Roberto Calasso - Ka

For thousands of days Śiva was united to Pārvatī, and that contact transmitted a tremor to the earth. Their bodies were twined together, but all at once Śiva noticed that Pārvatī was cold, as if she were rejecting tapas . Her fire concentrated in a single point: her eyes, which were no longer staring into Śiva’s eyes, but at his tresses. In the dripping dampness of his hair, she had recognized her elder sister, Gangā, still clinging to Śiva’s body. Every drop bespoke the delicate swaying of her generous hips. And the corners of her mouth upturned in a constant complicity of pleasure and mockery. Pārvatī thought: “So all the time Siva has had me wrapped in his serpentine embraces, he was still carrying Gangā on his head, still dripping with her body. How will I ever be able to show forth Devī, the Goddess who belongs to Śiva’s body, who is his body, how will I ever be able to immerse myself in pleasure if I’m forever meeting Gangā’s eyes, as when we played together as children, if Gangā’s eyes are forever telling me that she is immersed in a pleasure perhaps even greater than my own? So, while for years on end Śiva’s body has been glued to mine, at the same time I have been witnessing another of Śiva’s loves, which began before mine and is still going on, wrinkling his forehead and pouring down his tresses. How naive I was to think those signs were due to the heights of our pleasure…” Pārvatī was shot through by an overwhelming jealousy and anger. What did it mean, now, to have practiced tapas so long, for no other reason than to attract the god? What did it mean to have schemed with her father to distract the god’s mind and have it wander all over her body? What did it mean, if the truth was that Śiva’s head was still streaming with her sister, the loathsome Gaṅgā? Pārvatī turned her eyes on Śiva and said in icy rage: “You play with my body, but your head is still playing with Gaṅgā.” With a sudden animal move that made the mountain quake, Pārvatī wrenched herself free from Śiva’s embrace. Then she turned to the river Gaṅgā and cursed it: “May your waters be forever impure.” The god gazed at Pārvatī and thought that he had never seen her look so beautiful, as when they played dice and Pārvatī cheated. Then she would laugh, with a trill that concealed a similar and opposite fury.

When Śiva wiped out the world, all combinations of existence would flow within him, without needing to exist. The mind and the outside were not separate entities — perhaps not even entities at all. Penetrating each other, they lost all their shyness. The stream was one. The dreadful and the delicate surfaced together, in pairs, indifferent to each other, like distant relatives. Then they bid each other goodbye. Immediately something else took their place. An incessant migration. All forms, all forces: they were Śiva’s herd. That’s why they called him Paśupati, Lord of the Herds.

“For Śiva excess is the norm. An everlasting turbulence. None of his states can guarantee the earth peace and quiet,” thought the thirty-three gods, perplexed. If Śiva practices tapas and ignores the world, then creation grows dull, loses its fragrance, like a woman dressing up for a lover who doesn’t notice. If, together with the Goddess, or with a woman, he indulges in the game of pleasure, then it goes on for months and years, until the constant, exasperated contact between their bodies, its never-ending friction, infects the world like a fever and threatens to burn it all up. So the gods came to the conclusion that, however Śiva manifested himself, at some point or other he should be diverted, disturbed, interrupted, so that life might run its course, mediocre though that might be. They knew that Śiva was he who brings imbalance — and that even though it could never vibrate without him, the world could absorb only a tiny fraction of his turmoil. The only conceivable balance would be a sum of imbalances, all of them originating in Śiva.

When the Snake and the Turtle that the earth rests upon began to tremble, the gods got together again, aggrieved and grim. “Those two think of nothing but dice and sex. Tāraka could make slaves of us all, and they wouldn’t turn a hair. The world will have crumbled away beneath our feet before we know it,” said one of the Thirty-three. “We’ll go and ask Visnu’s advice again,” they agreed. This time Viṣṇu didn’t try to reassure them. “Śiva might perfectly well wait another whole aeon before releasing his seed,” he said pensively. He acted as their guide on the road to Mount Kailāsa. The gods walked along the path up the valley like a caravan of ants, until finally they sniffed the breeze of the locus amoenus where Śiva dwelled. They didn’t deign to give its delights so much as a glance. Coming out of the forest, they suddenly found themselves among Śiva’s Ganas. Some were asleep, some playing dice. “Where’s Śiva? You must tell us, our distress is crushing us.” “There’s not much to tell. One day, a long time ago now, Śiva withdrew into Pārvatī’s rooms. He still hasn’t come out. We don’t know what he’s up to. We’ve been left here yawning ever since,” said one of the Ganas. Cautiously, the gods pressed on, until they reached what Nandin the bull referred to as the Nocturnal Pavilion: an enchaunting, childishly embellished, polygonal structure that stood on thin columns and boasted a terrace where Śiva and Pārvatī gave themselves up to astronomy and pleasure. Viṣṇu had taken charge. It was he who dared to knock on the pavilion door, he who spoke, in a voice too shrill and tense: “Our supreme Lord, what are you doing in there? We have all come to seek refuge with you, oppressed as we are by Tāraka. Grant us your assistance.” From behind Visnu’s voice came a buzz of praise and celebration. Each of the gods was murmuring something.

That knocking on the door, the babble of voices, Viṣṇu’s shrill words: it all slid into Śiva’s mind like a splinter of some mineral whose composition he knew only too well. “The world again,” he thought, impatiently, slowly shifting the angle at which he was penetrating Pārvatī. Their coitus had been going on for some dozens of years. Initially it had been violent (they had just argued because Pārvatī was cheating at dice), then it had been like a liquid flow, then it had all dissolved like ashes in water, then it was all water, and the water trembled ever so slightly, as if it were feverish — and all at once Śiva had remembered how one day Pārvatī, the little-girl theologian, had appeared before him, self-possessed and resplendent, impeccably decked out in tree bark pulled tight with a belt of leaves at the waist, and announced in what was almost a rage: “How dare you presume to ignore the prakṛti you’re entwined to? How could your mind breathe if it didn’t devour your substance, myself?” Śiva had laughed. Then they had tried to touch each other using nothing but their teeth. For years Śiva had drenched himself in that substance, invading it, invaded by it, burning. But now, he felt, he was returning to a state not very different from the time he had stood fast in a motionless column deep in the waters, and shut the world out from himself. Yet from time to time he would feel nostalgic for that world. To go back to watching the sky and shooting his arrows or wandering around the forest with his animals, or going to the markets as a juggler or dancer, lost in the crowd. When would he be doing that again? It was the sign that Śiva was about to detach himself. He was only holding off because Pārvatī was still absorbed in her pleasure. And now this gaggle of gods. Śiva immediately crushed the profound irritation that had pricked him a moment before. He got up from his bed, opened the door, saw the gods’ faces, masks of fear and curiosity, their eyes not daring to meet his and at the same time taking advantage of the situation to sneak glances behind him, where they hoped to get a glimpse of Pārvatī in the half-light. Distracted by this ludicrous sight, forgetting himself for one tiny fraction of time, Śiva realized that his phallus was squirting out its seed. Quick as lightning, Agni darted forward and opened his mouth wide to take it. Regaining his composure, and likewise, his mocking smile, Śiva said: “Isn’t that what you wanted?” Behind him a door opened, slowly. And as the gods crowded around like a bevy of dim-witted school-children, Pārvatī appeared, her moist skin cloaked only in a thin and crumpled robe. The Mother of the Universe glared from furious eyes. She said: “I hate you and curse you all. It is you and the fear that consumes you that have stolen from me, from the Mother of the Universe, the happiness of giving birth like a normal woman. I shall be sterile, but likewise sterile shall be the wives that the demon Tāraka took from you and whom I hope he defiles, so that they may learn from him the pleasure that you were unable to give them. If they are sterile, then all the gods will be sterile. The era of these pusillanimous celestial families is over. There are too many of you, you are old and the world is impatient to be rid of you. Up there, where you live, there will be nothing but emptiness, and that emptiness will enchant men even more than you have enchanted them. Only Śiva shall be motionless, pervasive, intact, as he ever has been. I despise you.” Pārvatī shut the door. Without a word, the gods stepped contritely backwards and withdrew. Later they could be seen climbing down the mountain. On a litter, they carried a writhing Agni, his throat scorched by Śiva’s seed.