Kama was sent on a mission he knew was dangerous. He was the god of desire — of the creative longing that moves beings toward each other and toward beauty and toward the future — and he had been asked by the other gods to pierce Shiva’s meditation with an arrow of desire, so that Shiva would fall in love with Parvati and the son needed to defeat Tarakasura could be born.
His weapon was a bow of sugarcane and arrows of five flowers. He had his wife Rati beside him. He approached the meditating Shiva with the care and stealth of someone approaching a sleeping lion, knowing that the lion is more dangerous asleep than the ordinary world is awake.
He drew his bow and released the flower arrow at the moment when Parvati appeared before Shiva, hoping to catch the god of destruction at the precise instant of awakening when the arrow could do its work before he fully understood what was happening.
The third eye opened.
The fire that emerged from Shiva’s third eye — the eye that sees through appearances, that perceives what is rather than what seems, that burns what is not real — hit Kama and he was gone. Not diminished. Not wounded. Gone completely, reduced to ash so fine it dispersed immediately, and there was no Kama anymore.
Rati, his wife, fell to the earth in a grief that the Sanskrit texts describe with extraordinary precision: it was not the grief of loss in the ordinary sense but the grief of the sudden presence of absence where something had been so completely present that its absence was a kind of wound in the fabric of things.
And Parvati, who had been present when Kama was burned — who had been the one, in a sense, that the arrow was aimed to create the conditions for — fled.
What happened to the world when Kama was gone was a kind of deadening. Desire — the creative principle, the force that moves toward more life, that makes seeds germinate and flowers bloom and beings seek each other — had been removed from the universe by fire. The spring flowers closed. The birds stopped singing their territorial, wanting songs. Beings looked at each other and felt nothing in particular. The universe continued to function but it lost its colour, the way the world loses colour in the accounts of deep depression.
The gods who had sent Kama understood the cost of what they had asked. Rati’s grief moved through the heavens like weather. Parvati’s grief — the specific grief of a woman who had been pursuing the love of the person who had just destroyed the very principle of love itself — was something else again: it was the grief of seeming impossibility.
She sat with it. She did not abandon her path. This is the part of the Kama story that the wedding story requires as its foundation: Parvati’s response to the burning of Kama was not to stop. It was to go into the forest and do tapasya, to burn with her own heat the way Shiva’s third eye had burned, to generate by effort what the flower arrow had tried to produce by intrusion.
Later — after the tapasya, after the marriage, after Shiva had looked at his wife with the eyes of someone who has chosen — Kama was restored. Not to visible form immediately, but to principle. The world greened again. The flowers opened. Rati found her husband returned in the spring and in every expression of the creative desire that moves existence toward more of itself.
In South India the festival of Holi has one of its origin stories here: the burning of Kama is what the bonfire celebrates, the necessary destruction of a certain kind of desire so that a truer, deeper, harder-earned love can take its place.
Parvati’s grief was real. Her willingness to sit with it rather than flee from it, to let it fuel her practice rather than her despair, is the teaching the story offers to every person who has sat in the ash of something they loved and asked what is left now.
What is left is the practice. What the practice produces, in time, is the thing that the arrow could not.