Shiva

Two mounds of raw earth sit beside a forest track, worn down by rain and years until a traveler would walk past without a second glance. Mahadeva does not walk past. He swings down from Nandi's back, presses his palms together, and bows, first to one heap of rubble, then to the other. Beside him, Parvati, who is Sati reborn and who once, in her first body, asked her own version of this very question, looks around and sees no one. "To whom did you bow, my lord? There is no one here." Shiva straightens and answers as though the answer were obvious: ten thousand years ago, on this very spot, a supreme lover of Sitaram lived out his days in a hut long since fallen to dust; and ten thousand years from now, another such king among devotees will raise his home on the second mound and love Sitaram in his own turn. Both places, though empty to every other eye in creation, are worthy of Mahadeva's reverence. That single roadside gesture holds the whole of Shiva inside it: a god so besotted with bhakti that he bows to a devotee separated from him by ten millennia in either direction, to a love he cannot see and does not need to see.

Everything else told of Shiva has to be read against that image or it comes out wrong. He is the destroyer, matted hair grey with the ash of the cremation ground, throat stained blue from a poison he swallowed to save the worlds when the churning of the cosmic ocean brought up a venom no other being could hold without dying; for this he is called Nilakantha, the blue-throated one. He carries the river Ganga coiled in his hair, breaking the force of her fall from heaven so that she would bless the earth rather than shatter it. He opened his third eye once and burned the god of desire to ash for daring to disturb his meditation. All of this is true, and none of it is the center. He is also Ashutosh, the one who is satisfied with almost nothing: a bel leaf, a palmful of water, a name spoken with a whole heart. The fiercest ascetic in existence turns out to be the easiest to move.

Before he was ever this settled figure of Kailash, husband and father, he was first a bridegroom won by a girl's stubbornness. Sati, daughter of the great patriarch Daksha, had loved him since childhood without ever having seen him, humming a name nobody taught her, sketching in the dust a figure wrapped in ash and serpents that made her nurses uneasy. When she came of age she walked out of her father's palace and into the forest to win him properly, fasting through seasons, standing in freezing rivers, living on nothing but resolve, until the austerity of a girl became a force even Shiva could not refuse. Daksha, who found the whole match beneath his house, gave his daughter to the wandering ascetic anyway, and Kailash gained the one thing its silence had been missing. Their marriage was not a household in any ordinary sense. It was a meeting of fire and stillness, and Sati rode beside her husband on Nandi across the width of the earth, present at his side through wanderings that no other consort could have kept pace with.

It was on one such journey, deep in the Dandaka forest, that Shiva did something Sati could not make sense of. They came upon two brothers moving through the trees in obvious anguish, one of them, Rama, tearing through the undergrowth calling the name of a wife stolen from him by a demon king. Shiva dismounted at once and bowed low, the same unhesitating bow he would one day give to a pair of ruined villages that no one else could see. Sati was baffled. Here was Mahadeva, before whom the whole of creation prostrates, folding himself before a grief-stricken man wandering the wilderness like any bereft husband. Shiva told her plainly that this was no ordinary man: this was Vishnu himself, descended in full for the sake of the world, and the sorrow on his face was itself a teaching, not a weakness. Sati listened and did not believe him. She had watched her husband's austerities long enough to trust her own eyes over his word, and her eyes told her she was looking at a man in pain, nothing more.

Shiva warned her plainly not to act on her doubt. If she needed proof, he said, let her use her own discernment rather than a trick, because some tests cannot be taken back once they are attempted. She did not listen. Taking on the exact appearance of Sita, down to the smallest fold of her garment, Sati walked toward Rama where he stood beneath a great banyan tree, meaning to see whether the god who was supposed to know everything would be fooled by his own wife's face. Rama looked at her for a moment and then spoke with a gentleness that made the disguise pointless: "Mother, my reverence to you. Where has Shiva gone, that you wander this forest without him?" There was no accusation in it, only recognition, and that was worse than accusation would have been. Sati stood exposed in her own borrowed face, unable to hold the pretense a moment longer, and fled back through the trees toward her husband with the taste of her own presumption in her mouth.

What followed is the part of Shiva's story that devotees tell more quietly, because it does not flatter anyone, including him. When Sati confessed what she had done, Shiva did not rage at her. He told her, with evident sorrow, that because she had worn the form of Janaki, the goddess he adored above every other name, something in him could no longer hold her as a wife in that particular body; he had not stopped loving her, but he could no longer unsee what she had done with the shape of the one he most revered. There is an old Sanskrit line sung at the very opening of Tulsidas's telling of Rama's life, offered to Bhavani and Shankar together as the twin forms of shraddha and vishvas, faith and trust, without whom even the perfected cannot glimpse the Lord seated in their own heart. Shiva is vishvas in that formula. In the Dandaka forest, for one costly afternoon, the one who would become the goddess of faith herself failed at trust, and the rupture that followed was not punishment so much as a fact about consciousness that even Mahadeva could not soften.

Sati did not leave Kailash after this, and she did not stop loving him; she simply carried the coldness as a wound she had earned, staying near a husband who could no longer look at her quite the way he once had. It was into this wounded quiet that news came of a great sacrifice being arranged by her father Daksha, a yajna to which every power in heaven had been invited except Shiva and his wife, the old contempt between father and son-in-law having never actually healed. Shiva urged her not to go to a house that had not asked for her. She went anyway, pulled by something in her that still wanted to stand between her father and her husband, or perhaps only wanted, one more time, to be her father's daughter. What she found there was not reconciliation. In front of the assembled gods and sages, Daksha named Shiva a wanderer of burning grounds, a companion of ghosts, an ash-smeared beggar unfit to be spoken of among the pure, mocking the very garland of skulls and matted hair that his own daughter had loved since she was a child too young to have seen his face. Sati, who had spent her whole life defending this love against a world that thought it beneath her, chose in that hall not to argue but to leave the body that carried her father's blood, drawing up her own yogic fire through breath and will alone and dissolving in it before the assembly could stop her.

What Shiva did on hearing this is the part of the story that shakes even those who have heard it many times. He tore a lock from his own hair and dashed it to the ground, and out of that violence rose Virabhadra, a warrior terrible enough to answer for a god's grief, alongside fierce Bhadrakali. Together with Shiva's own hosts they fell upon the sacrifice and tore it apart, and in the ruin Daksha lost his head. Shiva's fury, once spent, gave way immediately to the mercy that is just as native to him: he restored the slain to life, setting a goat's head on Daksha's shoulders in place of the one that could not be recovered, so that the proud sacrificer would carry, for the rest of his days, a visible reminder of where contempt for a devotee finally leads. Shiva himself carried Sati's body across the sky in a grief so vast it threatened to unmake the three worlds, until Vishnu's discus, moving quietly behind that terrible procession, cut the body into pieces that fell across the earth as it passed. Wherever a piece touched ground, a Shakti Peetha was born, a place where the goddess is still worshipped today, so that the very grief which nearly destroyed creation left the world instead studded with places where she can still be found.

Shiva withdrew after that into a tapas so absolute that even the gods, desperate for the son only he could father to defeat a demon threatening the three worlds, could not rouse him from it by ordinary means; it took the sacrifice of Kamadeva's own body, burned by that opened third eye, before the fierce concentration finally cracked and Shiva could be won again, this time by Parvati, daughter of the Himalaya, undertaking her own long penance until she became the wife of his second life, the mother of Ganesha and Kartikeya, the girirajkishori in whom, as Sati's own tradition puts it, Shiva could finally hold once more what one youthful mistake had cost him.

None of this quite explains why a Vaishnava garland of devotees like this one gives Shiva a place at all, until you remember what he does at Kashi. Anyone who dies within that city, whatever their life has been, receives from Shiva's own lips the thirteen-syllable Taraka mantra of Rama's name, whispered into the dying ear as a final gift that carries the soul across the ocean of birth and death without any other rite required. He is called Ramanama-mahatmya-prakashak, the one who makes known the glory of Rama's name, and he sits, by the reckoning of the Bhagavata itself, among the twelve great knowers of dharma alongside Brahma, Narada, and Prahlada, an Ishwara who is also, without contradiction, the crown jewel among bhagavatas. Rama, for his part, would later stand on a southern shore before crossing to Lanka and refuse to move a step further until he had raised and worshipped a linga of Shiva with his own hands, so that the two great traditions of Indian devotion bow to each other across the same handful of stories, neither one lord able to do without the other's blessing.

Return, then, to the two ruined mounds beside the forest track. A god who has swallowed poison for the sake of strangers, who lost a wife to a moment's doubt and a father-in-law's cruelty, who tore apart a sacrifice in grief and then healed everyone in it out of the very next breath, dismounts from his bull one more time for two forgotten villagers whose names no scripture bothers to record. That is the deepest secret this story keeps: bhakti is not a lesser path that gods graciously permit to mortals from a distance. It is the thing gods themselves cannot stop doing. If Mahadeva can still find someone worth bowing to in a heap of dust that everyone else has stopped noticing, then no devotee, however forgotten, however ruined the little life they thought they were living, is outside the reach of his gaze.