The conventional story of love has the beloved notice the lover and respond. Parvati’s story does not follow that convention, which is probably why it has been told and retold for two thousand years with the kind of sustained devotion that conventional love stories do not produce.
She had first come to Shiva as a young woman bringing flowers and sweeping the path around his meditation seat — a patient, present, tender service. He had noticed her. But noticing was not the same as being moved, and Shiva — sealed in a grief that had become indistinguishable from deep meditative stillness — could be noticed and not moved simultaneously.
The gods had sent Kama, the god of desire, to help the process along. Kama had shot his flower arrow and briefly broken Shiva’s meditation. For this intrusion into his stillness, Shiva had opened his third eye and burned Kama to ash. The god of desire, destroyed by the god of destructive fire. Not an encouraging sign.
Parvati had been present for this. She had seen Kama burn. She had watched Shiva return to his stillness as though nothing had happened, because for Shiva, nothing significant had happened. And she had understood something: she would not achieve what she wanted through the usual instruments.
She went into the forest and took off her jewels.
What she did next is called tapasya — literally, heating or burning, the Sanskrit word for austerities, the practice of deliberate self-discipline and renunciation that generates a kind of spiritual heat the texts call tapas. Yogis and sages had performed tapasya for millennia. What Parvati did in the forest exceeded what most of them had attempted.
In summer she sat surrounded by four fires, one at each direction, with the sun as the fifth above her. The heat was extraordinary. In the monsoon she sat in the open, the rain falling directly on her without any shelter. In winter she stood in water to her neck in the rivers, the cold as deliberate and intense as the summer’s heat. She ate nothing but leaves — leaves only, then dry leaves, then she stopped even that. She stood on one leg for long periods, her arms raised in a posture that made her entire body a gesture of upward intent.
The forest around her began to fill with the force of her tapas. Animals calmed in her presence rather than fleeing. The trees bent toward her. The elements — fire, water, earth, air — modulated around the woman who was asking nothing of them but sitting in the full force of their extremity without complaint.
In heaven, the gods watched with the particular unease of those who understand what large accumulations of tapas mean: it has to go somewhere. It produces power. It demands result. A being who has sat in five fires through summer and stood in rivers through winter for a long time is not a being who will be denied what they’re asking for.
They sent Shiva again. This time he came in disguise as a brahmin, and the brahmin began to describe Shiva in the most unflattering terms available: the cremation ground, the ghosts, the skulls, the ash, the absence of family or property or any of the normal markers of a desirable husband. Why, the brahmin asked, would a woman of her quality pursue such a person?
Parvati listened until he was done. Then she stood, and in her face — thin now from the austerities, her former adornments gone, her eyes clear with the kind of clarity that comes from having subjected yourself to fire and water and cold and heat for long enough that only what is essential remains — there was an expression that was not anger and was not argument.
‘What you describe is the surface,’ she said. ‘I am not asking for the surface.’
The brahmin revealed himself. And Shiva — the ash-covered, ghost-accompanied, cremation ground-haunting destroyer of worlds — looked at this woman who had sat in five fires for him, and what moved in his face was not the fire-opening of the third eye. It was the other thing, the one that requires more force to produce in him than fire: love.
The tapasya had done what the flower arrow could not. Not because the flower arrow aimed wrong but because love of this kind — the kind that will sit in the forest through five fires and stand in rivers through winter and answer the slanders of sages with absolute unshaken clarity — requires a different response. It earns, not attracts. It becomes undeniable, not appealing.
Shiva surrendered to the undeniable. He went to Himavan and asked for his daughter’s hand.