Roberto Calasso - Ka

Pārvatī was stubborn and wild, but that didn’t mean she had given up on being a princess, or that she didn’t want everything to happen to her just as it should happen to a princess. If Śiva really meant to be her husband, the first thing he would have to do was ask — or have somebody else ask — her father, Himavat, for her hand. And as far as the wedding was concerned, Pārvatī left no one in any doubt that she expected a magnificent ceremony, scrupulously faithful to the most ancient customs. Mildly smiling, a patient Śiva called together the Saptarṣis at the Mahākośī waterfall. They would be his ambassadors. They went down to Osadhiprastha, where Himavat received them at once in the presence of Menā and Pārvatī. While Aṅgiras launched into a speech of great and characteristic eloquence, solemn images spouting from his lips like drops of crystal, Pārvatī concentrated on counting the petals of a lotus flower, like a little girl playing in a corner and pretending not to listen to what her parents are talking about. Menā couldn’t conceal her anxiety. Himavat looked at her to ask for her consent. Menā’s nod turned into a prolonged shiver.

When Śiva’s retinue passed through the second gate of Osadhiprastha and the procession behind found themselves up to their ankles in flowers, wind ruffling their standards of Chinese silk, there was a sudden, unanimous movement, like a beating of wings, among the women hidden away in the palaces. One dropped a garland she had been fixing in her hair; another took her henna-wet foot from her maid’s hands and ran to the window, leaving red prints on the floor; another rushed over with one eye made up and the other not; another broke off in the middle of tying her robe and, pressing her forehead against the grating, had a bracelet cutting into her navel as she tried to cover her bare belly with her hand: another had been lacing a girdle of pearls and suddenly let go, leaving the pearls to fall and scatter. The procession pressed on through the empty streets, while behind a thousand embroidered screens bright splashes of light trembled like lotus flowers besieged by swarms of bees.

The city disappeared. The villages disappeared, likewise the travelers. The noisy escort disappeared. Nature thickened, withdrew into itself. Piece by piece, Pārvatī felt the world she had known fall away from her. She had scarcely left her parents’ house and already she had no idea who she was. A little girl? The Goddess? Both followed the footsteps of the man with the wiry legs as he walked ahead along the path that climbed slowly up Kailāsa, and never turned back to look at her. Behind them, they could hear the warm breath of Nandin the bull, carrying their few belongings, only witness to the scene.

Then they had fallen asleep, welded together like two metals, and Śiva had begun to move in Pārvatī’s dreams, then they had fought like two swords, then stopped, suspended in the air, then laughed, bit into fruit, drunk, blindly, oafishly, then left their supine bodies, looked at themselves from above, motionless while their bodies stirred ever so slightly, Pārvatīhad begun to wander off, already she could see the lights being lit in her temples, except that the temples were inside her, they rose up everywhere Śiva’s phallus, like a quiet, inquisitive traveler, prodded and explored her, at which Pārvatī saw a name impress itself on the vast landscape around her — Yājñavalkya — and couldn’t remember who it might be, then she heard Śiva pronouncing those same syllables, as he recited the texts of the ṛṣis , and beside the name were some words she hadn’t understood at the time and had marked for later attention, because she sensed that one day they would be useful, and she had forgotten them, but now they came back like obviousness itself, the obviousness of the Self, of the ātman , which, according to that ṛṣi of whom she knew nothing aside from his name, causes us to feel like the man who embraces the woman he loves, the man who “no longer knows anything of without and within.” “No longer knows anything of without and within,” Pārvatī said to herself, muttering a knowledge that surpassed even her pleasure, which in turn surpassed everything else, and at the same time her eyes moved cautiously around those temples at once remote and intimate, but it was then that she caught a sense of something suspicious, insidious, something that disturbed her, and she found the eye of Kālidāsa, the poet, crouched on the steps of one of those temples, as if trying to blend in with stones — and instead he was watching her and writing. “This must not be,” murmured Pārvatī, assuming the terrifying shape she often played with. “A curse on you if you proceed, by so much as a syllable, with your description of Pārvatī’s pleasure.” But Kālidāsa had already melted away, crept back into the gloom of time.

Pārvatī said to Śiva: “Please explain. Pleasure leaves no memory. I mean: during the twenty-five years of our first embrace, when I had just left my father’s house, I often thought, as though making a long journey: I must remember what happened just now, exactly how this moment was, how we got there and how we left it behind. I was quite determined — and everything seemed quite clear and sharp, but the way dreams seem clear and sharp while we are dreaming them, we decide to remember them and fasten on every detail — and the idea that we might forget something seems so ridiculous we almost smile, because it is all too real, but then when we wake up that thing evaporates along with all the rest. Try to understand: everything that happened is there inside me, just below the flux of my mind. But I can’t recall the sequence of it all, I could remember far better the sequence of something quite unimportant to me: how I dressed one day, what makeup I put on, how I went down into the palace gardens, how I walked along a particular path and how I mounted my dappled horse, my two maids behind me, and how the maids were dressed, and the first words we spoke to each other. Yet Kāma, Desire, is also called Smara, Memory. Indeed, it’s as if that were his real name. Or at least that’s the name I always use for him. And I saved his life, remember? For days I sat motionless before you, at a respectful distance, immersed in tapas . We didn’t know each other then, and I was just a girl. You kept your eyes closed all the time. When you opened them and saw me, you spoke, without even looking at me: “What’s happening?” you said, “Kāma is here.” Kāma barely managed to get to his feet — he was behind a bush — and to draw his how with one of the five flower-arrows, before your eye had shriveled him up. Then you looked at me, as though this was the first time you’d really seen me, and invited me to ask a boon of you. I said: “Now that Kāma is dead, there are no more boons to ask. Without Desire there can be no more emotion. Without emotion men and women may as well ignore each other.” So you granted me this boon, that Kāma might go on living, but invisibly. When I was a little girl and used to invoke him, looking at the miniatures I’d painted of you, though I’d never seen you then, all I would say was “Smara, Smara…”

It wasn’t unusual for Pārvatī to fall asleep while Śiva recited the Vedas to her. The hymns made her impatient or drowsy. But she would soon rouse herself again, as if driven by a goad. There were only two things she never tired of discussing: theology and women, the latter insofar as they were — or had been—Śiva’s women. Pārvatī sat up in bed, bare-breasted, her skin moist and glistening. She gazed steadily ahead of her and spoke to Śiva, who was lying by her side: “ Prakrti, māyā, śakti: you see how, when we set off along the path that leads back to the beginning, we always come across this element that flaunts its feminine noun. Never existing alone, but always such that nothing else can exist without it. Nature, illusion, power: these are the words your ingenuous Western devotees will pronounce one day, though generally without realizing how each is the shell of the other. There is no nature without illusion, there is no illusion without power, there is no power without nature. As for māyā , rather than ‘illusion’ it would be more apt to call it ‘magic,’ that strange thing that those supposedly of sober mind are convinced does not exist, while actually it would be far more sober to say that nothing in existence can exist without it. But even that would not be enough, and this is what I want to talk about, that’s why I’m here next to you waiting for you to lay me down on that tiger skin, get rid of your Ganas and launch your liṇga on the vessel of my thighs, so that the māyā in me may cloak it in a liquid veil.”