Roberto Calasso - Ka

In a clearing in the Forest of Cedars a group of women were gathering flowers and firewood. It was early morning. They saw a man they didn’t know come out of a bush. He was half naked, his body gray with ashes, but here and there the skin showed through in streaks of gold. His hair was thick, black, plaited. He held a bowl in his hand and said not a word. All the women turned to look at him. In the silence the man bared his teeth, which were terrifying. Then he began to laugh, with a sound they had never heard before. The women went toward him, as though to shut him inside a circle. But Śiva paid no attention and walked through them. He went on toward the village. The women fell into line behind. They began very slightly to sway their thighs. Now it was Śiva who was silent, while laughter slithered along the snakelike procession behind. At the same time, the ṛṣis ’ women who had stayed in the village to do the housework stopped, forgetting whatever they had been doing. Something drew them to the windows, the doors. Some stepped out, still in their nightclothes. Others left hearth or makeup table. Bracelets fell from their wrists and were left where they lay. Soon the women were walking one behind another along the road, without so much as a word. Their feet made small dance steps, hips swaying ever so slightly. Having reached the last huts, they saw the Stranger coming toward them, followed by his procession. They tagged along, falling into step with the others.

Shortly before reaching the Forest of Cedars, Śiva had evoked Viṣṇu and entreated him to assume the shape of Mohinī, the marvelous celestial courtesan to whose exploits the gods owed a great deal. That day Mohinī appeared, her body laden with jewels and ribbons. Śiva’s hand, dry with ash, squeezed Mohinī’s, moist with sandalwood oil. Thus they walked along for a while, like brother and sister, then took diverging paths.

The ṛṣis were uneasy. Nature’s awakening came as a disturbance to them. In the morning mist their heads steamed. They thought with annoyance that once again they were to be subjected to the cycle of the seasons. But if they really were liberated-in-life, why this annoyance? Then there was an unusual silence all around. The monotonous, reassuring accompaniment of domestic clatter was missing. Perhaps it was time to go and bathe, they all thought at once. And on the way to the river, they met Mohinī. Those powerful men, so solemn and severe, followed her. with avid eyes. Under long white robes, phalluses grew erect. They wanted to sit beside the river and talk to that beautiful Stranger, who doubtless knew every world there was and was cloaked in the breath of taverns, palaces, bedrooms, ports, ships, horses, cut roses. Could she be an Apsaras, come down from the heavens once again to mock them? No, there was something in this woman, her hips just slightly swaying before them, that far surpassed any previous pleasure. The ṛṣis hadn’t said so much as good morning to one another. Each followed Mohinī as if alone. Suddenly, out of the forest, came a muddled sound, of laughter and shouting, of bells and cymbals and tambourines. The swaying procession of the ṛṣis ran into another swaying procession. They recognized their wives: they were following a man whom no one knew, but who was obviously up to no good. But there was no time to size him up, for already the two processions were mingling. In an instant the ṛṣis changed expression. They began to scold their wives. They had come out of the village to look for their women — they said — and now they found them disheveled, improperly dressed, trooping about after a filthy beggar. Well, they were going to punish him, that was for sure. But where was he? They looked around — and they were looking for Mohinī too. There was no trace of either of them. Angry and confused, the ṛṣis ordered their wives back home, like prisoners under armed and surly guard.

The ṛṣis hadn’t recognized Śiva, but Śiva had recognized some of them as his noble brothers-in-law. Vasiśṭha, Atri, Pulastya, Añgiras, Pulaha, Kratu, Marīci: they were the names a loathsomely smug Dakṣa had rattled off to Satī to heap shame on her repugnant, ash-smeared groom. They were the right men, who did the right things and thought the right thoughts. Some of them Śiva had seen before, not on the earth but in the sky, long watched them in the tremulous light of the Bear. In the heavens those lights looked nostalgically through billowing shadows toward their distant loved ones, the Pleiades. On earth they lived like aging husbands, inured to repetition, shut away in the bubble of air that separated them from the world’s impurity. Wasn’t it precisely these lofty sages, after all, who had been responsible for Satī’s ending up in a heap of ash? Ash. Of course. That was what the ṛṣis didn’t understand, what they shunned, what haunted them. Everything mingles and merges, everything is leveled in ash. There is no illumination without ash. There is no illumination until all are understood to be so many animals. Animals communicate in ash. Only ash can make the propitious fragrant. That was why the ṛṣis ’s women had followed Śiva so frenetically.

The ṛṣis ’ wives shut themselves up, each in her own home. The ṛṣis got together and were grim. They’d have to hunt down that Stranger, they said. Kill him, said a voice. Castrate him, said another. As Gotama had done with Indra. No one mentioned Mohinī, as if she had never appeared. Meanwhile, their anger consumed the immense tapas they had stored up. Exchanging glances, they might have been the commonest of men, so many roughnecks out for revenge. Splitting up to search the forest, they were fooled by laughter, braying, howls, roars. The Lord of the Animals mocked them and vanished. But in the end they found him in a clearing, sitting on a log. They surrounded him. “If you want to castrate me, I’ll do it myself,” said Śiva, calmly. Grasping a reddish phallus and scrotum with one hand, he tossed them into the deep grass.

Where Śiva’s phallus had fallen, the astonished ṛṣis saw a serpent of light snake away. There was a smell of burned grass. Slowly, silently, the ṛṣis set off after the light. They thought: “It isn’t like any other light.” They didn’t even realize that Śiva had disappeared. The penetrating light slithered down to the lake. The ṛṣis stood on the bank, to watch. The light wriggled on, deep below the water. They saw it reach the other bank. Then it rose into the air. The sun had set, and shadows were creeping across the lake. In the center, water and sky fused in a single dazzling furrow. You couldn’t tell where it began or ended.

Leaving the Forest of Cedars behind, Śiva wandered from place to place, his bowl of bone still stuck to his hand. Just a couple of paces behind, the ragged Brahmahatyā followed in silence. Nobody took any notice. They were just a pair of beggars like so many others. They would stop in the marketplace, by a palace, a harbor. Śiva’s eyes were vacant. Nobody spoke to them. Around a fire beside the road, they heard other beggars saying they were going to Kāśī, for that is the place where it is well to die. Śiva longed for death. But not the repeated death, punarmṛtyu , he had introduced into the cosmos to save it from perishing once and for all in the conflagration provoked by Brahmā’s fury. No, he was looking for something rarer and sweeter: the one, definitive death, the irreversible dissolution of that atrocious contact with the bowl of bone. But was the world able to set free he who had brought it into being?

Brahmahatyā was leading the way for once, when they saw the town in the distance. It looked like any other big town. But there was something different in the air, countless grains of the finest dust, a subtle smell, at once sweet and sour. From beyond the warehouses and workshops, the cattle sheds and markets, palaces and parks, came the sound of a river in full flow, a river like the sea, its further shore lost in the mist. There, they whispered, was release, on the further shore of the Gangā.