Roberto Calasso - Ka

The Dakṣa household looked like an aviary. Sixty daughters and even more maids. Just one man, the austere father, immersed in his rites. There was an air of expectancy, preparations for the party, whisperings that some powerful ṛṣis , were already on their way, from the Himālaya, from the banks of the Sindhu and the Sarasvatī. The maids brought word of the suitors, who was the most handsome, who the strongest, who the most rigorous at tapas . Even King Soma was expected, from the moon. Dakṣa knew perfectly well, having spent a long time over the matter, which daughter was destined for which ṛṣi . Everything was going ahead according to plan. But behind the habitual severity, there was a shadow in his eyes. All the time, obsessively, Dakṣa was thinking of just one of his daughters, the one he’d always watched, and not just with a father’s affection either, the only one he would speak to, at night, when all the other women slept: Satī, She-who-is.

It had been difficult, indeed tortuous, to bring Satī into the world. She-who-is, she who would one day become the concretion of reality, seemed unable to make her appearance. Until then, birth had never happened as a result of sex. Brahmā went on generating his born-of-the-mind children but was unable to overcome his perplexity. There was something unsatisfying about that world before the world. It began to look as though there might be another level of reality to discover: more opaque perhaps, perhaps less meaningful, but then again perhaps more appealing too. There Satī would be born — and one day the place would be called “reality” without further specification. One day everything would become so opaque that nobody would remember what had come before that level of reality. The thing now was to reach that level, by cunning. But Brahmā couldn’t act alone. He needed a minister, who would be forever the minister: Dakṣa.

Dakṣa had a long face, furrows on each side of a hooked nose, hollow cheeks, serious, protruding eyes, and a thick, pendulous lower lip. His bearing was noble, studied, severe. But he could not efface a look of animal affliction that hung around him, an invisible burden that weighed on his mind. There were moments when you might even have imagined that Dakṣa’s eyes, well practiced as they were in the art of concealment, concealed, among so much else, an intense, perhaps violent, sensuality. His features were haunted by an underlying resignation to something yet to happen, the kind of look you see in those goats who graze alone.

What was the difference between Satī and his other daughters? wondered Dakṣa. Why did the mere fact of his looking at her touch him in the only spot where he felt entirely vulnerable? She was no more beautiful than the others; just — perhaps — her face had something more serious about it. Something hidden too. And something that filled Dakṣa with amazement: a lofty sadness, for which there was no apparent reason. As if, with Satī, one sensed what the mind is like when it is internalized, concealed. Something the world knew nothing of as yet. thought Dakṣa. And he remembered the vacuous motley of his brothers, who had disappeared.

Before Satī was born, reality was less real. Dakṣa sensed that at once — and made no remark. Watching the girl grow up, he tried not to distinguish her from the other fifty-nine. But often he would feel how she followed him with her eyes, peered at him from behind doors as he celebrated the rites. Satī reminded Dakṣa of his secret. Before being a priest and the head of a family, with wife and servants, Dakṣa had been a solitary fanatic: with no experience of women, he obstinately pursued a single, never-confessed, desire: that Deví, the Goddess, she who lives in the body of Śiva, should reveal herself to him.

One day, when quite unusually he had surrendered to drowsiness, a condition akin to illness for Dakṣa, he saw the darkness grow bright and throb. There were two points of light, in the darkness: a blue lotus flower — that was what it was — and the sparkle of a blade. They moved ever so slowly: until finally Dakṣa saw the hands that held them and two other hands, unburdened in the air. Then he glimpsed the body of the Goddness. She was crouched on a lion, as if since time began that lion had been the earth. Suddenly Dakṣa felt more watchful than he had ever been. He felt the bold rashness of a warrior, something quite out of character for him. He said, “O thou, Devī, Dark One, I beg you to be born as my daughter. I beg you to find once more, through me, the one in whom you are.” Those last few words were to torment Dakṣa, for years. He knew he had spoken two sentences to the Goddness, but the second had been lost, like something spoken in a dream, though what did remain, etched in his memory, was the conviction that those words were the most important of his life. Dakṣa would never cease to search for them.

Satī’s maid curtsyed before Dakṣa and said: “Master, I feel it’s my duty to tell you that Satī, my mistress, is odd. All her sisters are passing around miniatures of the ṛṣis and King Soma — and trying to guess who will marry whom. They invent charades where they dress up as ṛṣis and play out the scenes of their future lives. They laugh — and sometimes they’re sad and cry. But Satī keeps herself to herself. While her sisters squabble, she doesn’t seem to care at all. She hasn’t tried on any new clothes. She hasn’t asked for a new makeup box. She wanders around the gardens for hours. But I know what she does there, I’ve caught her at it more than once. Satī sings — or rather she hums. And the songs are always about a dark man. His name is Śiva. Or if she doesn’t sing she draws. Always the same face, a frightening face. Or she practices tapas , something no one has taught her. Or whispers, as if there were a ghost beside her. Master, it was my duty to tell you all this.”

Dakṣa and Vīriṇī, their faces noble and time-worn, though with something gloomy about them too, an expression almost of dismay, sat by the fire after their daughters and servants had gone to bed. Dakṣa said: “This man who has come, this stranger, this woman-stealer, this enemy of our rules and rites, this wanderer who loves the ashes of the dead, who speaks of things divine to the lowest of the low, this man who sometimes seems crazy, who has something obscene about him, who grows his hair long as a girl’s, who bedecks himself with bones, who laughs and cries for no reason, why should I give my daughter Satī to him of all men, why should I give She-who-is to someone who, every time I see him, seems to me the opposite of everything I wanted to be myself, of everything I want life to be? Why did I compose so many rites, so many signs, so many words, why did I generate She-who-is, just to have everything stolen from me one day by he who is its living negation?”

When the suitor stepped forward, Dakṣa, the impeccable priest, devotee of ritual precision, considered him with contempt: he was a wild beggar, with sweaty pigtails, cloaked in the stench of the pyres. One long, strong hand held Satī’s tight, the other fiddled with a necklace of bone. Beside him, the unrecognizable Satī was barely covered by filthy rags, while her skin — Dakṣa was shocked to notice — seemed to have turned darker. Her eyes were bright and radiated happiness: shut up in her rooms, practicing tapas as a child, she had always dreamed of a man like this who would carry her off. She stroked Śiva’s blue neck, mixed her oils with the ash that covered his chest like soft armor. They set out at once for the highest mountains. They had no home, nor even shelter. The beasts welcomed them and guided them. Then left them alone.