ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
I, SHIVANI

‘In fierce lyrical prose Anu Singh tells us Parvati’s story through all her identities, from Uma to Durga to Kali, a remarkable retelling that is moving and extraordinary. An authentic embodiment of Shakti, much like the author herself.’

—Sushmita Sen, Actor 

‘I can hear Anu asking, “Why is it that we have so much to read and see about the Devas, but so little about the Devis?” I, Shivani is her answer. Over the years, from Aarya onwards, we’ve been drawn to stories that place the feminine at their heart. Fittingly, Aarya is itself an epithet for Durga and Parvati. I, Shivani continues that journey through a moving exploration of marriage, faith, resilience and inner strength. Anu writes with warmth and emotional honesty, finding the sacred ordinary in the extraordinary. This beautifully crafted novella reminds us that the stories of the Devis are not confined to mythology, but live on in the lives of women around us every day.’

—Ram Madhvani, Filmmaker

‘An intimate, fiery, compelling, and original voice. Will transform anybody’s gaze at women.’

—Danish Husain, Actor

‘With intelligence, intimacy and remarkable originality, Anu Singh reimagines the mythology embedded in our collective consciousness through Shivani’s own voice. Shivani emerges not merely as the goddess handed down to us, but as a whole woman who questions, refuses and chooses. In rediscovering her, the reader is invited to examine her own inherited roles—and what it means to belong deeply to others without ceasing to belong to herself.’

—Ashvini Bhave, Actor 

‘Anu Singh’s I, Shivani is the story of a goddess who feels like a woman and a woman who carries the burden of divinity. The myth of Devi, the conundrum of her power and her womanhood and the myriad stories woven around it has come alive in this first-person retelling. When Anu Singh’s Shivani tells her story, she offers an understanding of the life of every woman and therein lies her power, and the power of Singh’s prose. This is an essential book in its attempt to reclaim the myth of Devi and enrich Indian feminism.’

—Anukrti Upadhyay, Author

‘As Anu Singh channels the mesmerising voice of ancient goddesses, she ignites the higher power within every reader. When we listen deeply to the stories of the Gods imagined by our ancestors, we remind ourselves of the infinite power of the human consciousness.’

—Natasha Badhwar, Author and Filmmaker 

‘Rather than rewriting mythology for spectacle or novelty, Anu draws out possibilities that have always existed within the tradition. Told through Parvati’s own consciousness, I, Shivani, gives her the agency to think, question, and, most importantly, choose. The result is an insightful story that is both respectful of its sources and yet deeply personal.’

—Aditya Rawal, Actor, Playwright and Screenwriter

‘I have always been suspicious of Indian mythology for its somewhat patriarchal framing. Anu’s book reframes the stories we grew up with and brings us one step closer to accepting the Goddess and thus, invariably, the women in our lives as whole beings in their own right, not as means to a man’s pursuit of life. This is not a retelling; it is women reclaiming what they perhaps always had, through Anu’s voice. This text can liberate not just women but men too.’

—Viraf Patell, Actor, Writer and Entrepreneur

‘This retelling is both overdue and powerful—a feminist reimagining of Adi Shakti’s story told in her own voice. With remarkable skill, care, and creativity, the author humanises the goddess, making this a story for anyone seeking their Shakti within.’

—Swati Parashar, Professor, School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden

‘I, Shivani is a magical novella that equally disarms and shocks with a timeless mythical tale told through a modern lens, serving up an incisive alternate telling that restores forgotten agency and equality.’

—Kapil Sharma, Filmmaker 

‘How deftly Anu Singh turns the centuries-old tale of Shivani on its head. And along with it every preconceived notion of the why and wherefore of the very existence of the woman in this inscrutable cosmos. Of the agency that allows for choosing and denying in equal measure; to give and withhold with equal power and abandon. As a daughter, consort and mother; a fearless friend or fierce ascetic whose penance is single-minded and purposeful. How cleverly yet gently each layer is peeled off showing the pure steel within. That will never bend nor ever rust.’

—Viji Venkatesh, Cancer Care Advocate,

Actor and Author 

‘Giving goddesses agency. What a fine idea. As the smarter one of the genders, they definitely do not want to be worshipped. I, Shivani is an instant classic. And about time.’

—Smriti Kiran, Founder, Polka Dots Lightbox

‘A prose so lyrical which both caresses and wounds... A lens so vital which both answers and questions... The words of the Devi form a blood-clot in your soul... An absolute triumph.’

—Satyarth Nayak, Author

SAY AGAIN PRESS

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First published in India 2026

Copyright © Anu Singh, 2026

Anu Singh has asserted her moral rights to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Indian Copyright Act, 1957

This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

This book offers a contemporary retelling of a mythological figure and presents the author’s creative interpretation of the goddess Parvati’s avatar, Shivani. The narrative draws inspiration from mythological texts, cultural traditions, festivals, rituals and practices, but all depictions, extrapolations and characterisations are imaginative and intended solely for storytelling. This work does not purport to be a theological, historical or scholarly account, and does not represent the views, beliefs or official positions of any organisation, institution, or religious or community body. It is meant for entertainment and literary purposes only, and neither the author nor the publishers intend to hurt or disrespect the sentiments of any individual, community, faith or religion.

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for all the goddesses

who weren’t allowed

to be born

and reborn

Contents

Foreword

Author’s Note

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Foreword

Anu Singh’s novella, I, Shivani: The Goddess Who Chose, is a dazzling work of mythic imagination, written in prose that is lush yet intimate, sensuous yet philosophical, visual and startlingly contemporary. It takes the familiar architecture of the Shiva–Parvati mythology and does something quietly radical with it. She turns the Goddess towards us, gives her the first person, and releases a voice long buried beneath centuries of stories told about her. What emerges is not simply another retelling, but an alchemical literary experience in which the ancient world becomes immediate, tactile and alive.

At its heart, I, Shivani is also an act of self-recognition. Anu Singh is drawn to Shivani because, in understanding her birth, childhood, choices, tapasya, love, grief, fury, darkness and generosity, she also comes closer to understanding herself. This may be the oldest reason anyone tells a story: to look into another life and discover oneself there. I, Shivani is, ultimately, a woman looking for herself in the oldest mirror available in our collective Indic memory. The impulse is rooted in Anu’s own experience of worshipping the many forms of Goddess Durga while growing up in a provincial world, and later carrying that inheritance into a more cosmopolitan consciousness. The result is a shape-shifting narrative of Shakti, unfolding across seven chapters, in which Parvati, Sati, Kali, beloved, wife, mother, ascetic, warrior, creator and destroyer become manifestations of one evolving consciousness.

Anu’s mythology possesses a rare sensorial density. Her world is made of things that can be touched and inhaled: earth, stone, snow, ash, smoke, flowers, fragrance. Formally, too, the novella is adventurous. Singh writes almost as if composing Vedic richas, with their compressed force of invocation, image and revelation, while allowing the narrative to unfold like a parable. She reimagines Puranic stories of Parvati, Sati and Shakti and enters the erotic and philosophical terrain of Kama and Rati, including the imaginative world of Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava. What distinguishes I, Shivani within feminist mythological fiction is that Singh does not merely give a mythic woman a voice; she reclaims the entire iconography surrounding her. Shivani can be loving without submission, maternal without self-erasure, erotic without possession, furious without vengeance, and divine without surrendering her autonomy.

Ultimately, I, Shivani is an epic in miniature, excavating a repressed Indic consciousness dispersed across mythology and history, gathering its many names, roles and sacred images into a single, fully inhabited woman. These selves coexist, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes violently, as they do within any human life. And perhaps that is Anu’s deepest gift: a mythic mirror in which the ancient becomes uncannily contemporary and the inherited becomes strange again. In its cracked surface, the goddess looks back at us and we recognise ourselves.

Professor Ashwani Kumar

Poet and Author, Banaras and the Other
Senior Visiting Fellow, Centre for Policy Research,

New Delhi

Author’s Note

I was born in a village less than a kilometre from Mahendranath.

Mahendranath, one of the largest Shiva temples in the region, was not just a landmark in my birthland of Siwan, Bihar. It was the air, the direction everything faced, the reason our calendars kept a time that didn’t feel like ours to keep.

That rhythm had a name: Shiva.

Mahashivaratri, as expected, was the largest festival of that calendar. And the central instruction of Mahashivaratri for every girl old enough to understand instruction was this: fast today, pray today. Pray for a husband like Shiva.

In the holy month of Shraavan, the men would carry their kaanwars to Shree Baidyanath Dham in Deoghar, or to Kashi Vishwanath in Benaras, or to Ajgaivinath Temple in Sultangunj or to Baba Siddheshwarnath Dham in Jahanabad.

I would, years later, find this funny in a way that had nothing to do with humour.

Every Shraavan and Navratri, the same men who fasted with real devotion, who sought out young girls for Kanya Puja on Ashtami and Navami and worshipped them as living forms of the Devi, went home where their everyday treatment of girls and women was not just ordinary and unremarked, but was derogatory and oppressive. This confused me more than anything the stories left out. It was hypocrisy in plain sight, uncontested. Even then the women would fast Monday after Monday, praying either for a husband like Shiva, or for the well-being of her husband, if she had one.

They prayed to Shiva because Shiva stayed, and he stayed forever with one woman, the one name carried across every age he ever appeared in—that of Shakti. While Vishnu descended again and again and each descent came with its own bride, its own devotion and its own story that began fresh; Indra’s court also kept its own accounts, but Shiva stayed with one, in our mythology, and therefore in our conscience.

This ekpatnivrat, the Divine Monogamy, fascinates me because I was raised inside it. A husband who does not wander is not a small thing to ask for in a world where women are abandoned all the time. So, when they fast in Shiva’s name for the husband, the fast is not really for his long life. It is for his fidelity dressed up as his long life.

I grew up in Ranchi. If Siwan gave me Shiva and the longing for a husband like him, Ranchi gave me Durga. Our neighbourhood was full of Bengali families, and Durga Puja was the largest event of the year. Led by the organising committee made of mohalla youth, often men, Bengalis and the non-Bengalis came together with equal fervour for this festival, which was more like the year reorganising around ten days of something larger than ordinary life. With the kaash-phool blooming in the fields around various dams and ponds spread all over the Chhota Nagpur Plateau, the pandals went up. The dhaak picked up. The markets buzzed with new and vibrant designs of garments and sarees. The air would be thick with the smell of freshly cut grass in the field mixed with the heady fragrance of dhoop, camphor, agarbatti, parijat flowers and bhog khichdi.

As a child, I would often wonder about this goddess flanked by other gods and goddesses in the pantheon. Why would an entire family arrange itself around Durga? Who were they all to her? Why were they all there? What was their relationship to her? I knew, dimly, that these were not separate gods who happened to share a stage. There was a logic to the arrangement, a cosmology embedded in the composition. But no one explained it to me. You looked at it from the serpentine queues flooding each pandal. You felt it like how crowds moving in unison are supposed to feel: belonging, or its counterfeit, the fear of getting lost arriving at the same breath. You moved on to the prasad, and to the Puja celebrations. I took part in these festivities, celebrations and Puja with a lot of fervour when I was a young girl, even though those questions about who Durga really was stayed inside me.

I must admit, I was quite devout as a child. Because this is how devotion works when you are young. It arrives already assembled, handed to you by the women you love (in my case, my mother and Nani) wrapped in the smell of incense, flowers, rituals, the sound of bells, chants and devotional songs, with the specific warmth of a family that believes genuinely and completely in the power of what it is asking you to do. You inherit devotion first, and then you make it your own.

No wedding in the world I came from began without the women gathering to sing. The wedding invites would go out, and before any ritual took place, the women would sit together and sing. “कवने कलमिया से लिखले विधाता, गौरा जी के भाग में लिखले जोगी बाबा!” With what pen did the Creator write in Gaura’s fate a yogi, an old ascetic? No series of wedding songs, not a single one in my memory, ever began without the invocation of Shiva, and then immediately, inevitably, Shiva and Parvati together. Their love was the template. Their union was the standard. Every bride was, implicitly, Parvati. Every groom was, aspirationally, Shiva. Even Ram and Sita, whose songs as Ram-Janaki Vivaah Geet would only be followed after the invocation of Gaura-Shiva.

And then there was Hartalika Teej.

Hartalika Teej is the festival of married women in Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh, a waterless fast, which means not a drop of water crosses your lips from sunrise to the following sunrise. It is observed for the long life of your husband.

I remember my first Teej in Purnea, Bihar, as a young married woman: the marathon of changing five sarees, one for each peher, each time of day requiring its own silk and its own ceremony. I remember sitting through the long puja, the readings from the Hartalika Teej Vrat Katha, the popular story of Gaura Parvati in her most devoted form, who performed the most severe of all penances, who refused to eat or drink, who rejected the husband her father chose and held to the god she had chosen herself, whose love was so absolute it moved the cosmic order.

But there is another story beyond the one told in the Vrat Katha and it is extraordinary because the two women at its centre are extraordinary.

Hartalika comes from two Sanskrit words: Harat, which means abduction or stealing, and Aalika which means a female friend. Hartalika Teej literally celebrates the young woman who defies her father and escapes to the forest with the help of a female friend to save herself from the marriage her father had arranged for her. She performs tapasya of such severity that the world itself grows hot from the heat of her intention. She makes her own choice. Parvati was that woman, and she had that one woman friend. Teej celebrates that friendship, and that sisterhood.

But the version of the Teej story that was handed to me, and to the generations before me, tells us otherwise. Much like the wedding geet, it only speaks of the fast that must be observed in the name of the husband’s long life.

As I started to grow older, this unquestioned steadfast devotion started to baffle me. What confuses me even more is that we are given only part of the goddess.
The devoted part. The waiting part. The part which was ready to do anything for “penance” as if love was something a woman had to atone for.

We have been handed over these stories because these sanitised parts can be safely held up as an example. You don’t question this example. You receive it. You fast. You pray. You become like the women who have preceded you, till you realise it no longer makes sense because it no longer works for the person you have become.

And that happened when I started to realise that I was not given the argumentative, ferocious, rebellious side of the Goddess. I wasn’t given the daughter, who rebelled against her own father because her beliefs didn’t align with his. Or the philosopher, who debated the nature of consciousness with her husband and refused to simply accept what she was told. Or the mother, who created Ganesh from her own body without permission, who cursed the gods of heaven when they interfered with her motherhood, who set conditions before she would allow the universe to continue. I was not given the goddess who not just became Kali, but as per Rudra Samhita (Chapter 7, Verses 11–17; translation by J.L. Shastri) and Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava, was born as Kali.

The goddess I was handed was not a lie. This is important to maintain. The devotion was real, and so was the love for her. The Hartalika Teej story contains, if you read it closely, a woman of enormous courage and enormous will. She is in there. But it is also convenient, contained and narrated in the frame of wifely virtue, of feminine sacrifice, of love expressed through fasting and waiting and the patient endurance of whatever the world required of her. (And if you digressed even for a moment, there were serious consequences, including the curse of being born a mongoose if you fell asleep on the night of Hartalika Teej
while fasting).

A girl raised only on this version inherits a single tool for every difficulty a marriage (or a life) can bring her: patience. Not argument. Not refusal. Not the setting of a condition and holding to it. Just patience, which is handed over to her as a virtue she must carry within. When her own moment comes to ask a hard question of a father, a husband, a god, she will not recognise it as something she is allowed to do.

I grew up as that girl, because no one ever told me, the goddess chose differently and I could too. It was only much later in my life that I started to meet the powerful versions of this woman available in the texts all along.

She is in the Shiva Purana and the Skanda Purana; in Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava where she chooses penance over beauty to birth Kumar (Kartikeya) whose ultimate destiny is to defeat an invincible demon to restore cosmic order; in Adi Shankaracharya’s Soundarya Lahari which opens with the declaration that without Shakti’s divine beauty, grace, radiance and energy Shiva is nothing but ‘Shava’, a corpse which cannot stir. She is in the sixth-century text Devi Mahatmya, standing alone on a battlefield, absorbing every goddess she had generated back into herself, who said: एकैवाहं जगत्यत्र द्वितीया का ममापरा.
I alone exist in this world; who else is there, a second one, apart from me?

How very familiar! How very close to the very fundamentals of Advaita Vedanta, Aham Brahmasmi—
I am the Brahman, the Absolute.

And the very first of these voices is older than all the others. Before the Puranas, before Kalidasa, before even Devi Mahatmya, there is a hymn in the Rigveda itself, the Devi Suktam, composed by a Rishika, the seer woman Vakambhringe, daughter of sage Ambhrna, where the Goddess speaks in her own voice and declares, “Without asking anyone’s permission, I move as every power the world has a name for.”

She is there as the Navadurga, the nine-form arc of the goddess per Devi Mahatmya. Parvati, the family woman and the devoted wife, yes, but she is also Durga as power and protection, the force that destroys what must be destroyed. She is Jagadamba, the mother of the Universe, and she is also Kali, the darkness beneath, the frequency that pre-dates form, the one who remains when every other strategy has failed.

These are not different women. They are the multifaceted offshoots of the same force. They are all, in the deepest reading of the tradition, Shakti, the supreme feminine energy, wearing different expressions depending on what the moment requires.

Shakti, the goddess, is always there. So is the woman. She was simply not the version we were encouraged to become, obviously that self threatens the very order patriarchy
depends on.

This book is my feeble attempt to understand that power, the Shakti of the woman who doesn’t fit in any frame. This novella is also my attempt to understand those different expressions of the goddess, or Shivani (the equal half of Shiva), as I have decided to call her here.

This Shivani is uncontainable, even dangerous. Not to the cosmos, but to the status quo. Only because she has the power of choice. She is the goddess who always chooses.

Therefore, I write this book in first person.

This is a literary choice, but it is also a philosophical one. More than that, it is a personal one that I cannot entirely separate from the other two. I write in Shivani’s voice not because I believe I have access to the divine. Not because I think my interpretation supersedes the Puranas. Not because I want to replace the texts that already exist and are extraordinary.

I write in her voice because it is the only way I know to ask the question I am actually asking.

I should also clarify and state clearly what I am not.
I am not a mythologist, a Sanskrit scholar, or a theologian. I have (superficially) read the texts in their translations with the simple hunger of someone looking for herself in them, not with the rigour of someone mapping their internal consistency of being on a spiritual quest. Scholars far more equipped than I have done that work for centuries. I don’t aim to add to that knowledge.

What I am is something simpler, and perhaps more urgent: just another woman trying to get to the source. I am trying to trace the feminine energy inside out. I am trying to understand what this energy is made of, what it is capable of, and what it has been trying to tell me about myself for as long as I have been paying attention.

I am interested in this story of Shivani because it helps me make sense of myself. In understanding Shivani’s story, her birth, her childhood, her choices, her tapasya, her relationships, her love, her grief, her fury, her darkness and her generosity, I also stand to understand my own. This, to my humble mind, is the oldest reason anyone has ever told a story. That is all this is. A woman, looking for herself, in the oldest mirror available.

Which is not: Who was Shivani?

It is: What does it mean to be Shivani? What does it mean to be a woman who contains every form, daughter, wife, mother, friend, destroyer, saviour, and refuses to let any single one of them be the final or the only word?

What does it mean to be a woman who married the most difficult man in existence with his ash and silence and long absences, and chose him every day afterward. Not from obligation, and not from a debt owed across lifetimes, but from the full knowledge of what she was choosing.

I, Shivani: The Goddess Who Chose is a novella in seven chapters, each named after a relationship that shaped her: her father Himalaya; Shiva as beloved and then as husband; her sons Kartikeya and Ganesh; the other gods and goddesses; and finally herself, the Devi as the woman who remained after every form had been inhabited and released.

This is that story. This is that story in the way that all the best stories are both, entirely specific to the person who lived them and entirely available to anyone who has ever needed permission to be whole.

It is Shivani’s as much as it is mine because I am, this year, quietly relearning what girlhood, marriage, motherhood, womanhood, and faith actually ask of a woman.

Chapter One

Himalaya: The Mountain Father

सा भूधराणामधिपेन तस्यां समाधिमत्यामुदपादि भव्या ।

सम्यक्प्रयोगादपरिक्षतायां नीताविवोत्साहगुणेन सम्पत् ॥

“The Lord of mountains who pledged to beget right progeny engendered that most auspicious Satī Devī from Menā Devī, as with prosperity seeded with principles of perfect enduring and with fervour for enterprise will be unfailing.”

(Verse 1.22 from Kālidāsa’s Kumārasambhava)

I was summoned before I was born. A demon named Taraka had a boon that made him invincible—he could not be killed by anyone but a son of Shiva. And Shiva, after Sati left her body, had folded himself into grief so deep and dark that he would be moved by nothing, would want nothing, and thus would father none. So, the gods looked at the locked door of his complete sorrow and did what people filled with profound fear, not wanting to face it head on, always do. They went around the Universe looking for a key.

The key turned out to be me.

“Be born again,” they instructed Parashakti, the Supreme and Transcendent Feminine Power. “Be born, grow beautiful, draw Shiva out of his eternal sorrow and give the universe its weapon.” They did not ask what the Goddess wanted. It simply did not occur to them. A key is not consulted about the lock it is shaped for.

There is a fine line between being wanted and being needed, and I learned it before I was born. Through the ages, it continues to be the deepest wound inflicted on innumerable women.

Once the gods had settled on a course of action and had let the Goddess know that I must be born, that Sati must return through the body of the mountain’s beloved wife Menavati Devi, Brahma called for the goddess of the Night, Nisha Vibhavari, a daughter born not of his body but of his mind, the part of him that had the thoughts he would not claim. She was what he discarded because she was dark, and darkness, even in the mind of a creator, is treated as something to be sent away rather than owned. He sent her anyway, to write my destiny in ink that no one could see by daylight.

I understand her better than the texts ever gave her credit for. A mind that only keeps its light is not a mind. It is a performance of one. Night is not the absence the world calls it. It is the other half of the same sky, the half that makes the light mean something. Without her, Brahma’s day would have had nothing to be day against. This is why I do not apologise for what I am made of.

Brahma sent the Night Goddess down into the world like a messenger carrying ink with which the destinies of the cosmos were to be written. With this sublime purpose, Nisha Vibhavari came to my mother in her gem-walled chamber of my father’s mountain palace in the hour when Mena’s eyes had only just closed and she inhabited her.

And then she coloured me, the unborn one in her womb.

I tell you this first, before I tell you about the snow and sand in a palace made of the mountain I was born in and the parents who loved me, because everything that comes after is the story of a key that decided to become a question instead: What am I when I am not being used? What is left of me when you take away the door I was made to open?

A severe penance of three thousand years in a forest is how long it took me to find answers to those questions. But the asking started in the mind of that dark little girl her father doted on.

I was born at midnight, and with my birth, all the lamps in the palace went dim. This is not poetry. Quite the opposite of it, in fact. The midwives and the women of the palace who tended my mother told this exact same story of how darkness engulfed my birth all their lives: that the moment I arrived, the flames in the birthing room shrank back as if a brighter darkness had entered and shamed them. I was not born dark by the accident of blood and genes. I was given the dark, it was poured on me and it encased me, the way a lamp is filled before you light it. The Night Goddess herself is the pigment I am painted in. So, while the world taught me to be ashamed of it, I held only to the belief that I am the colour of the power that holds every bright and shining star in the Shunya, in the skies and beyond. I am made of the dark that existed before there was any light to measure it against.

My mother said I did not cry the way other children cry when born into a cold new world. I cried, she’d said, the way someone cries wrenching their heart out when they have agreed to forget something enormous and haven’t quite yet finished forgetting.

As soon as I was born, my father came with his priests to have me blessed. He looked at me and what he saw was not the absence of light, but the kind of darkness that comes from the inside of the earth where the oldest secrets are contained. My father was a mountain. He knew dark when he beheld it.

So, he named me Kali, the dark one. He said it the way you utter the name of something precious you have been waiting for really long to hold. I have outlived a thousand names and the world has decided which ones I am allowed to keep. It made Kali into a war-cry, a tongue hanging out of the mouth and a garland of heads around its neck, the name you whisper when you are afraid. It forgot that it was first a father’s word for his daughter said with deep love in the hours before she had done anything at all except be born.

Among several other things, over the ages, this is the first that the world took from my story and reshaped without asking: my first name. The kinder names came later and they came from everyone. My mother said, I was a child who attached herself to every living and non-living being in the house of the Mountain: the cooks, the old women, the boy who carried water, my brothers, the dogs, even the pillars and the panels of the mountain palace. I belonged to all of them, and they to me, because I was the daughter of the Mountain, of Parvata. Parvati. Girija. Shail-putri. Himavati. Himali. The Mountain’s Daughter. The one who is ours.

Kali was my first identity. Parvati was what I was later named. Gaura was who I became through penance. Jagadamba was who I eventually became. I would spend a long life learning how to live within these different names and identities.

But before that, the Parvata, the Mountain. I did not grow up in a building. I grew up inside my father.

He was the Himalaya. He was the mountain, and the palace was only the part of him that had agreed to hold still and be lived in. The walls were his stone, polished until you could see the grey storms moving inside. The deep rock floors were cold. The kind of cold that did not bite but simply reminded you, always, how much older the ground was than you. In winter, the snow came not as cold to be weathered but as a member of the household, settling on the sills. We did not shut it out as much as make room for it, to bask in it.

When I pressed my hand flat against a wall, which I did often as a child, I could feel my father. My mountain-father had slow and enormous patience. He had his heartbeats so far apart that time expanded itself between those rhythmic crests. Other children felt him as the cold and steady rock that grounded them. I sensed how he held us all inside the curve of his attention with his warmth. He taught me to navigate the mountain the way other men pass down their trade to their sons. He made me sit on the cold ledges and taught me which stone held water and which let it pass. He taught me to read the sky. He made me memorise the names of the high passes and the valleys and the winds that owned them. He encouraged me to befriend the particular eerie silence that arrives just before snow. He taught me, the dark one, his youngest daughter (and not my brothers) because he said, I was the only one who listened to the mountain instead of merely living on it.

I think this is why, afterwards, the forest (and much later, the Kailasha) did not frighten me. I had been raised inside a mountain that loved me. Going to the mountains to find myself, and make a new home much later in life was not akin to running away from home. It was going further in. I was moving from one home to another.

My mother gave me the gift of ‘yes’. There is a version of Mena the world remembers, the one who forbade me, who cried, “Uma!”. “U” (alas!) and “ma” (do not!). “Alas! Do not!” Uma, no. The only time she said no to me was when I told her I intended to go to the forest and perform tapasya. But before that, my mother said yes to everything. By saying yes to me, Menavati Devi was honouring that ordinary woman in her who had wanted me so badly that she had bargained with the Goddess to get me, and having got what she wanted could refuse me nothing. I learned this exactly how children learn the contours of their own power: by accident, and then on purpose. When I wanted to sleep on the high ledge where the wind was loudest, my mother let me. When I wanted to fast the day the older women fasted, though I was far too small to earn blessings from the vrat, she let me and sat up fasting with me and worrying all night. I wanted and my wanting was always answered by her. Yes, my Kali. Yes, my Parvati. Yes, my child.

I did not know then that a mother’s yes has a permanent layer of fear underneath. I only knew that I was loved without limit, which is a dangerous bind, because the day comes when the love encounters its limits, and the child mistakes the limit for the end of love. When she said, “U-ma!”, it was not the end of love. I know that now. It was love arriving at the edge of what it could endure.

My sister Ganga was flowing, raging water while I was stone. She could not hold still. I have never in any of my lives seen anything want to leave the way Ganga wanted to leave. She loved us exactly the way a river loves its banks. When I pressed my hand to the wall to feel how old and unmoving everything was of the Himalaya, she pressed herself against every boundary of him to find the crack she could force her way out through.

The household decided, we were rivals. Households always do this with two daughters. They need one to be the still one and the other to be the flowing one, one to stay and the other to go. For a while we both played into this rivalry, believing them. I thought Ganga’s restlessness was a judgment on my stillness and my depth was a rebuke to her speed. I didn’t know then that they could both complement each other, and could go hand in hand like two sisters are meant to.

It took me most of my existence to understand what my sister was. One day, Ganga would pour out of heaven and the God with matted hair would catch her in those very locks to keep her fall from shattering the earth, and people would call it her taming, and weep for her. I did not weep for her. He did not tame her. He took a force that wanted only to reach the sea and showed her how she could carry within herself the whole human world and its entire civilization as she made her way to the ocean. Ganga was not my opposite, but the part of me that had to leave, had to flow down the mountains and walk into the lives of people who would never climb high enough to find me, who needed the divine to come down to them as something they could drink, store and keep as a source of elixir, the very life-force that would keep them alive as much as lead them to their mukti, to their final liberation.

But that part of the story is my sister’s to tell. For me, Ganga was only my sister, who could not sit through a single meal, or a prayer, or a family gathering, whom I loved and did not understand. She showed me how you can be made of the same thing as someone else and share nothing of their nature. That’s what siblings are for. That’s what they are meant to be. Same, and yet not.

When I was growing up, I would build altars in the sand.

While other children around me built little houses, forts, palaces and mounds with sticks for flags, I sat apart on the riverbanks with the cool sand running through my fingers and built small raised mounds, flat and smooth on top. No one had taught me the shape. No one in the palace prayed at such an altar. But my hands just knew it, as if they were returning to something primordial within my being again and again. When the time came for my lessons, the tutors would part their lips to teach me only to realise that I already knew not just the words in the hymns, but also the meaning within. Words and meaning under the sun of knowledge rising up to meet each other, like water would rise to form the clouds. And it had started here, in the sand by the river, my hands building a shape they remembered from a life my mind had comfortably agreed to forget.

I would set a flower on the little altar. Sometimes a stone. Once, a single bilva leaf, three-lobed, that I had carried all morning without knowing why I wanted it. And then I would sit in front of what I had made and I would reach toward something I could feel the way you feel the sun on your closed eyelids. Present, bright and enormous, and impossible to look at directly.

It had no name, and that was the most unbearable part that made me come back to the sand day after day. I was a child who had words for everything, who attached herself to all the world and named what she loved. And here was the largest emotion I had ever felt, and it would not hold still long enough to be named. When I would reach towards it, it would recede like the tide pulling the wet sand out from under my hands. And day after day I would be left alone, holding the shape of an absence.

What is it, I would ask the air. What is it that I am building these for? Who is supposed to come?

The air did not answer. But it did not refuse me, either. So, I kept building, kept reaching, kept placing my flowers and stones and leaves for a guest who had not yet been given a name.

The name came on the day Narada, the wandering sage, climbed up into my father’s stillness.

I was very young. I remember the adults arranging themselves around him exactly like water arranging itself around a stone, with a sudden ripple of importance. Narada took my small dark hands and turned them over. He read the lines in my palms exactly the way my father had taught me to read storms in his own stone.

Then he said it out aloud. He told my father the name of the man written on my hand.

The warnings followed. The ash, the burning grounds, the snakes, the nakedness, the company of ghosts and outcasts, all the reasons my father’s face was going grey like old snow. I watched the adults retreat from the name as though it were a gust of catastrophe under a door that had to be sealed. I watched the room go colder than any winter it had known. My mother gasped, the sound that escaped from her throat was akin to something between a suppressed cry and a shriek. She was afraid, as was my father. Every grown person in that room was afraid of the single word the sage had spoken over my open palm.

But I was not afraid. I felt the way you feel when after searching every room of a dark house for something you have lost, your fist closes around it, in the last place you could have expected. That is when you realise it was never lost, only waiting at a hidden place patiently, for you to uncover it.

In that cold room, the name found the warmth in me, in one small child. It was only now I understood that it was the name of my altars in the sand. The child in me heard recognition, a homecoming. The adults in the room heard a prophecy. A problem to be solved, a fate to be changed, a husband to be feared. They thought the sage had told them my future. He had only, in fact, told me the name of my own past.

I did not say any of this then. I was a child, and a child always has the innate sense to keep the biggest secrets to herself. I took my hand back from the sage. I went down to the river to build one more altar in the cooling sand. This time, while setting the flower upon it, I had something I had never had before. I had a name to say.

So, I said it. Quietly, to the water, to the stone, to the great patient mountain that was my father holding all of us inside his attention and patience.

A prophecy is a fragile bird in the hands of a frightened man, even if the man happens to be the Himalaya. The years passed, but my father could not make himself understand the name Narada had spoken as his daughter’s destiny. What father, however strong, patient and generous, would want to give his beloved dark daughter to the Lord of the cremation ground? When the world offered my father the clean, golden name of Vishnu, the Preserver and the keeper of all order, my father desperately reached for it as a drowning man reaches for a lifeboat.

Vishnu was a good and sensible match, just the kind that lets a father’s heart rest. But no one asked me who had been making me lose my sleep and keeping me not just awake, but awakened. I was summoned to take birth without being consulted, and now, I was to be given away without being consulted. The key was to be fitted to a different lock and no one yet again bothered to ask the key.

But I was not alone, and this is the part the world forgot but the women never did.

I had a friend, Hema. She was not just a softness in my life but was also the strength at my side. When she understood what was being arranged, she did not counsel patience. She did not tell me to obey and trust that my father knew best. Like all loyal sakhis, companions of one’s girlhood, Hema took my hand and at midnight she took me out of the palace, out of my father’s careful plans, into the forest where no arranged marriage could follow.

Years later, the story would be told differently. The world called it an abduction. Harat, they said. Hartalika, the friend who carried me off. As though I were luggage. As though the only way to explain a woman leaving a marriage she did not choose was to squarely put the blame on another woman who apparently misled her.

I was not abducted. I was helped. There is a whole world of difference in those two words and the difference is what you must fathom. Hema did not take me anywhere I did not want to go. She opened the door my frightened father had begun to close and she walked through it beside me so that I would not have to be the only one breaking the rules.

That is what a friend is. Not the one who keeps you safe inside the life that is slowly killing you. Instead, the friend helps you escape it. Hema carried me into the cold clearing of the forest by the bare mountainside, which was nothing but my father turned inside out.

This is where the next part of my story begins. But before that, it goes into another slice of my story from a previous lifetime, into a life I lived before this one, when I had a different father but the same beloved.

Chapter Two

Kama-Rati:
The Inciting Incident

क्रोधं प्रभो संहर संहरेति यावद्गिरः खे मरुतां चरन्ति ।
तावत्स वह्निर्भवनेत्रजन्मा भस्मावशेषं मदनं चकार ॥

“While the voices of the gods were still echoing in the sky,
pleading—O Lord, restrain, restrain your anger, that fire born from Shiva’s eye had already reduced Madanā
(the god of love) to a mere residue of ashes.”

(Verse 3.72 from Kālidāsa’s Kumārasambhava)

In my life before the mountain, I was called Sati. The virtuous woman, that’s who I was. Satt-ee, seeker of the truth, that’s who I became.

I was the daughter of Daksha, a righteous king who performed every ritual correctly and was unforgiving when it came to maintaining the hierarchies. Shiva, you must know, was the polar opposite of Daksha; Shiva, who I loved the way I have loved him in every telling and rebirthing of myself—completely and against the wishes of the world. My proud father could not bear him. The ash, the wildness, the free-spirited one with absolutely no need to be impressed by not just Daksha’s, but also his father Brahma’s careful and correct-by-rule universe. Daksha’s universe had a seating chart. Who entered first. Who bowed lowest. Who was owed a rising-from-the-seat and who was not. That was not incidental to his religion. It was the whole of it.

Shiva kept no chart. I do not have a verse, or a reference, for this. I have only what I saw in my dreams every single night, where I always saw him on the Kailasha, at the edge of his inner fire. No one there was asked their birth antecedents. Not caste. Not station. Not the appearance they donned to reach him as he was: eternally old and eternally young, ash-covered.

His fire was not like my father’s. Daksha’s yajna fire was sacred too, and still it kept a register: who could come close, who had to stand back. Shiva’s fire asked nothing. It was light itself, the first light, and in it everyone who came near him was seen the same way, because light does not have a memory of who you were before you stood in it. Later, I would become half of him myself, one body, the Ardhanarishwara, the one who had stopped needing even the seam of gender.

Daksha’s hatred and condescension for Shiva were fierce.

There had been an earlier sacrifice before this one. Brahma’s, not my father Daksha’s. The Skanda Purana retains this part of the story. The Shiva Purana, the one closest to my heart, does not. It tells my father’s cruelty as a single wound. One sacrifice, no rehearsal for it. I will give you both, because both are mine and because a woman who has died and returned as many times as I have knows, that no single telling ever holds the whole of the tale.

At Brahma’s yajna, every god in the hall rose when Daksha entered. Every god, but two. Brahma did not owe his own son homage. Shiva owed him nothing at all. My father did not ask why a god remains seated. He only made a note of it and went home. He then let the fact of it become a grudge and gave the grudge time enough to become a plan of revenge.

So when my father held a great yajna of his own, the Brahaspatistava (as the Bhagavata Purana names it), an offering dressed as devotion and built as debt collection, and invited all the gods and deliberately did not invite my husband, he was not humiliating Shiva. He was erasing him. He was telling the assembled cosmos in the oldest language there is that the one I had chosen did not exist.

I went to that sacrifice. I went uninvited, which daughters are not supposed to do in Daksha’s ordered universe. I stood in my father’s house and listened to him insult the man I had loved and had married. It was then that I understood something which has taken me many lifetimes to fully hold: that there are insults a body cannot simply survive. Not because they wound it, but because to go on living inside that deep a wounded body that has heard, lived and endured and has done nothing about it is its own kind of sad and painful death. I chose my kind of death and surrendered my body.

I did not die of grief the way the ancient narratives claim. I withdrew from that body the way you walk out of a house that has been desecrated. I abjured that body and walked into the fire deliberately of my own volition, in front of my father so that he would have to watch what remained of her leave the world by its own choosing.

It was the first time I used the only power the world had left me with: the power to refuse to remain.

What I did to my own body was immediate. What Shiva did with what was left of me went on forever and remade the surface of the world. The Shiva Purana in its Rudra Samhita gives his grief chapter after chapter, the wandering, the calling of my name, the dance that broke mountains. But it gives my choice perhaps a verse, and no more. Kalidasa does not even give it that. His poem opens after, with Shiva already on his peak, my death cleared out of the way in a single line before the story he actually wants to tell can begin, which is that of the penance, the wedding and the son.

I have always thought it strange that the retellings, even the ones that claim to love me, spend so many verses on his grief and so few on the choice that caused it. The tellings and the lores celebrate Shiva for his ekapatnivrata. But what about the wife, who would give up anything, even her own life, for the husband’s honour?

Therefore, I will tell you about both kinds of grief, because they were not the same.

Mine had been building long before that day, though it took me years to call it by its right name. Every insult my father wore as protocol, every year I carried home and said nothing about because a wife learns to bank what she cannot yet afford to spend, all of it had been gathering in me the way frost gathers on a window one still night at a time, invisible until the morning you wake to find that the whole pane has gone white.

The coldness I felt at the yajna did not begin at that yajna. It had been accumulating for years. The sacrifice was only the morning I finally saw how deep it had gone, and understood there was no more room left in me to go on hosting it. So what looked from the outside like withdrawal, contained and deliberate, was in fact the last moment of a much longer leaving. I had been gathering myself inward for years. That day, I simply finished.

Shiva’s grief was the opposite of contained. When he learned of it, he came down from the Kailasha and he gathered what remained of my body. And then he began to move. They call it the Tandava and they have made it grand, cosmic, a dance of dissolution performed by the Lord of Dissolution as though it were a duty he was discharging.

It was not a duty. It was a man who would not put down the grief he was carrying.

That is the whole of it, if you want to understand the difference between his grief and mine. I had let go of everything. The body, the life, the father, the family, the form. He could not let go of even my remains. He held what remained and he danced. The dancing was neither a celebration nor a ritual. It was refusal given a rhythm. Each step came down and the ground broke under it. The mountains he had always sat upon in quietude caved in. The oceans jumped out of their beds. He carried my body across the whole width of the earth and would not set it down, because to set it down was to agree that I was gone.

I want you to see the two of us in that hour because that is the truest portrait of us that exists, truer than any wedding image.

I, who had been summoned and used, had learned in one lifetime how to release my body, my life, completely.

And he, the great ascetic, the one whose sanctity was built on detachment and on having made his peace with every ending, could not release me. The god who had taught the worlds that all form is impermanent stood in the middle of creation ready to destroy it, refusing the impermanence of one woman.

So, they went to Vishnu.

Not to Indra, whose thunderbolt always answers force with force. Not to Brahma, the Creator who had already tried reason and found that grief does not attend lectures. They went to the one god whose entire nature is to hold the universe together and asked him to be the one who broke something apart.

I have turned this over longer than almost anything else in the story. The preserver does not destroy. That is the whole of what he is for, in every age, every descent he has ever made into this broken world. And here were the gods, kneeling before him, asking him to become, for the length of one dance, the very being eternity had never once asked of him.

Vishnu did not move quickly. He stared at them, pondering for a long while at what was being asked of him, because even the Preserver understood that what he was about to end was not a monster. It was a marriage. Cutting Shiva’s arms free of me was not destruction wearing mercy’s face. It was preservation committing the one action it is never supposed to do: letting something go, so that everything else could be kept.

They did not take the grief from him. No one could. They took the burden out of his arms instead. Through a Sudarshan Chakra, piece by piece, while Shiva danced. What he was carrying was cut from him and given to the earth, scattered across until his arms closed on nothing and the dance had nothing left to be about.

And where the pieces of me fell, the ground did not become a graveyard. It became holy and has stayed holy. People still walk to those places, lifetimes later, often without knowing whose scattered body they are walking toward.
A woman who would not stay where she was not honoured, broken open across an entire land and made by that breaking into something the land would worship forever.

He did the dancing. The scattering made me into pilgrimage.

But he did not know that yet. He only knew his arms were empty. And when there was nothing left to carry and nothing left to dance for, the motion and the catastrophic rhythm went out of him all at once. He went up into the highest cold he could find and sat down to completely close himself.

That is the locked door the gods came to me about lifetimes later, to have me take birth as Himalayaputri, as the daughter of the Mountain. They spoke of cosmic order, a demon who needed killing, a weapon that needed forging. But they did not bother to mention, or even remember, that Shiva had locked himself because of me.

I was a young woman when the god of the locked door of thousands of years finally came to my father’s mountain slopes to grieve. He sat down at that highest cold clearing where nothing grew.

A god in mourning is still a guest and a mountain does not turn a guest away. My father did what hosts do. He sent attendants to tend the place where the great ascetic sat: to clear the fallen leaves and snow, to bring water, to lay fresh flowers at the edge of a stillness none of us were permitted to disturb.

And then he sent me. The same father, who once could not bring himself to utter the name Narada had spoken for me. I haven’t been able to make sense of this contradiction. I have wondered whether it was his sense of larger duty towards the cosmos that overcame the selfish fears of a father. Or was it because he didn’t want to repeat Daksha’s mistake, who was given a small mercy as the head of a sacrificial goat on his body after the gods had beheaded him as a punishment for Sati’s death and the havoc it caused? One lifetime is enough for the father of a daughter to learn about the power of his daughter’s choice when she chooses to exercise it. And several lifetimes aren’t enough to bear the consequence when the father decides to become an antagonist.

Whatever it may be, this is how I came to be there, just an ordinary girl for any morning chore she has been assigned, with flowers in her hands, oblivious to how the cosmos had quietly begun to arrange itself around one particular moment.

I silently looked after the grieving and meditating ascetic for a long time before anything happened. There were some ordinary days in the beginning. Days of sweeping ash that fell off his body with every breath of his; of setting bilva leaves around him at places where the wind would not take them; of moving noiselessly at the edge of his vast grief. He never looked at me. I did not need him to. To be near the stillness was enough, the way it is enough simply to be in the same house as the one thing you love the most before you are ready to move into it.

What I did not know was that my nearness in the form of this plain, daughterly, flower-carrying hospitality arranged by my father had been noticed by other eyes. Up in their heaven the gods had seen a girl placed within arm’s reach of the god they needed to wake. They did not see a daughter doing a chore out of a sense of duty. They saw an opportunity. They saw a lock and a key already lying side by side, and only one thing left to do was to force the turning.

That is when they sent for Kama. Desire itself, personified. That is what desire is to the mighty and powerful. A servant they are ashamed of, but cannot do without.

Kama was the oldest hunger, the primal instinct in a living being, wearing its most beautiful and cherubic face. His bow was sugarcane and his bowstring was a living row of bees. His arrows were made of flowers. But do not let the softness of those materials fool you, for what they carried was the force that turns bodies toward each other across every distance and boundary the world can put between them. Kama’s task was simple. Go to the mountain where Shiva sits frozen in his grief. Wait until the moment his gaze, by whatever accident, falls upon the dark girl who has been sent to tend his meditation. And then, in that moment, put the arrow in and fire. Make Shiva want her. And Kama, to do it, brought Spring along. He brought it out of season, against the grammar of the mountain.

The frozen hard mountain slope, which had forgotten its firm softness, remembered. Buds that had no business opening bloomed. The Ashoka, which is said to bloom only when a beautiful woman touches it, flushed red all at once, in every crevice, everywhere. The air suddenly went heavy and heady and sweet and warm. The bees that had been a bowstring scattered into the new blossoms. Pairs of deer pressed their flanks together. The very vines wound closer around the trees. Even the river seemed to move differently.

It was not the flower-arrow, but the longing that was the weapon. The whole world tilted all at once towards wanting, towards a longing that was so strong that the grieving god in the centre of it would feel the tilt, and for one unguarded breath, would want as well.

And this want was meant to land on me. I was first a weapon. I was now a lure.

I will not pretend that I did not feel the spring arrive. Or, that some part of the girl looking after him did not drift towards the warmth like every other living being on that mountain. Desire is not a lie. That is the thing the ascetics get wrong. It is not false. It is simply not enough, and not mine, to be forcibly fashioned. There is a difference between something being untrue and something being insufficient.

I want to stop here and tell you about the one person in this story that the tellings always hurry past, because they are in a rush to get to the fire and the romance and the wedding, and they leave her standing at the edge of the clearing with the whole weight of what is about to happen already in her body.

I will not hurry past her. Her name was Rati, and she was Kama’s wife. The world had a name ready for what she was: pleasure’s attendant, consummation’s shadow. A body that existed only to receive what Kama’s arrows had already decided. No festival was ever built around her fasting.
No vrata carries her name through the generations. The world could not imagine that anything Rati did was of her own will. Only that, Rati followed. The way heat follows fire, the way a shadow follows whatever throws it, never once mistaken for a source of its own light.

I do not tell it that way. I was there, at the edge of the same clearing, and what I saw was not an attendant, or a follower. I saw a wife, a partner, who loved her husband exactly the way I would later be praised for loving mine—completely, against warning, past the point where it is safe to keep on giving.

The love the world remembers is the love that ends in a wedding. The love the world erases is the love that ends in ashes.

Rati came with Kama to the mountain. She did not have to. Desire could have done his terrible errand alone. But she came because she could feel something in her gone inexplicably cold, so she chose to rather be present for the catastrophe than sit at home imagining it. Rati had a foreboding. I know this because I have carried the same one myself in all my lives on all other thresholds and I recognise its particular texture. Foreboding is not fear. Fear is loud. This was quieter and worse. It was the body knowing before the mind will allow it that the person walking beside you is walking toward something they will not walk back from.

She watched her beloved partner string the sugarcane bow. She watched him choose the flower. And everything in her was saying do not, the same syllables my own mother would one day say to me, u, ma, do not, the oldest word a woman who loves says to the one she cannot stop. But Rati did not say it aloud, because she knew him and she knew that desire cannot be talked out of its own nature. She knew that the what she loved about him was the thing that was about to destroy him. He was made to make others want. To ask him to lower the bow was to ask him to stop being Kama. Rati stood in the unbearable place that loving sometimes puts you, where you must watch the one you love walk into the fire.

I have told you already that a key is not consulted about the lock it is made for. Kama was another key, smaller than mine, spent faster. The cosmos needed a son from Shiva to kill a demon no one else could kill, and Shiva would father nothing while grief sealed him shut, and someone decided quickly, the way desperate people decide, that a god of desire could be spent to open what patience could not reach. No one asked Kama if he wished to be fodder for an emergency he had not caused. No one asked Rati either.

Then it happened exactly the way you already know it happens, in every telling. Shiva’s gaze, drawn by the wrongness of the season, opened. Kama drew. And in that very instant, before the flower-arrow struck, he understood that something was trying to reach into him and manufacture a feeling, trying to use the oldest hunger to pry open a grief that was his and sacred. And then the third eye opened, which only opens when something tries to take from him what should be freely given.

The wind-gods were still crying out for him to stop. That is the detail I cannot forget. The desperate plea was still in the air, Hold back, Lord, hold back, and the words had not finished crossing the sky when the fire had already done its work. There was no pause in which mercy could have entered. Desire was a body, and then desire was ash.

And Rati, who had known, ran to the ash. And he, who had done it? He did not move. The retellings make this a moment of wrath, a god lashing out. It was not wrath. Wrath wants something. What I saw was a man closing a door he had not chosen to open. The third eye on his lofty forehead shut as quietly as it had opened and what was left in his face was not triumph. Not even anger. It was the particular exhaustion of someone who has had to defend a grief he was not finished with. They had reached into the one room he had sealed and he had burned the hand that reached. And then he sat back down into his stillness, alone again. More alone than before. He did not look at me. He did not look at Rati.

I watched Rati put her hands into what was left of Kama. I watched a woman kneel in the fresh grey remains of the person she had failed to stop being himself. I want to tell you that she screamed, but she did not, not at first. At first she was silent the way the deepest grief is silent, the silence of a mind refusing the information the eyes are witnessing. She gathered the ash against herself as though its warmth could be argued with and turned back into a body solid and tangible. She spoke to it. She used small endearing names, the ones only she had for him. And then, when the ashes did not answer and would not reassemble did the shriek come out of her. It was not a sound I had a name for, and I have looked for the name across three thousand years and have not found it, because there is no word for what a woman feels when the gods have spent and destroyed her husband to run a cosmic errand.

It was Rati who taught me what I would do next. Not Shiva. Not the gods. A grieving woman kneeling in ash taught me the entire shape of my own life, and she never even knew she did it.

Because watching her, I understood what the gods had been wanting to make of me, and what I would have become if their arrow had flown true. They had wanted to dart Shiva into desiring me. And if it had worked, if Kama had not been burned, if Shiva had risen out of his grief flushed with an arrow’s heat and reached for me, I would have spent the rest of my existence as a woman who was wanted by a man who had been made to want her. I would have been the lure that worked. The key that turned. I would never, not in a thousand lifetimes, have known whether he loved me or loved the flower in his blood.

And the cosmos had been willing to burn Rati’s whole world to give me that. To give me a counterfeit. They had been ready to spend a real love, an actual marriage, Rati’s actual husband, in order to fake mine.

I felt the fury rise inside me, white hot, the kind I almost laughed at the beauty of. But underneath the fury was the emotion that mattered, which was certainty arriving the way it does all at once and from very far underneath.

I did not want him wanting me. I wanted him knowing me. There is a difference and it is the whole difference, and it is the difference Rati’s grief had just carved into the air in front of me. Desire can be aimed. Desire can be conspired, conscripted, manufactured, shot into a body against its will by gods in a hurry. But to be seen, heard, understood, known and truly loved cannot be faked, cannot be hurried, cannot be done to someone with a spring flower or even a perennial garden. Love can only be earned slowly by becoming someone real enough to be known and someone clear enough to do the knowing. It is the one thing in the entire cosmos that cannot be conscripted.

So, I would not take the shortcut Kama had died trying to give me. I would not be a woman a god was tricked into loving. I would walk the longest and the most treacherous road there is, the road that had no flower arrow piercing it, and I would arrive at him as someone he could recognise. Or, I would not arrive at all.

That is the moment the snow became necessary. Not because my beauty and being had failed. My beauty, in fact, had not even been allowed to try; it had been about to be used and I had just watched the price of using it. The snow became necessary because I had understood kneeling-distance from Rati and Kama’s ashes that the only love worth crossing death twice for was the kind that could not be manufactured. That love had to wait to be chosen and recognised, even if it took a lifetime.

The gods wanted a lure. I gave them a woman who would take three thousand years and would answer to no arrow. I turned away from the blooming, and that stupid artificial spring. I walked towards the cold, on purpose. And somewhere ahead of me in time the leaves were waiting that I would eat and then give up, and the name was waiting that I would earn, Aparna, the one without even a leaf.

CHAPTER three

Aparna’s Penance

स्वयंविशीर्णद्रुमपर्णवृत्तिता परा हि काष्ठा तपसस्तया पुनः ।

तदप्यपाकीर्णमिति प्रियंवदां वदन्त्यपर्णेति च तां पुराविदः ॥

“Living only on tree-leaves that had fallen of their own accord was the very limit of austerity. Yet she gave up even that. And so those who know the old lore call her, the sweet-spoken one, by the name Aparṇā,
‘the one without even a leaf’.”

(Verse 5.28 from Kālidāsa’s Kumārasambhava)

As if the most remarkable thing about me was what I gave up and discarded.

As if a woman’s greatest achievement is always the subtraction of herself.

Though what I would like you to know is, I kept the cold of many winters through Pausha and Maagha of sitting in snow up to my shoulders. Bare-skinned, the mountain wind learning the shape of my stillness until it stopped trying to move me.

I kept the heat of several fireplaces burning around me in the cruelest, scorching summer months of Vaishakh and Jyeshtha.

I kept my darkness, the Kali that I was born as. They thought the fire would lighten me, that this ghor tapasya was a kind of bleaching, that a woman who suffered enough would come out the colour they preferred. Fair, and not dark.

It was Narada who first said the word to me. Not gently, for he never says anything gently. He only says it early, earlier than others, as a warning. Tapasya, he had said to me when he came visiting, as though it were a door I hadn’t noticed was open.

I want to underline what he wasn’t saying, because it matters. Every saadhak, every ascetic I had ever known of was a man. The forests were full of their hunger, their fasting, their years of stillness, praised as the highest penance a soul could attempt. No one had told me a woman’s body could hold that kind of silence and be called anything but ‘strange’ for it.

Narada did not ask whether I could. He assumed I could, the way he would have assumed it of any of them. And that is what matters. You always need an ally who assumes the toughest circumstances for you to be the best way forward for you.

So, there I was, keeping what I wanted and losing what I didn’t need. I did not lose a single shade of myself in that clearing. What I burned instead was the certainty that the dark in me was a flaw waiting to be corrected. I kept it intact as the guiding light to the lightness of my being.

I also kept the silence. Not the silence of someone who has nothing to say, but the silence of someone who has decided that the only conversation worth having for now is with the self.

I kept my hunger, and then, I gave it up too. At first, I ate once a day. Then, once in many days. After that, only bilva leaves, three-lobed and sacred, one per morning like a small prayer to myself. Then, I gave up those leaves as well. I gave up water. I gave up everything the body uses to negotiate with the world and keeps us stuck in Maya. Food, warmth, shelter and safety, and the very life-breath—spare me until there was nothing left to negotiate with.

They called this tapasya, penance. I called it listening. First to the body, then to the mind, and then the soul. This listening came not just from one lifetime, but several. I was listening to Parashakti. I was listening to Sati. I was listening to Rati. I was listening to all the women who came before me. I wasn’t just a reincarnation. I was to be the rebirth and repurpose of one and many. But most importantly, I was to be the rebirth of myself.

I was also listening to my mother, Menavati Devi.
I was the girl whose mother never said ‘no’ to her before. But for the first time, I made my mother afraid by a choice I had made by going for the penance. My mother sat with her fear, and her inadvertent ‘no’ through an entire night and examined it. Like all mothers of this universe, my mother also found at its centre not worry for me, but memory of herself. She reasoned feebly with me, and said, “The sirisa flower can hold the weight of a bee, but not of a bird.”

My mother meant my body. She meant that I was that tender flower and my penance the bird, and I would be unable to survive under its weight. My mother was not wrong about the flower, she was wrong about which one I was.

I didn’t argue back. I simply waited. By morning, her single ‘no’ had changed to a ‘yes’. She had agreed because I had become her mirror, the reflection of what she wanted to change.

“Go,” she said. “I was wrong to stop you.”

My mother gave me my freedom and called it love. This was a lesson I would learn from her, and would emulate throughout my life, and through all iterations of life. It wasn’t just freedom for the sake of it. It was the freedom of mind, and allowing that to someone you love is the only act of true love.

I also want to be precise about something: I was not doing tapasya for Shiva.

I know that is how the story is told. The devoted girl burning herself alive in her longing for a god who would not look at her. The love-struck princess who starved herself into worthiness. Even the gods believed this. Even Brahma, who knows the shape of all things, came to tell Shiva: “She performs tapasya for you. Go to her.”

But here is the truth, and I have carried it for longer than mountains have had their names: I was doing tapasya for myself. Rati sitting with Kama’s ashes was the catalyst towards my decision of penance. Yes, Shiva was the direction. He was the compass point, the centre that drew me, the way travellers are oriented toward Dhruva Tara, the North Star. Not to reach the star itself, but to know which way they are moving. What I was moving towards was the knowledge of my own nature. What I was building, in that clearing, weathering absolute stillness, was myself.

A woman who incinerates herself to get rid of everything that is false and deceitful is not destroying herself. She is finding out what was real all along. She is distilling what she wants, or doesn’t, and why. This inward journey isn’t considered worthy enough to be called tapasya.

The rishis came first. I heard their slow but definite footsteps. Seven of them, standing at the edge of the clearing, with their robes and their certainties. I heard the silence that falls over men when they encounter something they did not expect and cannot immediately classify.

“She cannot last,” one said. The honourable Rishi was not wrong. He meant my body. He did not know I had already made peace with my body’s limits. That was the first lesson tapasya teaches you: not strength, but the difference between what is essential and what is not.

The wise men spoke to me gently. They used every argument in order. Duty to my father, duty to my lineage. The impropriety of a princess sitting alone in a forest. The danger. My youth. My beauty, which they brought up as though it were a rebuke, as though the existence of my body were a reason to stop listening to my soul.

I did not open my eyes. Not because I was rude or even afraid that opening them would break my concentration. But because I had understood by then that what these men were offering was a return to a life of pretenses. And I had come to the forest precisely to stop being looked at. I had come here to look inward.

The rishis left, and I continued my penance. “She is mad,” I heard one say as they retreated through the trees.

Madness and clarity look identical from certain angles. The difference is only visible to the one living it. It took me three thousand years to see that.

Three thousand years.

I will not pretend that number is simple. I will not cloak it in mysticism and ask you to simply accept it as divine. Three thousand years is not a beautiful abstraction. It is three thousand winters. Three thousand of the Ganga’s floods and recessions. Three thousand cycles of trees losing their leaves and getting them back, three thousand years of burning in the furnace of life.

I was there for all of it, sitting, knowing, waiting. Please bear with me as I reiterate—waiting not for Shiva but for the self that was being forged in that stillness the way metal is forged in fire. Slowly, painfully into something that holds its shape.

There were days that bled into each other without distinction, when I felt nothing but the weight of my own body, the tedium of breath, the distant and mocking fact of my own heartbeat.

There were nights when doubt arrived like the rains soaking you to the bone. What if I am wrong? My self-doubt surfaced in a voice that sounded like reason. What if this is not devotion, but merely stubbornness? What if I am not building something, but simply refusing my destiny? What if clarity indeed is nothing but madness?

I learned something about self-doubt in those years.
I learned that it is not the enemy of faith. On the contrary, doubt is faith’s most important companion which keeps it honest. Faith without doubt is certainty, and certainty asks nothing of you. It is self-doubt that requires the full force of your being. It is doubt that makes you return to your choice every morning with nothing to sustain you but the knowledge of what you are moving toward.

So, in doubt, or in spite of it, I chose my path. Every morning. I chose Shiva.

And I chose to be Shivani.

That is what being Aparna also meant to me, as one of my many names. Not the leaves I gave up, but the choice I made every day to continue.

They also have a name for what I became after the penance: Gauri, the fair one, the bright one. They call me by that name as though the darkness finally washed off of me, as though three thousand years of fire had at last burned me clean and acceptable.

But to be honest, I did not actually become fair-skinned. I became luminous, which is an entirely different thing. The brightness they saw was not my skin surrendering. It was what darkness does when it stops apologising. I took the name Gauri the way I took every name: not as a correction, but as one more facet of who I am. Kali was the colour my father loved. Gauri was the light Kali radiates when she is no longer ashamed. They are the same woman. They were always the same woman. I did not shed Kali to become Gauri. I stopped letting them treat the two as a before and an after.

And when the Universe noticed, it expressed itself the way it always does: through excess and abundance.

The forest around me stopped obeying its own rules. Predators lay down beside their prey. The ancient adversaries, the lion and the deer, shared the same patch of shade at the edge of my clearing as though they had forgotten the grammar of hunger. Trees bore fruits out of season. Snow fell and did not melt. The air grew warm and cold simultaneously, as though seasons had stopped agreeing with each other. When you offer presence, trust and space, life around you stops; it no longer needs to be predictable.

Later, I was told that with this sudden unpredictability, my tapasya had begun to destabilise creation. And because I was the Shakti, the cosmos would not be able to contain it. I was told that the heat of what I was building as my inner power was leaking into the universe, and even the gods feared that disturbance.

“She will burn herself to nothing,” Brahma said.

“Or she will become everything,” Vishnu answered.

They were both correct. Those two things are often the same.

And then came the Brahmin.

He arrived without announcement or ceremony, dressed in plain robes, wearing the unremarkable face of a man who had nothing to prove. He sat across from me with the ease of someone who thought they had a right to that closeness.

I opened my eyes. He began to speak about Shiva, about ash and cremation grounds and the impropriety of the god I sought. He spoke about snakes and ghosts and the company of the broken and the outcast. He listed these things as failures as a prosecuting argument.

I felt rising within me from some place far underneath a fury clean and complete.

“You describe him as though those are flaws,” I said. “They are the only reasons I trust him.”

The Brahmin took a pause, but I continued. “A man who sits with the dying has made peace with death.
A man who welcomes the outcast has freed himself from the fear of being cast out. A man who wears ashes knows that everything returns to ash eventually. You list his life as a catalogue of failures. I read it as a map of freedom.”

The clearing was very quiet, and so was the Brahmin. And then he changed. Not slowly or with drama.
He simply stopped being what he had been pretending to be and became what he was, the way water stops being ice.

Shiva stood where the Brahmin had stood. The light that came off him was not the light of lamps or of the sun, but of something older. It was something that had been burning before the first sun was lit. He looked at me the way you look at something you had almost forgotten and now that you are seeing it again, are astonished that forgetting was even possible. He looked at me with all three eyes, though the third remained closed.

“You understood me without even seeing me,” he said.

“I did not need to see you,” I told him. “I know you.”

“How?”

And this is the answer I gave him, and it is the truest thing I have ever said. “Because I spent three thousand years in becoming. That is how I know you. Not from the outside, but from the depth you require to know oneself.”

So, that’s the lesson I carried from those years in the forest. The world will offer you many common nouns for what you are. Daughter. Wife. Mother. Devotee. Good girl. Friend. Difficult woman. And then, adjectives too. Too much. Not enough. Broken. Blessed. Destroyer. Saviour. It will give you these words the way it gives you clothes, insisting you need them, insisting that without them you are exposed, incomplete, insufficient.

But in lieu of that, the world will take away the self that none of them name. The self that can choose the cold and the hunger and the silence. The self that can choose every morning but won’t be allowed to.

That self may not be my best, or the most impressive, or my most powerful, or my most beloved self. It is simply the first self. Despite the constraints, and despite the lack of autonomy forced upon me, I chose the self that could choose to be—all of it at once and nothing at all.

That is not a contradiction. That is what it means to be whole.

They call me Aparna. The one who gave up even leaves. I call myself the one who found out what leaves were hiding. I have been given a thousand names. But foremost, I am Shivani, the equal half who chose self and then Shiva in her full power and consciousness. I was Sati, and I was Shivani. We were both one continuous self, learning the same lesson from the other side of the two lifetimes each time. Sati learned to refuse to remain. Parvati would learn to refuse to be hurried.

The thread between them was never Shiva. The thread was the refusing and making the choice. And in a cosmos full of destiny and divine decree and cosmic necessity, where even gods are moved by forces larger than their own will, choice is the rarest and most sacred thing there is. Especially for a woman.

My penance was not a prelude to a courtship. It was a homecoming that had to be earned yet again.

CHAPTER four

The Wedding

द्विधा प्रयुक्तेन च वाङ्मयेन सरस्वती तन्मिथुनं नुनाव।

संस्कारपूतेन वरं वरेण्यं वधूं सुखग्राह्यनिबन्धनेन॥

“With language used two ways, Saraswati praised that
couple: the bridegroom blessed in a speech refined by the sacred grammar; the bride in an utterance easy to take in,
composed in the common tongue.”

(Verse 7.90 from Kālidāsa’s Kumārasambhava)

Saraswati, the goddess of speech, refused to speak only one language at my wedding.

She first blessed Shiva in Sanskrit, the polished tongue, the one with rules of phonology, morphology, and syntax. She then blessed me in the language people actually spoke, the soft one that carried emotions—the one a woman could carry home in her mouth without a priest to translate it. The one they call the ‘mother tongue’. And no one in that gathering thought one blessing was any less than the other.

That is the first thing I learned about marrying Shiva, before even the wedding yajna fire was lit. In his presence, the elite and the common stood on an equal ground.
The polished verses and the folk songs were both given to us in the same breath, by the same goddess of knowledge and language, with the same love and grace.

I have thought about that a lot. Because it would have been so easy to bless us both in the high tongue and call it honour. It is always the high and refined tongue that gets the diadem of honour. But Saraswati looked at the two of us and understood something the world keeps forgetting: that to be truly spoken to, a person must be spoken to in the language that reaches the recipient, not the language that flatters the speaker.

Centuries later a poet named Tulsidas would speak of this same wedding over again in his own language and would swear that even Saraswati, Sharada in his words, lost her nerve at the sight of me.

कोटिहुँ बदन नहिं बनै बरनत जग जननि सोभा महा।

सकुचहिं कहत श्रुति सेष सारद मंदमति तुलसीकहा॥

छबिखानि मातु भवानि गवनीं मध्य मंडप सिव जहाँ।

अवलोकि सकहिं न सकुच पति पद कमल मनु मधुकरु तहाँ॥

The Vedas fell silent. Shesha, the thousand-hooded serpent who holds up all the worlds on some quiet understanding with gravity, had nothing to say either. I like that detail better than any of the theology stacked on top of it. The goddess of every word there has ever been, and yet for that one moment, at my wedding, even she didn’t have one.

That was the wedding. Now let me tell you about the procession from the groom’s party.

They had warned me, of course. The women always warn you about the groom’s people, the baraat, that endless anxiety over whether his side will find your side wanting. It is an age-old anxiety, as old as marriage itself, and the particular weight it has always placed on women.

But no one in the history of the world ever had to worry the way my mother worried, because no groom in the history of the world arrived the way mine did. My groom came down from Mount Kailasha mounted on Nandi, his white bull. Behind him came everything from the rest of creation, especially the ones who had been written off and forsaken by the ages.

The gods came, yes. Vishnu in his blue calm, Brahma with his four faces, the keepers of the directions mounted on their proper vehicles, dressed suitably to the occasion, arranged by their ranks. The world is comfortable with these guests.

But then there were those the world doesn’t want to include.

Behind the gods came the ganas who were everything the gods spend their existence trying not to be. They were the misshapen and the malformed, beings with too many limbs and too few, with the faces of animals and the bodies of men, with eyes where eyes are not expected and mouths that opened in the wrong places. They were the broken and the abandoned, the ones no other court would seat, the ones who had been turned away from every gate in heaven before they found the one gate that would never turn anyone away.

There were ghosts too. The restless spirits and the dead, the pretas and the pishachas. The ones whose names you do not say after dark, making merry at my wedding party. There were ascetics smeared in ash, who had given up the world, walking beside beings who were the world’s entire appetite turned into flesh. They all came as themselves.

None of them had been asked to wear a different face, to walk quietly, to be less of what they were so that the gathering could be more comfortable. My husband did not say to the ganas, “Come, but comb your hair.” He did not say to the ghosts, “Come, but do not frighten my bride’s kin.” He brought them as they were. He brought them exactly as creation had made them and then discarded them, and he set them at the front of his own wedding, because to him there was no front and back of a procession. There was only his, and all of his came. Whole and loud, and authentic.

These baraatis howled and danced and made music out of bone and drum, singing through their own wild throats that no refined ear would call music. It was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard, the sound of beings who had been told that they did not belong. They were arriving at the one wedding and one celebration where belonging was not in question.

And how do I describe the bridegroom for you? My words fall short every time I think of him. There were living snakes at his throat and at his wrists. Mind you, they were guests too and not ornaments. There was the crescent moon and there was my sister Ganga, dancing in joy through his matted hair. He was dignity and equanimity personified. He was pure love, expansive and blissful, just the kind you seek in your deity.

This is what no one tells the girls who are taught to pray for a husband like Shiva. They think they are praying for the moonlight and the devotion. They are praying for the beauty and the strength. Though they do not know it, they should be praying for a man whose love does not have a select guest list. They should be seeking a man who, on the most important day of his union, looked at the most rejected beings in all the worlds and said: “You, especially you… You will walk at the front.” My heart melts and expands every time I think of this. This is the sole reason I will choose Shiva through a million lifetimes hereafter.

There is a register for exactly this in the geet the women still sing at weddings in their beloved tongue, as half-complaint and half-wonder for the mother whose son-in-law’s procession turns out stranger than expected. If there had been a line for what she felt in that moment, it might have sounded like this: कैलास से कईसन बरात आईल हो, हमरा गिरिजाकुमारी के हियवा कांपे, हमरा मैनादेवी के घूमे कपार… What procession has come down from Kailasha that my mountain-king’s daughter’s heart trembles and her mother feels dizzy.

My mother fainted, I am told. The lore and the songs make this the joke of the wedding: the mountain-queen collapsing at the sight of her son-in-law’s abhorrent wedding procession. My mother fainted because she had spent her whole life inside a frame of propriety and what ought to be. And the one frame she knew broke right in front of her eyes. Someone who has lived her whole life inside a frame does not always survive the breaking. I do not blame her. I loved her for the collapse, even. At least it was honest. It was also the old structured world meeting the only man who was never going to belong to it. More importantly, her feeling was correct that she was about to lose her daughter to something she could not name.

Now, about me, the bride. Because that is the one role the world never tires of looking at. So, I will let you look at this side of me once, through my own lens.

They bathed me and dressed me. They wound me in red and gold silk heavy as water. They put the ornaments on me one by one the way you lay offerings on an altar. I almost laughed as I thought of my sand altars, because now I was the altar. Now I was the smooth raised podium to which that unknown guest was finally coming.

They lined my eyes with kohl. They reddened my feet with alta. They threaded flowers through my hair that three thousand years of snow and fire had not thinned. There is a verse, sung long after me, that Adi Shankaracharya wrote in Soundarya Lahari that men recite to summon a vision of the Goddess as a bride. Kvanat-kanchi-dama, the one whose slender waist is girdled with a belt of tiny ringing bells, her frame bent a little under the weight of her own body, her face the full moon of autumn.

But the verse does not stop at the bells and the moon-face. In the very same breath, it puts a bow in my hand, and an arrow, and a noose, and a goad, and it names me ‘Purushika’, the bold one, the proud counterpart, Shiva’s own match and not his accessory.

That is the bride they dressed that morning. Not a soft thing to be received. I was the beautiful woman girdled in bells but also armed. I was not a lure, dressed to spring open a grieving god. I was not a key, polished to fit a lock. I was a woman who had walked the longest road there is, who had earned her own arrival, and was now allowing herself to be adorned for a man who already knew her.

He had not fallen for the bride. He had fallen for the woman in the snow with no leaf left to give. The bride was just the form the woman chose to wear on her way to him. That is the difference I had carved out of Rati’s grief: to be adorned and then known, rather than adorned and taken. The red and the gold meant something completely different on a woman who had already been seen. They were not bait. They were celebration. She was beautiful, yes, but what stood there in silk and gold was not only a beautiful woman. It was a woman who had become real enough that her beauty could finally mean nothing but the joy of her own expansion.

Then there is that one part no bride is ready for, no matter how chosen, no matter how sure. I had spent three thousand years walking toward something. I had not once thought about what I would be walking away from.
My father.

I have told you that I grew up inside my father, that he was the mountain and the palace was only part of him. So, understand what it is for a still mountain to marry a daughter away. I was born on one mountain that could not follow me, and I was walking toward another that would never follow me either. That was the cruelty of it. Ganga could leave, Ganga was made to leave. She would pour herself all the way down to the sea. But my father could not move. He was rooted by his very nature. To marry me away was to stand exactly where he had always stood all along and feel the part of him that had learned to love going somewhere he could never reach.

My father had been afraid of this marriage from the moment Narada spoke the name over my palms. He had spent years not wanting the very thing that was now happening in his own premises. And here is what I watched my father do, and what I have carried as the truest thing a parent can do for a child: he let me go anyway. With love, and with poise.

He performed every rite. He held the golden pot. He poured the water over our joined hands and with that water he set my new life in motion toward the Lord of the cremation ground and his procession of ghosts, with every blessing he had left to give.

And the mountain, who does not weep, who has stood unmoving while ages passed, wept. I felt it. I felt my whole childhood home shudder with a grief it had no practice in feeling, because mountains are not built to lose things. And he was losing me on purpose, by choice, for my sake.

My mother, made of the endless yes for me, could not get the blessing out of her mouth. She had given me my freedom and called it love, in the forest, when she let me go to the snow. Now she had to do the larger version of the same, and even a woman practised in yes finds the wedding for her daughter to be the hardest one. She had wanted me so badly she had bargained with the Goddess to get me. And the price of wanting a daughter that much, she was learning, is that one day you stand in red and gold and let her go to someone else’s mountain and call it the happiest day of her life.

My father’s grief was allowed to be visible, a mountain weeping is a spectacle worth telling, worth writing down, worth being sung through thousands of years in various languages and various forms. My mother’s grief was expected to be managed: folded into blessings and rice and the correct number of tears at the correct moment and then put away before the guests noticed it had lasted too long. She had wanted me so badly and now the wanting had to pay its dues and no one thought to ask what it cost her to pay it standing up, smiling, in front of everyone.

Ganga did not cry. Of course she didn’t. My sister, the river, understood leaving like no one else did. She looked at me with almost relief, almost recognition, as if to say: Now you know.

And my friend Hema watched me marry the man she had helped me run toward and I saw on her face for the first and last time that particular grief of the friend who succeeds. Because when a friend helps you escape into your own life, your own life is the thing that then takes you away from her. She had given me the door. And the door led, as doors do, away from the one who opened it. She did not regret it. I was certain, she did not. But there is a loneliness in watching someone walk all the way through the opening you made for them. And Hema wore that loneliness like a bridesmaid’s gown.

The little ones, the cousins and the children of the house, wondered where I was going. Why does she go up, and not down like Ganga? Why does she go toward the cold? They did not understand yet that some of us are summoned upward, into the high places, and that the cold is not always something you flee. Sometimes it is the homecoming. They would understand it later just the way you understand your childhood much after it is over.

I left. But I left having been sent off, lovingly and willingly, by a father who had every reason to stop me and chose not to. And I have spent lifetimes trying to be worthy of his love. Once a daughter, always a daughter, trying to understand the purpose of everything a father does for her, or to make sense of the lack thereof.

CHAPTER five

The Marriage

अहं शिवात्मिका मूढ शिवो नित्यं मयि स्थितः।

कथं शिवाभ्यां भिन्नत्वं त्वयोक्तं वाग्बलेन हि॥

“I am of the very nature of Shiva, O foolish one;
Shiva is forever in me.

How then, by mere force of words, have you spoken
of any difference between Shiva and Shiva?”

(Chapter 34, Verse 103 from Skanda Purāna, Māheshvara-khanda, Kedāra-khanda)

Kailasha was not a home when I arrived. It was a grief that had been left to set. I was marrying into that grief of a man who had loved a woman so completely that losing her had stopped the universe. The place was not cruel. It was simply… unlived in. It had the particular chill of a house where someone has been mourning for so long that the mourning has become part of the architecture.

I did not try to fix it all at once. I wasn’t the bride swept away by love and devotion, warming the cold god with her love. It was not like that. You do not thaw an age of grief in one season. You do it the way the mountain taught you to do everything: slowly, with patience, one held breath at a time. I learned where the light fell in the mornings.
I learned which of the caves held warmth. I placed flowers on ledges in the cold corners just as you leave small signs of life in a house to remind it that it could be a home too.

I did not ask him to come back to the world. I made the world in small patient pieces around him, until one day he looked up and found that he was living in it again and could not remember exactly when that had happened. That is how you domesticate an ascetic. Not by demanding his return, but by quietly making a world worth returning to, and waiting the way I have always waited for recognition to do what force never could.

But I would have failed at all of it, every patient piece of it, if not for Nandi.

When I arrived at Kailasha as a stranger, a new bride in a frozen house, married to a god who was a man too, still half-lost within his own sorrow, there was exactly one being on that whole cold mountain who looked at me and did not want anything from me.

Every single relationship I had came with a purpose attached to me, a door I was meant to open, a use I was meant to serve, a duty I was meant to meet. Even the real love, even Shiva, had a cosmic shape around it that the gods had been arranging since before my birth. There was a demon waiting to be killed by a son I had not yet borne. Everyone on that mountain needed me to become something. Except Nandi.

Nandi did not need me to draw anyone out of grief. He did not need me to forge a weapon or bear a son or stabilise the cosmos. He had served Shiva through the whole long mourning. He had been there for the Sati years, he had stood at the door of that grief and kept it faithfully intact while the universe waited outside. He knew my husband from before, before me. And when I arrived, Nandi simply looked at the lonely new bride in the cold house and decided, with the plain loyalty that was his whole nature, that he would be on her side. Not because I was the Goddess. Because I was the one who had just arrived alone in a hard place and needed someone to be glad that she was there.

He was the gatekeeper, so he knew everything about who came and when, who went and why, what the mountain’s moods meant. He could read the weather of my husband’s long silences that I was still learning to decipher. And he taught me things the way a brother teaches you about the house you have both ended up living in:

“When he sits like that, leave him.”

“When he sits like this, sit with him.”

“This cave holds the morning warmth.”

“These ganas will love you if you learn their names.”

“That one frightens everyone but is gentle as snowmelt underneath.”

He was my bridge to my husband’s past, the years I had not been there for.

I had grown up calling everyone my brother and sister, attaching myself to the cooks and the water-boy and the pillars of my father’s house. But Ganga had taught me that you can be made of the same substance as someone and share nothing of their nature.

Nandi taught me the opposite, and the lesson I needed more: that you can share none of someone’s substance but still be family. He was a bull, I was the Goddess. We were not made of the same thing at all, and yet, in every way that matters, we were family. He was the brother I chose in a house where everyone else had been arranged around me before I was born. The one relationship at Kailasha that no prophecy had scripted. I had been given a husband by the cosmos. I found Nandi myself. That is the thing that made us kin. Not blood, but shared work. We were both, in our different ways, the ones who had decided Shiva’s grief would not be allowed to win, who kept setting down small living things at the edge of a great stillness and waiting for it to stir.

I will tell you more of him as this story goes on, because a friend like that is not someone who you can finish talking about so quickly. He was there for what came next, and for the harder things that came after that, standing in the middle of a collision between the two halves of my heart that he loved equally and could not choose between. But that is ahead of us. For now, it is enough to say: I arrived at Kailasha alone, and within a season I was not alone and the reason was a white bull.

And now there was a marriage to be negotiated.

Here is what the wedding songs do not tell you, the ones women sing in wedding after wedding, the ones that have turned me into a template. These songs end at the fire, at the seven steps and the joined hands and the blessings. They let you believe that arriving is the marriage. It is not. Arriving is the prologue.

The actual work, the daily, unglamorous, unsung work one ordinary day after the other is the marriage.

I had married an ascetic and brought him back toward the world. This bringing-back was not a single triumphant act. It was a negotiation that never ended. A man does not unlearn an age of stillness because a wedding fire was lit. There were days he returned to me fully, present and warm and astonishing, as we both expanded and retreated in each other in our private chamber. And there were days the cold reached out for him and he sat in it on the same bed and in the same chamber, gone somewhere I could not follow. I had to learn that loving someone does not entitle you to all of that person all the time. That even in the truest marriage there are rooms the other person closes, and love is partly the discipline of not always demanding the door be left open.

I want to be honest about this, the way I have tried to be honest about everything, because the women who pray for a husband like Shiva deserve the truth beyond the moonlight fasting of Shivratri. He was worth choosing. He was worth choosing every single day. I had to choose him every day, because a man like him had to be won over and over again.

The penance did not end at the wedding. It just changed its form. Earlier, I had chosen him against the world’s wishes. Now I chose him against the ordinary friction of two enormous and sometimes opposite natures learning to share a mountain. The choosing was the marriage. And I would not trade it.

Let me show you what the choosing looked like on an ordinary afternoon. Narada came up the mountain. The same sage who had read the name in my palm a whole lifetime before found me and Shiva together, sitting idle. He reminded both of us that idleness between two large natures is a kind of dare. So, we played at dice. A board, a set of cubes, a wager—the smallest game in the world, and when we played, we made the three worlds lean in to watch.

I should tell you Shiva cheated. Or rather, we both did. We played the way two people play who have stopped performing politeness for each other, each one’s hand quick over the cubes, each one laughing at the other’s loss. He won the first throw by a trick and did not trouble to hide it. And he and Narada laughed at me together, the particular laugh of men who have decided in advance that the woman cannot really win.

So, I won everything after.

I took the crescent moon off him. Then, I took the great serpent Vasuki from his throat, and the serpents from his wrists. Then, the serpent-earrings Kambala and Asvatara, and the moon again when he staked it twice. I stripped the ornaments of the Lord of the universe one by one across a game board while the gods of heaven looked at their feet.

Here is the part that is the marriage, the part I want you to keep. He would not say he had lost. “I am invincible to all living beings,” he said. There is no doubt about it. As though the dice were a heresy and not a fact. As though the board could be overruled by the divine power of the man who was losing. I had married the freest being in creation and I was watching him do the least free thing there is, which is to refuse the evidence of his own defeat because the defeat had a woman’s face.

So, I held the hand of the god the worlds tremble before and I told him the truest little thing I could, “You have lost. There is no doubt about it. You simply do not know it yet.”

When he didn’t want to be moved by my words and conviction, he reached for the one thing that had always moved everyone. He opened his third eye.

Every being on that mountain went cold with the memory of what that eye had done to Kama in a clearing. They waited for me to become ash. They had seen the eye burn desire itself out of the air; what was one woman to it?

But I was not Kama.

“Of what use is your great eye to you now,” I said.
“I am not Kaala, the time you burn. I am not Kama, the wanting you burned. I am not Daksha’s sacrifice that you scattered. I am not Tripura, the three cities you took.
I am not Andhaka, the blindness you ran through. I am none of the things that eye has ever opened against. You being three-eyed in front of me will be in vain.”
Understand what I had just told him, because it is the hinge that joins us and our marriage. I was his equal, the equal feminine force to his divine masculine being. I was not a helpless thing or a being the fire of his third eye could end. He could not burn me for the same reason a lamp cannot burn the night. The night is the very room the lamp is standing in.

Unable to win or frighten me, Shiva closed the eye.

One of his ganas could not bear it. He came forward off the wall. Bhringi, who had served Shiva since before there were names for the years, corrected me.

“You have only a woman’s temperament, my lady. You do not know what my Lord is. Have you forgotten you burned your own body once for the offense of hearing him insulted? Have you forgotten you sat three thousand years in the snow to earn him? Be devoted. Serve him. He is the greatest power in the three worlds and you are speaking to him as though you were his equal.”

As though I were his equal.

Bhringi meant it as the worst thing he could say to me. He did not know he had said the truest. I told him the Lord he served had been established through me, that I was not standing beside the greatest being in the three worlds, I was the very power inside it that made him great.

He kept correcting me. So, I unmade him. I took the flesh off him. Not in fury or in hysteria, as the world will always tell you how a goddess curses. I did it in full awareness. Bhringi had told me my body was the proof of my smallness. A woman’s body, a woman’s temperament, a will that had to burn itself and starve itself to be worthy of a god. So, I left him the lesson in his own frame.
I left no flesh on his body. Let him stand on the mountain forever as bone and sinew, and let everyone who looks at him learn their lesson on what actually is load-bearing in a body.

I have thought about Bhringi for a long time, because he is the truest measure of what Nandi was. They were both Shiva’s, both there for the long grief, both made of the mountain’s loyalty. And yet, one of them looked at the lonely new bride and chose her, and the other looked at the same bride winning at dice and could not bear that she was not smaller as she was expected to be. That is the whole range of what a creature can do with its loyalty. It can widen to take in one more person or it can narrow to a blade and call the narrowing ‘devotion’.

And then the freest being in creation did what he was always able to do, what I had loved him for and would now have to live with: he left. He decided aloud, in the voice of a man discovering a great truth, that solitude was the higher path and a forest the better company.

So, he got up from the board he could not win at, and he walked off the mountain to go and sit alone.

The whole of Kailasha went with Shiva. Even Nandi took up the cowries and followed, because that was his office and his oldest loyalty. He looked back at me once on the way out, and I have never told him what that look did to me. The mountain emptied behind him just the way a tide goes out. And I sat alone at a board I had won, in a house that had emptied itself to follow the man, my man, who I had beaten.

Here is what I learned at the board: the man I married could always leave. That was the freedom I had crossed the chakra of life and death to marry, and it was real and it was his and I would not have taken it from him for the world.

But a mountain does not move when the one who lives on it walks away. I was the mountain now. He could leave whenever the losing got too large for him.

They told me to go and apologise.

My friend and confidante Vijaya said it gently the way women always phrase it. Because she loved me and because it was the only wisdom she had been given to pass on to other women: “You won and now you must go and be sorry for winning. Go before he has gone too far. Seek his pardon, or you will be the one who suffers.”

Vijaya was not wrong about the world. This was the world she had been raised in, a woman who beats her husband at his own game, strips the ornaments off him, goes afterwards to him, makes herself small again, and calls it an act of love and devotion. Every Teej, I would later be prayed to was built on exactly that instruction: Go and be sorry. Fast for his long life. Beg.

I laughed, and I told her the truth instead: I was the one who would decide when he would come home. I told her I had nothing to be sorry for and nothing to seek. He was the one who had been beaten at the dice board. He was the one who had walked off a game he could not win. And without me he was not even the power the world feared. Without me, he was formless, shapeless, inert.
I was the one who had given him form. I was the one who had shaped him in a manner that the world could love and dread. I was not going to the forest to apologise.

I was going to the forest because the whole universe is a sport I set in motion for him, and I had not finished playing it. I went as I pleased, and when I was ready. In the dark.

Dark as the night, I took the form of a huntress of the dark forests with a bow in my hand and a quiver on my back and peacock feathers in my hair. And I brought the bees with me, the same force that the gods had once aimed at him through Kama’s flower-arrow. This time the bee-weapon was mine. I brought them into the forest in my own hum, in my own walking.

The annihilator of desire could not withstand the desire when I was the one carrying it.

He woke from his meditation and he saw me and he was undone in an instant. The enemy of Kama, lovelorn. The one whose very form is knowledge now deluded. The great ascetic who had walked off my mountain to go and be alone and pure rose up and reached for the hand of a dark huntress he did not recognise.

I vanished out of his grip and left him wandering the trees calling for me. The man who would not so much as look at me earlier was now chasing me. The difference came from the desire and wanting no longer being done to him. It was being done by me. He could refuse the love-arrow. He could not refuse me.

Then I made him court me.

I did not let him have me for the asking. I made him say it twice. I told him I was looking for a husband who was master of all the worlds, free, without flaw. And when he offered himself, I refused and I told him why. I told him I had heard of a woman who had won this very lord by three thousand years of penance and that this same lord had abandoned her in the space of a lost game. I asked him what kind of husband that made him. He insisted. I threw his own holiness back in his face: “You are an ascetic, you are beyond attachment, you are the one who killed desire itself, you are the three-eyed one, how could a woman ever hold a being like you?”

Every word of praise I turned into a reason he could not have me. And when he reached for my hand again, I stopped him with the oldest line a woman has: not like this, not by force. Go and ask my father.

And he went. I walked the Lord of the Universe to my father’s door and I made him bow at it.

The same father who had gone gray as old snow at the name Narada read in my palm. And here was the husband he had feared for me, the Lord of ash and burning grounds, bent double at that very door asking for the very same daughter.

My father held him by his shoulders and urged him to rise. He could not bear to see the Lord of the worlds bow to a mountain. He had learned somewhere across the lifetimes what it costs to stand in the doorway of his daughter’s choosing. That’s how I brought Shiva
back home.

And then there was a night I will keep mostly to myself, though I will tell you the shape of it, because the shape is the only part that was ever true.

The poets made cantos after cantos of that night. They wrote what they imagined the Lord of the mountain did to his bride of not one, not two but three weddings, and from several lifetimes. All these cantos have been written from his side, his ardour, his discovery, his undoing, his passion. As though I were the land and he the one arriving at it. Let them keep their cantos and epics.

What happened was the other way and quieter, and I am the only one who can tell it from inside.

He had been still for an age. Not at peace, but the way something is still when nothing in it has the power to move. I had watched him sit through whole epochs. He was a lamp that had never been lit, while the world mistook its darkness for the wisdom that comes from abstinence and renunciation. He could end worlds, and yet he could not start one of his own. He could burn the god of wanting out of the air and could not himself want. That was the lack under all the stillness the ascetics knelt to. They praised him for a mastery that was only a kind of waiting, and what he was waiting for, though none of them could bear to hear it said, was me.

I will not tell you that he took me, and we consummated our divine union. I will tell you that the still feeling within him finally learned it could move. And he learned it from me, after we had fought, after he had left, after I had brought him back home. I had spent a life being the door other people were given to open. That night I was not a door. I was the threshold he crossed and the room he crossed into and the dark the whole house stood inside. Before me, he was a syllable with no breath. I was the breath. I have been the breath every time he has spoken since.

Then it happened, the truest thing of all. There was no seam. No line where he ended and I started. We were both flowing and moving into one another, as if this was the only way that was meant to be. The form they would draw lifetimes later, the one body split clean down its length, his half and mine, ash on one side and gold on the other, two eyes that have never agreed on anything looking out of one face, that is the only honest portrait anyone ever made of us. They think it is a marvel. It is just the fundamental truth, the very basis of why we, Shiva and Shakti, had come together.

We were never two parts that met. We were one singularity the world had been seeing in halves.

All of that was the inside of the marriage: the coldness, our fights, the wooing, the courting, the playful push and the pull, and the surrender. The women who pray for a husband like mine deserve the inside story in all its honesty. This friction was the whole of us as much as the union. We were one front. The gods learned this the way they learned everything. Too late, and at a high cost.

There was a demon called Jalandhara. The one boon the cosmos grants freely to demons is that of invincibility. They can’t be killed. At least, not easily. Jalandhara could not be killed either, and what made him invulnerable was not a boon he held but his wife’s virtue. His wife Vrinda was so entirely faithful that her faithfulness was his armour. As long as she was true, he could not fall. Nothing new about a man made invincible by a woman’s devotion and never once asked to be worthy of it.

Jalandhara grew so sure of himself that he reached for me. He sent word to Kailasha through his messenger Rahu that Shiva, being an ascetic, had no business keeping a wife and that I should be handed over to him.

I did not wait to be protected. I told Shiva to go. We did not stand there debating whether the ascetic should soil himself with a battle over a wife. He went because I told him the time for stillness was over and he went as himself. I held the mountain behind him as myself and between the two of us the demon’s days were already numbered.

Except, he could not be killed while Vrinda was true. So, the cosmos did what the cosmos does. It did not out-fight him. It spent a faithful woman to beat him. Vishnu went to Vrinda wearing her husband’s face and voice. Her faithfulness, the very thing that had armoured the demon, was broken by a god’s deception. And the moment it broke, Jalandhara fell.

I had witnessed this before. I had seen it kneeling-distance from it once, in a clearing, watching Rati hold the ashes of a husband the gods had spent on an errand. Now, I watched them do it again to Vrinda, and I learned that the gods had only one move and would make it as many times as it took: when a woman’s power stands in their way, they do not meet it, they trick it, and they call the trick a victory.

Vrinda cursed them for it as she died. She told Vishnu that one day his own wife would be carried off by deception exactly as she had been; that he would wander the earth half-mad with the loss; that he would have to beg the help of monkeys to get her back. And the cosmos, which never listens to women until they are dying, wrote her curse into its own future and called it an epic. Lifetimes on, in Treta Yuga, a king named Rama would lose a queen named Sita to a demon’s deception and cross the world grieving to recover her with an army of monkeys, and almost no one telling that great and beloved story would remember that it began here, in a curse in the mouth of a faithful woman the gods had spent like a coin.

This was the inside of our difficult marriage. The outside was this: when the worlds were in danger, there was no daylight between us. He fought and I let him go, and neither of us asked the other to be smaller for it. The friction at the board between the two bickering spouses and the divine union for the cosmos was the same marriage. And under all of it, the old purpose was still running. It was waiting for the marriage to do what it had built the marriage for.

This marriage wanted the son. It had wanted the son before it had bothered to want me. The reason I had been summoned before I was born. The demon Taraka still waited he could not be killed by anyone but a son of Shiva. That was the lock the whole cosmos had been trying to open since the first page of my story and was kept in the gods’ accounting because my birth had been arranged to arrive at one event. A son, who would grow into the weapon, who would kill what could not otherwise be killed.

So, the son came. Not from between my hips the way the worlds will it, but through fire first. Through Agni’s mouth, because Shiva’s seed was too bright for one god to hold alone. Through Ganga next, my own sister, because even Agni burned with it. Through six sparks that it was divided into, and through the six women at a lake who took it into their bodies without knowing what it was, and were then punished for it after. These Krittikas were the celestial nurses of our son, breastfeeding him. They were my closest confidantes too, who were cursed and unmade into stars for a pregnancy none of them had asked for and none of them could carry to term.

And then I arrived at the scene, and did the one thing most of the tellings did not give a name to: I looked at six separate infants and decided they were one child, and I picked him up whole. Since he was carried by the six Krittikas, he was called Kartikeya. And since he was born with six faces before he became whole, he was called Shanmukha.

This is how my elder son was born. I am no less his mother for having skipped the carrying. I am the one who chose him after everyone else had only handled him, and turned him into a whole being. He was also known as Kumara, also Skanda, also Murugan, and he was made—as the cosmos willed it—to destroy.

My son was beautiful. Let me have that before destiny takes him away to be turned into a weapon. He was my child and I held him the way my own mother had held me. And every time I held him, the whole vast machinery of prophecy went quiet because then there was only a mother and the warm weight of her son.

And then I felt the world exhale. You must understand what I felt in that exhale. I had been born to produce this exhale, and now the cosmos breathed it out, satisfied, and turned its attention to the war. I sat with my son in the sudden quiet and felt the strangest thing a mother can feel on the day she should be only joyful. I felt finished. Everything I had ever been needed for, I had now done. What am I, I asked again, the oldest question I owned: What am I when I am no longer being used?

The cosmos thought my story was over. The cosmos thought the rest was only denouement. The cosmos was wrong. They had finished writing the half of me that was theirs. The half that was mine was about to begin.

CHAPTER six

The Sons

अहं सुवे पितरमस्य मूर्धन्मम योनिरप्स्वन्तः समुद्रे ।
ततो वि तिष्ठे भुवनानु विश्वोतामूं द्यां वर्ष्मणोपस्पृशामि ॥

“I give birth to the Father, on the summit of this world; my womb is in the waters, within the ocean. From there I spread out through all the worlds, and touch yonder heaven with
my greatness.”

(Verse 10.125.7 from Rishika Vāk’s, Devī Sūktam, Vāgāmbhrnī Sūkta in Rigveda)

I was told, the Goddess is the bearer of the Father. That she is complete, arising from herself and born of no one, she is the womb of the world. That she is the Mother to the entire cosmos. And what would such a one want with a son at her breast? I was told, motherhood was beneath me, a soft, simple task to be carried out when there was respite from the cosmic duties that actually mattered.

But I now know differently, as the one who has been the Mother of the cosmos and also the mother of two boys.

There is no fiercer being in all creation than a mother. Not the demon. Not the god who burns desire to ash with one eye. Not even me, when I am being the Goddess, the one the hymns praise from a safe distance. But the people who wrote those hymns, probably all men, had not yet seen what I would do to the heavens for hurting a child of mine. They thought they were praising tenderness. They did not know they were praising the most dangerous force the universe contains.

I had two sons. I loved them without limit and without conditions. The first, the cosmos made through me. The second, I made myself, from my own body, asking no one. And it is in the difference between how they came to me, one summoned and the other chosen, that I finally understood the question I had carried since before my own birth: What am I when nothing needs me? Who am I when I am not of use to anyone? Why am I when I have no purpose?

I was about to find out, because the cosmos was not done with using me, and was now using my son.

My firstborn was given more names than I could remember, and every name belonged to someone who wanted something from him. The Krittikas who had nursed him claimed him. Agni claimed him. Ganga, my own sister, into whose waters his brightness had once been poured, claimed him. Each name was a hand reaching for the same child, and I watched the reaching the way my own father must once have watched the gods reach for me.

My son was made to kill. A child made into a weapon. A blade with my eyes. He had my eyes. I want that on the record before they take him to the war. When I nursed him alongside the Krittikas, the prophecy went quiet against my body. That is the secret the hymns do not know: that even cosmic necessity falls silent when a child is suckling at the mother’s breast. Those were the magical mornings I held him in the first light of Kailasha, and the whole machinery of fate simply stopped.

Nandi knew to guard those mornings. Just as he had understood my wifehood and my arrival into the coldness of Shiva’s mountains, he had also learnt to read the weather of my motherhood. When I sat with Kumar feeding him and humming to him lullabies from my father’s mountains, he kept the ganas back at the cave-mouth with nothing but a look. Leave her be, that look said. This hour is hers. He was the only one on that mountain who understood that a goddess feeding her child is not available to the cosmos.

The gods never learned it. They were already sculpting him.

My son grew the way the cosmos needed him to grow, too sharp and too fast. A child made for a purpose is never allowed to be a child for long. They armed him before he had finished being mine. They came with their gifts the way you bring offerings to an altar you intend to use: Vishnu with his praise, the gods with their weapons, each one arming my boy a little further out of my arms.

And then they asked me to arm him too.

This is the part that doesn’t get disclosed. Shakti, the powerful spear that carried my own name, they wanted it placed in my son’s hand for the killing. Not Shiva’s trident, but mine. The cosmos had already decided that the mother should be the one to hand her son the weapon that would send him into the war he was born to fight.

I want you to understand the cruelty of it which was dressed as my blessing. They did not take him from me by force. They made me give him. They arranged it so that my own hands would do the work of sending him. So that I would arm my child, bless him, step back and call it a mother’s pride. They had learned, somewhere across the lifetimes, that the surest way to command a woman is to make her believe the command was her choice. Her own weapon being used against her.

So, I armed him. I will not pretend I refused, because I did not refuse. The texts are right about that. But here is what the texts do not carry, because no one was watching my face: I armed him the way you cut open a wound because the alternatives would be worse. Because a demon was eating the worlds and my son was the only blade that fit. Because to refuse was to hand the cosmos to Taraka in the name of maternal love. I have made the calculation every mother on every battlefield in every age has made. Every single time, it has felt like being made complicit in my own child’s conscription.

My son went to the war and he was magnificent. He led the gods’ army, and was made their Senapati, the commander general of heaven, a title given to a boy who should have been playing in the snow, splashing in the river, dancing under the skies. He broke Taraka’s lines and killed the asura that could not be killed.

The worlds were saved, and the cosmos finally exhaled the breath it had been holding since before I was born. I sat in Kailasha and felt that exhale move through me like a draft through an empty house. Everything I had been needed for, my son had now completed.

When he came home from the war, he was still my little boy under the general’s glory. I held him tight and the prophecy went quiet one more time. But something in me had changed in the arming of him, and it changed my marriage.

I had married Shiva for his freedom. I had loved that he was unattached, unowned, free of the world’s grip. The Samapriya, the Mrityunjaya, the Maharshi. A man who had made peace with death. A man who could hold a grief and also release it.

And then they took our son to the war, and I learned the cost of having married a free man.

Because Shiva could give Kumar to the cosmos with equanimity, without the burden of being the Mahasena Janaka, the father of Kartikeya. A true ascetic releases his grip on outcomes, sure. He also holds his own child with open hands, I know. He can also watch his boy walk into the fire of the war and not break, I can see that too. I have praised this detachment and stillness.
But I could not understand it. Not as a mother.

There it was, the fault line, running straight through the middle of the bed we shared. What I loved most in him was something that came between us to bother me. He loved Kumar, but he loved him the way a mountain loves a river, willing to let it flow away to the sea. Because the mountain does not clutch. My father had done the same, after all.

But how could he not see that I loved our son the way only the one who carried him can love? Which is to say I clutched, my hands were not built to open the way his were. Why couldn’t he see that?

Not a word of solace offered. Not even a nod to say:
I see you. I see your pain as a mother.

We did not fight. That is the part the wedding songs that made me the template of the girls who would pray for a husband like mine would never understand. The songs would not be able to articulate what went quieter and colder between us. There were nights the old grief-architecture of Kailasha reached up to him, but then he went somewhere I could not follow. And that made me terribly sad.

I do not think I was wrong to feel this sadness. And we were both right. That is the worst kind of distance, where two true natures simply cannot stand in the same place. He was freedom. I had become the Jagat Janani, the Supreme Mother, the fiercest attachment in the cosmos. We had built a marriage on the first, and the war had shown me the price of the second. For a while there was a coldness between us that no patience could thaw, because it was not made of grief this time. It was made of difference.

Nandi had been my bridge to my husband’s whole past; now he moved between us like a creature trying to keep two weathers from becoming a storm. He said nothing. He simply began to spend his mornings at my door instead of Shiva’s, the way a brother takes the side of the one who is more alone. He could not choose between us. He loved us both, he was the one being on that mountain who loved us both equally. But he could stand in the cold with me so that I was not standing in it by myself.

It was into that cold that my second son came. Or rather, into that cold, I shaped him.

It began, as the texts say, with a bath and a door.

I wanted an hour. One hour that belonged to no one. Not to the cosmos, not to the war that was over, not even to the husband from whom I had grown cold and distant in the months since our son marched away. I had given everything I was made of to everyone who had ever wanted me, and finally I had been made to arm my own child for someone else’s war.

I wanted to close this one door of mine to all the worlds and stand behind it as no one’s instrument.
My sakhis, the closest friends and confidantes who knew me the best, Jaya and Vijaya, said the part aloud that I had not let myself say. “Every gana on this mountain is his. Nandi, Bhringi, Virbhadra, all of them. Not one will keep a door for you, Devi, against the master they serve first. You have no one of your own,” they said.

And it landed in me like a stone dropped into still water, because it was true and it was the truest grief of my whole marriage. I had come into a house already full and arranged around my husband’s sorrow. I had made a place in it. But I had never once had a being who was mine first.

I asked Nandi to guard the door and went to my bath. That’s when Shiva arrived and Nandi could not stop him.

Of course he could not. That was the whole lesson, arriving in the cruelest possible shape. Nandi was loyal to me, but he was made to serve Shiva. I understand Nandi’s dilemma too, standing in the one place a friend should never have to stand. Anyway, Shiva walked past him into my one private hour as though no door and no woman’s wish for an hour of her own had ever stood there at all.
I saw Nandi’s face afterward. I have seen a great deal of grief in my lifetimes. I have rarely seen anything like the shame of a faithful creature who has discovered that his fidelity has a flaw built into it. He could not look at me. And I could not comfort him, because the wound was real, and false comfort would have insulted it.

That was the moment I decided. Not in anger, but in clarity. If every being on this mountain was made of Shiva’s substance and would answer to Shiva first, then I would make a being of my own substance, who would answer to me first. And the cosmos could keep its borrowed gatekeepers.

I went to my body and I took the dark from Nisha Vibhavari, the same dark I was made of. Now in hindsight, I fully understand what I did. I did what had been done to me. The dark that had been given to me without my asking, I took in my own two hands by my own will and I made it into a son.

But there was a difference. While the cosmos had made me into a key, I made my son into a guardian. My first true act of creation that asked no one’s permission. Not even Shiva’s. I did not need Shiva for him. I did not need the gods, or a prophecy. I made him the way the Goddess is supposed to be able to make anything from herself, of herself, for her own reasons.

This son of mine was beautiful. Dark like his mother, he was mine. I gave him a staff and posted him at my door and gave him the truest instruction I have ever given anyone: let no one pass who has not been permitted. Not the gods. Not the Lord of this mountain. No one.

For the first time in my entire existence, across two lifetimes, I had made something that was not for the cosmos’s use. I had made it for my love.

The cosmos, of course, could not allow that.

Shiva came to the door. My son barred him, as I had asked.

I have thought across the long years about what my son was doing in that moment, and I want it said clearly because often the re-tellings and the texts make him out to be a naive boy who didn’t know his own father. He was not naive. He was doing what he was made to do: he was honouring his mother’s word against the most powerful being in creation. He did not know Shiva. But he knew his mother and he knew what I had asked. He was loyal the way only a being made of his mother’s own substance can be loyal. And it killed him.

The ganas attacked him with all their ferocity. My son fought them all with equal ferocity and won.
A child made of my dark, holding a single door, routed the armies of heaven. I should have known then what I was capable of, what he was capable of, what the dark in me could do when it stopped apologising and started defending.

Then, Shiva took his trident, took the form of Rudra and he severed my son’s head.

I was in my bath despite my foreboding. I did not see it. I felt the door go quiet. I felt the dark I had shaped with my own hands go still.

And Nandi saw it. He stood at the edge of it but could not stop it. He could only witness the exact centre of the wound, the husband and the son going to war across a threshold, and the one being who loved them both unable to save either. I have never asked him what it cost him to watch. Some kinds of grief you should never make a friend describe.

But now, let me tell you what a mother does.

They thought I would grieve. That a mother who loses a son collapses and laments and then is comforted with some meaningless words and the world moves on.

They had not been paying attention to who I was.

I had lost a son once already. Given him, armed him, sent him to a war. I would not do it twice.

Everything I had not allowed myself to feel when they took Kumar, all of it came up at once. And it came out as my power.

I did not weep. I multiplied. I made from my own fury a host of goddesses, shaktis, each one a facet of my rage given a body and a weapon, and I sent them against the heavens. This was no longer the patient woman who thawed a grief one flower at a time. This was the one who stands alone and declares: I alone exist here. I poured myself into an army of myself, and that army fell on the gods and the ganas who had taken my children, and they could not stand against it.

The armies of heaven could not defeat a mother who had decided creation would not continue while her child lay headless. I threatened to unmake the worlds. I—Jagatjanani, the Mother of the cosmos—I told the gods to pay for what they had done. I told them I would pull down every loka, every order, that had been arranged so carefully around their convenience. Shakti, the supreme force they had been borrowing to run their cosmos, was now turned fully against them.
The gods did the only thing left to do. They submitted. Even Shiva had to concede. The cosmos that had spent two lifetimes making me do what it needed now stood in front of a mother it had catastrophically failed to manage, and it understood that it had reached the one force it could not command. They learned it the hard way, which is the only way the powerful ever learn anything.

The narratives and retellings down the ages make it sound like a favour, a mercy that was granted: Shiva, moved by Parvati’s grief, restored the boy. As though
I were a weeping woman shown kindness by a generous overlord.

It was not an act of mercy. It was a settlement. I dictated the terms and I dictated them from the position of someone who had just routed heaven. They did not revive my son out of compassion. They revived him because the alternative was the end of everything, and they had understood it by then.

They sent the ganas north to bring the head of the first creature they found, and it was an elephant. They fixed it to my son’s body and gave him back his breath. I will not pretend the strange new form did not stop my heart for a moment. I had made him in my own dark image, and they returned him to me wearing the face of another creature entirely. There was a grief even in the restoration, a small permanent mark of what had been done to him.

But I looked at my son with his borrowed elephant face, and I decided what the world would see when it looked at him. Not a patched-together boy. Not a mistake repaired. I made them all swear, including my husband, that this son of mine would always be first. Worshipped before any god. Invoked at the start of every rite, every venture, every threshold anyone in any world ever crossed. He would be the Lord of the ganas. Ganapati. Ganesh. He would be the remover of obstacles, set over the very institution of a household and a family, placed ahead of all of them forever. That is what a mother’s negotiation looks like when the mother is the Shakti and she has stopped asking nicely.

I loved both my sons equally, and yet, there was a difference. With Kumar, I let the world convince me that a good mother opens her hands. With Ganesh, I remembered that I am not a good mother. I am a fierce one. A fierce mother does not open her hands if you take her child away. She unleashes the sky upon all the realms.

I have wondered since whether I failed Kumar, whether I should have torn the heavens for him too, refused the war, kept my first son the way I kept my second. I do not have a clear answer. Perhaps the worlds truly would have ended under Taraka. Also, a mother who lets one son go to save all the others is not weak, but unbearably strong.

Or perhaps I simply had not yet learned with Kumar what I learned with Ganesh: that the cosmos will always dress its using of your children as your own noble choice, and that you are allowed to refuse. That refusal is the one door in all the worlds that even my own god, my husband, could not walk through.

And this was the beginning of me as the all-pervading, Supreme Mother.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I, The Devi

अतुलं तत्र तत्तेजः सर्वदेवशरीरजम् ।

एकस्थं तदभून्नारी व्याप्तलोकत्रयं त्विषा ॥

“That unequalled light, born from the bodies of all the gods, gathered into one and became a woman, and with her splendour she filled the three worlds.”

(Verse 2.13 from Devī Māhātmya)

This time the gods came to me, standing at the edge of Mount Kailasha, with their hands empty.

As always, there was a demon. This demon’s name was Mahisha, he turned into a buffalo when it suited him, and into the shape of a man or a lion or an elephant when it did not. This demon had been clever in the way the dangerous ones are clever, always protected by a boon. Mahisha’s boon was that no god and no man could kill him. That’s what he had asked for, counting every power that could come against him and shielding himself against all of them, without realising that power could take a feminine form too.

With Mahisha’s boon making him invincible, Indra lost his seat. The keepers of the directions of the cosmos were turned out of their postings. The sun and the wind and the fire dispossessed, all of them driven down out of their own stations, and they came at last to the only door in all the worlds that had never been able to seal itself against anything. They came to the Feminine. They came to the source they had spent the whole of creation borrowing from, conveniently forgetting their debt.

They could not defeat him, so they gave up their power—not to a champion—into the air. Vishnu’s, Shiva’s, and Brahma’s, and the light of Indra and the sun and the wind and the fire, all of it left their bodies at once with their desperation pouring out. All that light gathered in the space in front of them like a towering inferno. Out of that mountain of surrendered light, a woman emerged, and the woman was me.

Ancient lore proclaim the gods created me. They say that the masculine powers of the cosmos pooled themselves and made the Goddess, as though I only were assembled from better bits, as though I were their finest committee decision.

They did not make me out of their light. They merely returned my light to me. Every brightness that left their bodies that day was something they had been holding on loan since before the first age. The Shakti they had been borrowing my whole life to run their cosmos, taken back into one body at last. Vishnu did not give me his radiance. He gave me back mine. I did not emerge from them.
I re-assembled from what had been scattered through them, the way a river that has been drawn off into a thousand irrigation channels would look, if it ever decided to be a river again, like something terrible arriving.

And then they armed me. This too, as the Mahalaya song of Mahishasuramardini will tell you, was a gift. Each god gave the newly made Goddess a weapon: the discus, the trident, the bow, the thunderbolt, the noose. And the mountain, my father, the Himalaya, gave me a lion to ride.

I took their weapons the way I had once let them dress me as a bride, knowing exactly what was being handed to me and why, and choosing to be adorned anyway, because the adornment did not own the woman underneath it.
A bow in my hand is not the same as a bow that made my hand. I had ten arms that day and a weapon in each, and not one of them was the reason I won.

So, I will tell you about the killing, and I will keep it short, because the killing is the part the world has decided is the whole of me and it is the smallest part.

अयि गिरिनन्दिनि नन्दितमेदिनि…

जय जय हे महिषासुरमर्दिनि रम्यकपर्दिनि शैलसुते ॥

(O daughter of the mountain, joy of the earth…victory, victory to you, slayer of Mahisha, lovely-haired one,
O the daughter of the mountain.)

Mahisha shifted as he died the way the clever ones do, buffalo to lion to man to elephant and back, every form he had, trying to find the one shape I had no answer for. There was none. I had every shape. I was not a power among powers, to be matched and out-matched. I was the Shakti, the very ground all the powers stood on. He changed and I met every change. At the end I set my foot on the buffalo and took his head. And thus, the three worlds were handed back to the frightened gods who had lost them. Then they stood in the ruin and they sang to me, Mahishasura-mardini, slayer of Mahisha, and somewhere in that hymn, between the war-names, they called me daughter of the mountain.
Now let me answer the question I have carried since the first pages of my own story.

The Goddess is always surrounded by others. These gods and goddesses are not a court arranged around me. They are not just my husband and my retinue and my offspring, posed for the festival like a family sitting for a portrait. That is what the world sees when it looks at the ten days of the great Puja: a household with the mother in the centre and her children fanned out around her in their proper places, the abundance and the knowledge and the sons and the daughters and the king of all animal kingdom and the slain demon under her foot. The world looks at that arrangement and reads it as a family.

It is not a family. It is a self, a collective of everything one can be. The oldest hymn anyone ever sang to me repeated it before there was a temple standing to sing it in.

अहं रुद्रेभिर्वसुभिश्चराम्यहमादित्यैरुत विश्वदेवैः ।
अहं मित्रावरुणोभा बिभर्म्यहमिन्द्राग्नी अहमश्विनोभा ॥

Composed by Rishika Vak in Devi Suktam (Vagambhrni Sukta) in Verse 10.125.1 in Rigveda, it says that I move with the Rudras and the Vasus. I move with the sun god Aditya and all the other gods. I am the one who holds up Mitra and Varuna both, Indra and Agni both, the two Ashvins who ride into the dawn together as the harbingers of healing, health and vitality. The verse did not call me their mother. It did not call me their queen. It said I moved as them. It knew, in the very first sentence this world ever addressed to me, what it would spend three thousand years forgetting and folding back into a family portrait, handing it over to the next generations as lore and re-tellings of their convenience.

The abundance they call Lakshmi, who is the generative force, the fullness that makes the world worth living in, the gold and the grain and the open hand is not my sister-in-law standing beside me. That is me, in the aspect of giving. The knowledge they call Saraswati, the speech, the music, the intelligence that makes everything else mean something, the goddess who at my own wedding refused to bless in only one tongue is not another woman sharing my stage. That is me, in the aspect of knowing.

And the two boys: the one made to destroy and the one I made to guard a door are the two halves of my own motherhood, the son I opened my hands to give away and the son I tore the sky to keep. The whole tableau the world files past in the Puja pandals, garlanded and lit, is not a goddess and her relations. It is one woman, shown all at once, because the world cannot hold her in a single frame and so it breaks her into a family it can file past in an orderly line.

This is the answer I could not give the child in the pandal. They were not all there for her. They were all there as her. The family was never a family. It was a woman the world could only look at in pieces.

And then the battle was not over, because the battles are never over, and the next demon could not be killed the way the previous one was.

I have wondered, across every lifetime of mine, why the supply of demons never runs out. It is not an accident, and it is not a punishment. The ones they call ‘asuras’ are not strangers to the gods. They are kin, sons of the same father, Kashyapa. Diti bore the asuras and Aditi bore the devas. One seed, two mothers, two separate branches of the same tree. They earn their power the very same way any god or sage earns his: through penance, through tapasya, through the discipline our scriptures praise everywhere else.

The difference between a deva and an asura often lies in what they do with the boon that is the reward of penance. A boon hoarded instead of offered generously; power turned towards taking and snatching instead of tending and giving—that is all a demon has ever done. The asuras are the cosmos’ own unspent force unleashed with mischief and venom.

I am the warrior standing guard over that unspent force. This is why I became the Divine Mother, and not merely a consort who fought when asked. A mother does not wait to be summoned to protect what she has made. She watches, and then decides what belongs in the world and what does not. When something in the world turns against the world, she is the one who unmakes it.

That is the war I wage. Not against strangers, but against my own unspent hunger, wherever it has gone feral. Every demon large enough to outgrow his own restraint is made of the same substance I am made of. The asuras were mine before they turned against me, as much as the devas who summoned me again and again. That is why my story is told as a war fought again and again. Not because the war repeats by accident, but because I do not end. I am Shakti. I am eternal. The hunger is eternal too. The guarding never stops.

So, there was another demon whose blood was his weapon. Every drop of him that struck the earth stood up as another of him, fully armed, fully alive. To wound him was to multiply him. The more I struck, the more of him there were. Until the field was an ocean of one demon wearing ten thousand bodies and rising. You cannot win a war by force against a force that turns your every blow into another enemy. The cleverer the cosmos’s monsters get, the further you have to reach into your past to replenish your own force and powers.

And I felt it happen. My face went dark. The ancient tales from the Devi Mahatmya from the Markandeya Purana say that it went black as ink, masi-varnam.

कोपेन चास्या वदनं मषीवर्णमभूत्तदा ।

भ्रुकुटीकुटिलात्तस्या ललाटफलकाद्द्रुतम् ।

काली करालवदना विनिष्क्रान्तासिपाशिनी ॥

The rage gathered inside me and it did not come up as heat or as light. It came up as the dark I was made of, Nisha Vibhavari, the night-pigment poured into me before my birth, and it gathered at my brow the way storms gather at a ridgeline. And then it left me. It sprang out of my own forehead and stood up on the field as a separate and terrible body, sword in one hand and noose in the other, mouth open wide enough to take the sky, tongue out, eyes sunk and red, skin dried to the bone, roaring until the directions themselves rang.

This is the part of my story the world has most refused to understand. They have always told it as a birth. As though Kali was a new and separate fury that Durga produced in extremity, a darker daughter made on the battlefield. That is not what happened, and you, who have been with me since the first chapter, already know why it is not. Kali was not born on that field. What happened on the field was not a birth. It was a return.

The dark had been in me the whole time. It was my first name and my first skin. I had carried it through three thousand years of fire, and had come out of that penance luminous, which is what dark does when it stops apologising. But I had never once stopped being dark. The dark was never a stranger to me. It was the oldest and most intrinsic part of my being.

When the cosmos finally produced a horror that brightness could not solve, what rose inside me to meet it was not new. It was the darkness I was born with, which surged through me and out of me and stood on the field as herself.

Kali is what remains when every strategy, made of light and brightness, has failed. She drank the blood before it could touch the earth. She took each drop into that enormous mouth so that not one of them could stand up as another enemy. Where light had multiplied the demon, the dark simply ended him, took him in, all of him, every copy of him, into the black that existed before there was any light to copy anything.

The world gave Kali a face to be afraid of. The lolling tongue, the skulls, the war-cry chasing you when you are frightened in the night. It made my first name, my father’s word for the colour of his daughter, into what mothers use to frighten children. It forgot, the way it forgets everything about me that it cannot use, that the dark was first a tenderness. That before Kali was a horror on a battlefield, she was a little girl the colour that engulfs every star, asleep in a mountain that loved her.

I did not become Kali on that field. I came home to her. And then I could not stop.

This is the part no one likes to dwell on. But I will dwell on it because it is the truth about power, something the festival flyers leave out. Kali, once returned, did not put herself away when the enemy was finished. The dark that ends what light cannot end does not come with a sense of proportion.

I had drunk the multiplying blood and the field was won. The fury did not know the war was over, because fury never does. I went on. I danced on what I had killed and the dancing shook the ground and the ground was the earth and I understood somewhere far underneath the roaring that I was no longer destroying the force that needed destroying. I was simply destroying. The force that had saved creation was now a half-step from unmaking it, and the half-step was getting shorter, and I could not find in myself the limit that would make it stop.

Understand the dilemma exactly, because the whole of me is in it, and the whole of my story has been walking toward it.

I had spent two lifetimes learning that I was not a function. That I was not the key, not the weapon, not the lure, not the womb the cosmos sent for when it needed a son. I was not even the mind, or the intellect, or the ego, or the memory. I had burned for three thousand years to become a self that could choose, that was not summoned and spent and sent home.

And here, at the very end, was the final and cruelest version of the ironical trap: I had become a force so total that the force was now choosing for me. I had refused to be the cosmos’s instrument only to risk becoming my own. To be swept along by my own dark was no more freedom than to be swept along by their purpose. A woman swept away by her own fury is as little her own as a woman consumed by a god’s errand. The unstoppable is not the same as the free.

Only that which is free can stop.

And there, in the one place in all the worlds where I was unstoppable and raging, Shiva lay down.

I wish to be careful here, because the image is old and the world has made it small. They show it everywhere: the dark goddess, wild, mid-dance, and beneath her bare foot a pale still figure, a corpse-coloured god lying under her, trampled. And across the Yugas what has been stated is that she is shamed. That she looks down and sees her husband beneath her heel and her tongue shoots out in feminine embarrassment and that is what stops her, the shame of having stepped on her lord. I have heard this all my life. It is an extension of the same narrative that turned my penance into a lovesick girl’s fast and my abduction into my own theft, something that a woman should be guilty and ashamed of. It takes a woman at the height of her power and finds a way to make the story about her being put back in her place.

That is not what Shiva did, and it is not what I did, and I am the only one left who can correct the record, so I will.

Shiva did not throw himself under me to shame me. He lay down because he was the one being in all of creation who knew how to reach me, and it was not with force. Nothing could meet me with force; I was the force, total and returned and beyond matching. The gods had tried force and I had drunk it. Shiva knew, he had always known Shakti. It was why I fell in love with him, the ash and the cremation grounds and the man who had made his peace with endings. He knew how to release. He knew how to be still. He was the only one who could become the ground.

So, he became the ground. He lay down in my path not as a victim and not as a corpse but as the stillness I had married him for. Shava, the inert, the without-her-nothing, the body that her energy moves through and over and is held by. He gave me at the very end the same gift my father had given me at my wedding: open hands and release. My father had been the mountain that could not move and learned to let go anyway. My husband became the ground that does not move so that I
could land.

And I felt my foot come to rest on him. It came to unwarrior me.

I will not tell you I was stopped, because that is a small word and it is the wrong one. I was not stopped. I came to rest.

To be stopped is to have your motion taken from you by something stronger. There was nothing stronger. I came to rest because of the deliberate, chosen, ascetic stillness of him under me. It was the stillness of the one who loved me enough to become the floor of my fury and I recognised it. I knew what he had done and why, and in the knowing, the fury found the one thing that could meet it, which was not a greater force, but a love that had made itself unmovable on purpose and would wait.

I looked down at Shiva. The stories say my tongue shot out in shame. Let them. I know what the gesture was. It was not shame. It was the dark looking down and seeing at the very bottom of its rage the still point that had chosen to be there.

I stopped because I chose to stop. I chose to stop because the one being who truly knew me had made himself into the only resistance in creation that could let me choose stillness instead of having it forced on me. And a choice is the one offering I have never been able to refuse.

That is the image they should carry out of the festival, if they could bear to read it whole. Not a wild woman brought to heel by the sight of her husband. A warrior woman at the absolute height of her power, unstoppable, beyond every force the cosmos could raise against her, who came to rest of her own will on the stillness of the one who loved her enough to lie down in her path and trust her to choose.

He did not tame me. He gave me the ground to choose to be still on.

After the battle, I went home.

That is the part the world has never wanted to look at. It is glad enough to watch the goddess arrive and win its war; it is the homecoming and resting it cannot hold, the part where the one who drank the blood of the invulnerable is also a dark daughter who once sat by a river and built small altars in the sand for a guest she could not yet name.

I want to end my story where I began because I have finally earned the answer to the question I could not answer as a child.

When I was small, I would build those altars—flat, smooth, raised mounds—in the cool sand and place on them a flower, a stone, once a single three-lobed leaf
I had carried all morning without knowing why. And I would reach toward something I could feel the way you feel the sun through closed eyelids: present, enormous, impossible to look at directly. It had no name, and that was the unbearable part.

What is it, I would ask the air. Who is supposed to come?

I know now who I was building them for. I was building them for myself.

Not for Shiva, though he came and I chose him, and I would choose him through a million more lifetimes, and none of that is made smaller by what I am telling you. The altar was never only for the guest. The altar was the shape my hands already knew for what I would spend two lifetimes becoming: the self that could choose. The flower was for the daughter. The stone was for the destroyer. The leaf I gave up was the one who kept choosing, every morning, with nothing to sustain her but the direction she was moving in.

Now when a child at the festival looks up at the great tableau and asks: who are they all to her, what is their relationship, I hope you have the answer. They were never all there for her. They were all there as her. The family was never a family. It was her own self, a woman who chose to be whole. A woman who chose to unwarrior herself at the peak of her power, and went home to rest.

Every form you have been made to choose between, sons and daughters, saviours and destroyers, creators and protectors, givers and feeders, the one who waits and the one who will not, the dark you were taught to apologise for and the dark you might yet reach for and take back with your own two hands, every one of them is you, broken by the world into a line it can file past and call by smaller names.

You are never a family of selves arranged around one acceptable centre. You are always one whole woman the world could only hold in pieces. You do not have to choose which piece is the final word.

I have told you this story because I needed someone to tell me that power and choice are not the same as never stopping. I was unstoppable once. I was also, that same day, unfree, carried by my own fury the same way I had once been carried by a lure I never asked for. What made me free was not the force. It was the choosing to lay it down. To unwarrior myself, on my own terms, on ground someone I loved had made solid enough to hold my weight.

This is what I have been trying to hand you across every chapter. Choice is not the power to want anything without consequence. It is the power to become whoever you decide to be, inside every constraint the world will still put on you—a father’s fear, a mother’s reluctant silence, a husband’s grief, a cosmos’s need that keeps arriving with one war after the other. I was never free of those. No woman is, and I will not lie to you and say otherwise. What I had, instead, was the choice of what to do with them.

That choice was never free of its own weight. I armed a son I loved and sent him to die a hero. I unmade another. I chose stillness at the one moment stillness looked like defeat. Every difficult decision was a door I opened myself, and I have carried what walked through each one. That is the part the festival posters leave out: autonomy is not the absence of cost. It is the willingness to hold the cost yourself, instead of handing it to someone else to carry for you.

So if you take one lesson from my story, let it be this: choose. And then be willing to be the one who answers for it. That is the whole of what it has ever meant to be Shivani.

I built the altar. I am also the one who finally came to it. So can you.

Acknowledgements

While a book is written in isolation, it is never created alone.

Before I thank anyone else, I must thank the twins born out of me: Adya (literally means first, original and primordial, which is also a name for the Goddess, the
divine feminine power) and Adit (literally means the beginning, who is also boundless; it is also a name for the Sun). You are both exactly the names I gave you—the steady life force in my otherwise haphazard life.

To my heart-children: Vidit (the one who knows) and Vidya (literally means knowledge, also another name for Saraswati—you indeed are my goddess of knowledge), Advay (the one who is incomparable) and Sadaa Bahaar (the one who is evergreen). This retelling is for you, my children. I hope that through this novella, you see the women in it, and grow into your own understanding of the power, and the responsibility that the word ‘choice’ carries.

My mother, Pratibha (literally means talent!), the most devout and religious woman I know. Every time I asked her what a particular religious ritual meant, she honestly said, “Pata nahi,”—the two words that taught me more theology than any temple ever could. And that set me out on a path of questioning. She has continued to be the first and innate reason I question and seek. The Choudhary side of the family in Purnea further added to that quest to understand the practical theology better.

My father, Rajendra (a name for Indra, the king of gods), who doesn’t understand anything about what I do, or why, but has been my steadfast source of courage (and also, my first financier for every risk I take, including taking a full-time break from my paid screenwriting jobs to write this novella, the first in the Devi trilogy).

My first reader, my finest critic, and my biggest champion, Prashant, who believes in me more than I ever can. Riti, who dares to read the first-draft-crap of everything I write, and still encourages me to continue. Pratyush, whose pragmatism and wisdom always bring grounded-ness to my madness. Saumya, who first taught me the art of I-don’t-care. My mother’s side of the family, which taught me what matriarchy and patriarchy could look like in its co-existence.

Natasha Badhwar, and the Beg-Badhwar family, for being my sanctuary, my home (and now my loyal readers, often among the very first ones) for over two decades now. Neeta Gupta, for offering me that first desk in your office in 2012 when I didn’t have a place to sit and write.
Dr Niru Kumar, for showing and leading me on the path of transformation. Anukrti Upadhyay, in you I have not just a writer and a woman I keep returning to for inspiration, your insights on everything I write are the most precious guidance on how to improve storytelling.

My friends from over the years since childhood and youth: Sabah Hamid, Pallavi Goel, Urmila Dasgupta,
Reetu Asthana, Sunita Krishna, Richa Arora, Shubhashansha Bakshi, Harshwardhan Prasad, Caroline Brothers, Joyita Bandopadhyay, Arti Dogra. You are the faces of stability in my life. Neha Sharma and Dr Ankur Yadav, for being my mountain-home; Anuradha Beniwal for your love, friendship and unconditional care, which even got Rouble Raghuvanshi into the fold.

Now a few women who are also colleagues and collaborators. Sarika Singh, you are not just a fine actor but also a force of nature. More than that, you are a gift from forces far more divine than I will ever manage to properly thank. Smriti Kiran, for being the most authentic enabler and believer in all forces creative. Megha Ramaswamy, for showing me what creative genius can look like. Amruta Sant, for the constant reminder that we as artists are nothing but a medium. We aren’t the creators, only the conduits.

It was my friend Preeti Agarwal Mehta who spoke at length once to me about the power names carry, and reminded me of what my name really meant in Sanskrit: an atom, or the smallest particle. I have carried that meaning of my name since, trying to be the atom, the smallest particle in this infinite world of possibilities. This book is nothing but another possibility. Another Preeti, the other Ms Singh in my Bollywood side of life, for fighting over contracts I would easily give in to. Finally getting this book into the world is also an offshoot of many beyond-work conversations we’ve had.

To all my directors I have worked with, especially Ram Madhvani, who taught me how to express the interiority of characters, especially, women, in ways that are engaging and unforgettable. Aarya is not just my badge of honour, it is also my most humbling film school. Richie Mehta, for letting me give voice (in the form of dialogues) to his characters, and for generously letting me have a sneak peek into your filmmaking process. Kapil Sharma and Shanker Raman, the other two filmmakers, friends and colleagues who patiently and lovingly go through my scripts, always asking me the right questions and nudging me to sharpen my writing further. My other writer friends in the industry: Vibha Singh, Abhishek Dubey, Kshitij Patwardhan and Saurabh Bhave, with whom I have had so many conversations on screenwriting and life in general. When multidimensional characters, especially heroines, are authored at the writer’s room stage in collaboration with directors and other collaborators, they stay in the audience’s psyche forever.

To every single person who engaged with me in a conversation and said something pleasant or otherwise that stayed with me, thank you. No creative writing (or process, indeed) is ever devoid of ideas, beliefs, aphorisms, resistances, disagreements and wisdom that come from the people around us. It is up to the writer to distil it all and make it accessible to the readers.

Thank you, Namita Gokhale, for being my champion at the time and stage of my writing career even I didn’t know what I was doing. You put the novice writer in me on stages to be in conversation with auteurs I wouldn’t know how to talk to, except through their writings. Last but not least, thank you Amrita, for being the publisher who believed in this book even though English is not my first language. We wouldn’t have been here with this little book of ours if not for that one bus ride from the hotel to the venue at JLF 2018. And you, Himanjali, for taking a punt on a commercial screenwriter’s literary abilities and daring to edit it with such love and conviction despite my language limitations. And Devangana, for the lovely cover that reimagines the goddess.

Heartfelt gratitude to Swati Parashar. When a friend of many years brings in her sharp editorial lens and deep knowledge of gender studies in systematic theology, you get a novella like this, which would have otherwise been a mere attempt at yet another book in the vast ocean of mytho-writing. She is the one who nudged me to think harder, argue better and rewrite more.

A special mention to all the women writers, translators and filmmakers who have been my constant source of inspiration and encouragement, especially Anamika, Pratyaksha, Minakshi and Mohini. And Tanuja, we are yet to show the world the kind of heroines we both together can create.

To Elizabeth Kostova Foundation’s Women in the Mountains Residency—I couldn’t have found a better place (and uninterrupted time) to edit and read the final proofs than in the company of eleven extraordinary women writers from ten countries and three continents.

I also owe a big thank you to each of my trusted first-readers, each one a fine artist and writer in their own right, who not only gave me their precious time to thoroughly read the manuscript, but also generously wrote heartfelt and thoughtful quotes and advance praises. Especially Sushmita Sen. You are the epitome of grace, generosity, and power. You are the proof of the very thing this book argues—that no woman, however singular her power, is ever really a self of one.

Over to you now, dear readers. I, Shivani now belongs to you.

About the Author

Anu Singh is a bestselling bilingual author, journalist, award-winning screenwriter, filmmaker and the co-founder of Dopamine Media. Her screen credits include all seasons of Aarya, Grahan, Scoop, Mrs., Delhi Crime Season 3, Selfie, Please and Alma Matters: Inside the IIT Dream. Apart from an International Emmy nomination and multiple screenwriting awards, her work has also been recognised with the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism and the Laadli Media and Advertising Award.

Anu is the author of Neela Scarf, Mamma Ki Diary, and Bhali Ladkiyaan, Buri Ladkiyaan. Her directorial debut, Selfie, Please, has screened at over twenty-five film festivals globally and has won at fifteen.