrifice. The victim honored that day was sacrifice itself, the ceremony.
Since Satī had burnt from within, her body was left standing, calcinated, on the sacrificial clearing. It was light, but it did not disintegrate when Śiva lifted it up and began to make the steps of the Tāṇḍava, repeating the dance that follows every destruction of the world. Always alarmed by the excesses of others, the gods looked down on the scene. The earth shook. Then, for safety’s sake, Viṣṇu took his sharp disk and set about mutilating Satī’s body as it turned on Śiva’s fingers. Down fell the arms, the breasts, the feet, breaking up in ashes as they settled on the ground. Śiva didn’t notice, rapt in the dance. But when Satī’s vulva fell on Kāmarūpa, the dance stopped. And they saw that the vulva had come to rest on the tip of a smooth column of rock. There it remained, like a rug.
Śiva went back to Kailāsa. Crouched in his cave, he realized that for the first time he was alone. No more Nandin with his powerful breath. No more snakes. No more Gaṇas. No bustling procession around him. All had withdrawn from the presence of the Lord of the Animals. A sinister wind was whistling, and the air was too clear, abrasive. On a shelf, he looked at Satī’s few remaining belongings. Some tiny makeup boxes. Her robes folded in one corner, a soft, lifeless heap. Satī had never grown used to not having a home. More than once, when the monsoon raged, she had asked Śiva if they were always to live as vagabonds beneath the sky. He had never answered.
Now Śiva looked around and saw how the moonlight had set apart an array of powder puffs and makeup brushes with mother-of-pearl handles, and beside them something of a yellowish white: the begging bowl, the top of Brahmā’s skull. His gaze rested long on these objects. They resisted him. It was they that oppressed him. The fierce pangs for the loss of Satī. The dull throb of guilt: not only had he decapitated the Creator, not only had he mocked and mutilated the father of all beings. But worst of all: he had wounded a brahman. That was the most heinous thing anyone could ever do. He who strikes a brahman swallows a tormenting hook, lives scorched by a firebrand in the throat. Śiva took the bowl of bone in his hand. It stuck to his palm like a sucker. He tried to hurl it away. He couldn’t. Someone was watching, a shadow lurking in the cave. He knew who it was, that silent and abhorred companion. A girl with red eyes, dressed in black and noble rags: Brahmahatyā, the Fury of the Brahmānicide. Of that woman alone might Satī have been jealous. She alone jolted his mind without truce, like a bat beating against the walls of a cave. Śiva watched pain and guilt slowly fusing together, as like substances will. They came rushing from the ends of the earth: they were all the pain and all the guilt, compressed and sealed within him. He remembered the stories of tortured lovers. Of the lost and the suicides. Of those whose name no one knows. They came like fine dust. Sparks flew and fell back in the brazier. He recognized every one of them. They greeted him, like his own faithful. A blink of Śiva’s eyelids was their response. Each had a name. All lapsed back into him.
It was never clear for what reason and to what end, if end there was, Śiva left Kailāsa. Motionless, he was accustomed to entertaining everything within his mind. But now, ever alternating, merging, just two images afflicted him: the bone and the ashes. Brahmā and Satī. Was it this persecution that goaded him to set off on his travels, like the commonest of wretches who seeks to lose himself along the highways and byways of the world? Clad in rags, surly, his eyes fiery and dark, the vagabond Śiva flitted across village and valley like a shade. His bowl never filled with water when he held it under a fountain. That was the most painful moment of all. He looked at that modest piece of bone and was bound to admit that it was bottomless: no liquid, be it blood or water, would ever fill it. No one recognized him. Śiva begged before Śiva’s temples. Sometimes the devout would trample him as they thronged to worship. Sometimes he would writhe and yearn like a madman lost among other madmen. He was the nameless, he who has no country, no caste, he was the lover forever bereaved, the murderer who cannot be pardoned, the missing person who is missed by no one. He got no more attention than a charred log. It was a breath of warm and quivering air that brought him back to himself. He felt a sudden tremor in the ground, the distant thunder of spring. And all at once his wanderings found a destination: the Forest of Cedars.
As he was approaching the Forest of Cedars, his light, feverish steps obedient to an inflexible determination, Śiva was aware of being inhabited by three passions, all living together within him and each exasperated by the presence of the others, even though each was exclusive and ought to have repelled all others. The first, the most remote, was the guilt for his brahmanicide. It seemed to Śiva he had been born with that guilt, even though he well remembered how many millennia had passed before his left thumbnail had sliced off Brahmā’s fifth head like a ripened fruit. But that seemed no more than a belated consequence. A consequence of what? Perhaps of the existence of the world.
The second passion was his mourning for Satī. And again, although this was recent, a still open wound that cut through his fiber from one end to the other, nevertheless it seemed it had always been part of him. Every lover loves, first and foremost, an absentee. Absence precedes presence, in the hierarchical order of things. Presence is just a special case in the category of absence. Presence is a hallucination protracted for a certain period. But this in no way diminishes our pain. Looking into the future, Śiva could see certain presumptuous and ingenuous natives of the distant West, who would one day believe they were the only ones to suffer, sectarians of the irreversible. Seeing them, Śiva felt sympathetic and, murmuring words they would never hear, addressed them as follows: “Whether the world be a hallucination or the mind be a hallucination, whether all return or all appear but once, the suffering is just the same. For he who suffers is part of the hallucination, of whatever kind that may be. What then is the difference? This: whether in the sufferer there is—or is not—he who watches him who suffers.” More than that, for the moment, he would not say.
Then there was a third passion, something that the first trembling of the air had awakened within him and that now grew, swelled in a wave that thrust him forward along the most rugged of paths, invaded by a euphoria, an insolence, a rashness that he hadn’t felt for a long time. What was it? The premonition of many women as yet unknown, the remote agency of bodies he had never seen but sensed he could already glimpse, ready as he was to overwhelm them. But who were they? Stern women, the purest of women, princesses careless of principality, charioteers of the mind, flushes of celestial heat that had settled on the earth, conserving within themselves the substance of the stars.
Śiva toiled on, climbing toward the Forest of Cedars. Only rarely did he find traces of travelers who had gone before. Nature greeted him, hurrying on his awakening. To anyone passing by, he would have looked like a pilgrim or beggar, lost on his way to a sanctuary. Or, if ever he had lifted his eyes from his feet, like a bandit gone to ground in the mountains. He was seeking the one place that is sufficient unto itself, which is within the world but ignores the world. Sometimes an antelope would come out of the undergrowth and rear up on its hind legs, pushing its muzzle into Śiva’s hand, to feed on the leaves he offered. Their eyes met, and there would be a flash of recognition. At that moment, they were the only creatures who would have known how to find him.
In the Forest of Cedars life was quiet, almost static. There, in society, lived those who had chosen to sever all ties with society. Rude huts of twigs were scattered among bushes and tall trunks, set apart but within sight of each other. One constant sound: running water—which sometimes merged with the mighty rustling of the wind. Here lived the ṛṣis and their wives. There was no market, no carts, no soldiers: none of those things that make up a community. Yet the inhabitants shared every rule of thought and deed. Such was their unspoken accord that the place was like a hard, transparent stone. Solitary women, magnificent and proud, walked the forest ways. They went to fetch water, or to bathe, or to see friends. It was pointless to ask what the ṛṣis did: they practiced tapas. Was this fullness? Was it emptiness? Was it tedium? Was it freedom? Was it memory? Was it renunciation? Was it happiness? No one ever established that with any certainty. Another dweller in that stasis was doubt.
Why did Śiva want to upset the life of the ṛṣis in the Forest of Cedars? Wasn’t it as close as any could be to the life he himself had lived for so long on Kailāsa? Wasn’t that perennial practice of tapas, that pure abandonment to mind and sex, as like the breath of Śiva as anything to be found in all the world? Then to live alone with one’s partner, in solitude and withdrawal, with a tapasvinī, mightn’t that even have seemed like an imitation of the happy time when Śiva had met no other gaze but Satī’s? Or was that exactly what provoked Śiva’s malice?
In a clearing in the Forest of Cedars a group of women were gathering flowers and firewood. It was early morning. They saw a man they didn’t know come out of a bush. He was half naked, his body gray with ashes, but here and there the skin showed through in streaks of gold. His hair was thick, black, plaited. He held a bowl in his hand and said not a word. All the women turned to look at him. In the silence the man bared his teeth, which were terrifying. Then he began to laugh, with a sound they had never heard before. The women went toward him, as though to shut him inside a circle. But Śiva paid no attention and walked through them. He went on toward the village. The women fell into line behind. They began very slightly to sway their thighs. Now it was Śiva who was silent, while laughter slithered along the snakelike procession behind. At the same time, the ṛṣis’ women who had stayed in the village to do the housework stopped, forgetting whatever they had been doing. Something drew them to the windows, the doors. Some stepped out, still in their nightclothes. Others left hearth or makeup table. Bracelets fell from their wrists and were left where they lay. Soon the women were walking one behind another along the road, without so much as a word. Their feet made small dance steps, hips swaying ever so slightly. Having reached the last huts, they saw the Stranger coming toward them, followed by his procession. They tagged along, falling into step with the others.
Shortly before reaching the Forest of Cedars, Śiva had evoked Viṣṇu and entreated him to assume the shape of Mohinī, the marvelous celestial courtesan to whose exploits the gods owed a great deal. That day Mohinī appeared, her body laden with jewels and ribbons. Śiva’s hand, dry with ash, squeezed Mohinī’s, moist with sandalwood oil. Thus they walked along for a while, like brother and sister, then took diverging paths.
The ṛṣis were uneasy. Nature’s awakening came as a disturbance to them. In the morning mist their heads steamed. They thought with annoyance that once again they were to be subjected to the cycle of the seasons. But if they really were liberated-in-life, why this annoyance? Then there was an unusual silence all around. The monotonous, reassuring accompaniment of domestic clatter was missing. Perhaps it was time to go and bathe, they all thought at once. And on the way to the river, they met Mohinī. Those powerful men, so solemn and severe, followed her, with avid eyes. Under long white robes, phalluses grew erect. They wanted to sit beside the river and talk to that beautiful Stranger, who doubtless knew every world there was and was cloaked in the breath of taverns, palaces, bedrooms, ports, ships, horses, cut roses. Could she be an Apsaras, come down from the heavens once again to mock them? No, there was something in this woman, her hips just slightly swaying before them, that far surpassed any previous pleasure. The ṛṣis hadn’t said so much as good morning to one another. Each followed Mohinī as if alone. Suddenly, out of the forest, came a muddled sound, of laughter and shouting, of bells and cymbals and tambourines. The swaying procession of the ṛṣis ran into another swaying procession. They recognized their wives: they were following a man whom no one knew, but who was obviously up to no good. But there was no time to size him up, for already the two processions were mingling. In an instant the ṛṣis changed expression. They began to scold their wives. They had come out of the village to look for their women—they said—and now they found them disheveled, improperly dressed, trooping about after a filthy beggar. Well, they were going to punish him, that was for sure. But where was he? They looked around—and they were looking for Mohinī too. There was no trace of either of them. Angry and confused, the ṛṣis ordered their wives back home, like prisoners under armed and surly guard.
The ṛṣis hadn’t recognized Śiva, but Śiva had recognized some of them as his noble brothers-in-law. Vasiśṭha, Atri, Pulastya, Aṅgiras, Pulaha, Kratu, Marīci: they were the names a loathsomely smug Dakṣa had rattled off to Satī to heap shame on her repugnant, ash-smeared groom. They were the right men, who did the right things and thought the right thoughts. Some of them Śiva had seen before, not on the earth but in the sky, long watched them in the tremulous light of the Bear. In the heavens those lights looked nostalgically through billowing shadows toward their distant loved ones, the Pleiades. On earth they lived like aging husbands, inured to repetition, shut away in the bubble of air that separated them from the world’s impurity. Wasn’t it precisely these lofty sages, after all, who had been responsible for Satī’s ending up in a heap of ash? Ash. Of course. That was what the ṛṣis didn’t understand, what they shunned, what haunted them. Everything mingles and merges, everything is leveled in ash. There is no illumination without ash. There is no illumination until all are understood to be so many animals. Animals communicate in ash. Only ash can make the propitious fragrant. That was why the ṛṣis’s women had followed Śiva so frenetically.
The ṛṣis’ wives shut themselves up, each in her own home. The ṛṣis got together and were grim. They’d have to hunt down that Stranger, they said. Kill him, said a voice. Castrate him, said another. As Gotama had done with Indra. No one mentioned Mohinī, as if she had never appeared. Meanwhile, their anger consumed the immense tapas they had stored up. Exchanging glances, they might have been the commonest of men, so many roughnecks out for revenge. Splitting up to search the forest, they were fooled by laughter, braying, howls, roars. The Lord of the Animals mocked them and vanished. But in the end they found him in a clearing, sitting on a log. They surrounded him. “If you want to castrate me, I’ll do it myself,” said Śiva, calmly. Grasping a reddish phallus and scrotum with one hand, he tossed them into the deep grass.
Where Śiva’s phallus had fallen, the astonished ṛṣis saw a serpent of light snake away. There was a smell of burned grass. Slowly, silently, the ṛṣis set off after the light. They thought: “It isn’t like any other light.” They didn’t even realize that Śiva had disappeared. The penetrating light slithered down to the lake. The ṛṣis stood on the bank, to watch. The light wriggled on, deep below the water. They saw it reach the other bank. Then it rose into the air. The sun had set, and shadows were creeping across the lake. In the center, water and sky fused in a single dazzling furrow. You couldn’t tell where it began or ended.
Leaving the Forest of Cedars behind, Śiva wandered from place to place, his bowl of bone still stuck to his hand. Just a couple of paces behind, the ragged Brahmahatyā followed in silence. Nobody took any notice. They were just a pair of beggars like so many others. They would stop in the marketplace, by a palace, a harbor. Śiva’s eyes were vacant. Nobody spoke to them. Around a fire beside the road, they heard other beggars saying they were going to Kāśī, for that is the place where it is well to die. Śiva longed for death. But not the repeated death, punarmṛtyu, he had introduced into the cosmos to save it from perishing once and for all in the conflagration provoked by Brahmā’s fury. No, he was looking for something rarer and sweeter: the one, definitive death, the irreversible dissolution of that atrocious contact with the bowl of bone. But was the world able to set free he who had brought it into being?
Brahmahatyā was leading the way for once, when they saw the town in the distance. It looked like any other big town. But there was something different in the air, countless grains of the finest dust, a subtle smell, at once sweet and sour. From beyond the warehouses and workshops, the cattle sheds and markets, palaces and parks, came the sound of a river in full flow, a river like the sea, its further shore lost in the mist. There, they whispered, was release, on the further shore of the Gaṇga.
Before going into the town, Siva and his companion tried to approach a clearing where a lavish sacrifice was going on. But this time they were chased off. Someone noticed the bowl of bone hanging unnaturally from the beggar’s hand. They stopped him. Using a long stick, laughing, they tried to tear it off him. The bowl fell, but immediately another grew out of his hand. Nobody was laughing now. They stared in horror. Śiva and Brahmahatyā went away, unfed.
It was the eighth day of Mārgaśīrsa, the Head of the Antelope. Śiva hurried on toward the town as if eager to revisit a place he already knew. He was walking swiftly, and Brahmahatyā saw how his steps were turning into a dance. Śiva was heading not toward the lights and the bustle of the travelers but toward a dark, smoking expanse, dotted with pyres. Then Brahmahatyā felt her feet sinking in a soggy mush: ashes, blood, charred flesh. You couldn’t see the jackals and vultures, but you could hear them. Ambiguous shadows flickered by the fires. It was a huge cremation ground, called Avimukta. As he walked ahead of Brahmahatyā, Śiva’s steps were delicate and precise. From time to time a pyre would flare up; others sank into embers. Śiva sat down, motionless. Brahmahatyā stood and watched. She had never spoken so much as a word to him, but now she felt a tremendous urge to use his name, as if they were lovers and that cremation ground their bed. She couldn’t do it. In a dark light of moon and pyres, she saw Śiva’s open palm offering its bowl to the night. The skull was crumbling away. She saw Śiva’s lean hand, free at last. Beneath her feet the ground grew softer. It gave way and sucked her in. Without a sound she plunged down into a yawning crack.