After Sati — Shiva’s first wife, who had immolated herself in her father’s sacrificial fire after her husband was insulted — Shiva had retreated into grief so vast that it looked indistinguishable from his normal state of detachment. He wandered. He sat on mountain peaks. He meditated for kalpas at a time, his mind so perfectly stilled that the gods were not sure, looking at him, whether he was alive or dead.
Meanwhile, the demon Tarakasura was making everyone’s lives impossible. He had a boon — he could only be killed by a son of Shiva. And Shiva, sealed in his asceticism and his grief, showed no signs of fathering anyone.
Parvati was the daughter of Himavan, king of the mountains, and of Mena, the most gracious of women. She had been born specifically for this purpose — she was Sati reborn, the same soul in a new form, arriving again with the same essential nature and the same destination. But this time, she would have to earn it.
She went to Shiva.
He did not notice her at first. He was in samadhi on the peak of Kailasa, coated in ash, his matted hair piled up and bound with serpents, his face turned inward. She made her approach: she began to serve him. She swept the path around his meditation seat. She brought him flowers each morning and laid them carefully where he would see them when he opened his eyes. She kept the animals at a distance so they would not disturb him. She sat near him and practised her own meditation.
Slowly, awareness of her presence penetrated even that deep stillness. He opened his eyes and found her sitting nearby, lovely as the mountain morning, her eyes closed, her hands folded in her own practice of devotion.
He was — in the version of the story that is most honest — not immediately overwhelmed with love. He was interested. That was something. For someone who had spent centuries being interested in nothing worldly, interest was already a significant concession.
He tested her. He appeared to her in various forms — an old brahmin, a wandering ascetic, a gossip — and each time he spoke disparagingly of Shiva. Described his flaws in detail: he has no family or property, he wears a garland of skulls, his companions are ghosts and outcasts, his home is a cremation ground. Why would anyone want such a husband? Surely there were better options. Surely a woman of her qualities could find a husband with a pleasant home and proper habits.
Parvati’s response each time was the same, and it was not argument. It was absolute clarity. ‘You are describing what you see from outside,’ she said. ‘I am in love with what I know to be true inside. His apparent poverty is the freedom from attachment. His skull garland is the reminder that all forms end and only consciousness remains. His companions are outcasts because he sees no outcasts — he sees only beings. I know who he is. No description of his surface will change what I see.’
When the disguised Shiva revealed himself, she looked at him without surprise. ‘I knew who you were,’ she said simply. ‘Did you think I didn’t?’
The wedding was the event of the cosmic age. Every being in existence came — Brahma officiating, Vishnu arriving on Garuda, the rivers flowing toward Kailasa in celebration, the mountains themselves trembling with joy. The apsaras danced. The gandharvas sang. The great sages sat in rows looking terrified-and-delighted simultaneously, which is the traditional expression of those attending a wedding hosted by the most powerful ascetic in the universe.
Shiva arrived on his white bull Nandi, his ganas trooping beside him in their various peculiar forms — some with animal heads, some with extra limbs, all of them festive in the ways that demigods are festive, which is to say, unconventionally. The gods who had been hoping for a conventional wedding had to make a rapid adjustment.
Mena wept when she saw the wedding procession. Not with joy. With the particular horror of a mother watching her beautiful daughter about to marry a man covered in ash who arrives with a retinue of ghosts. She moved to block the wedding.
But Parvati came to her mother’s side and spoke to her quietly, and what she said — the texts do not preserve it exactly but give its essence — was something like: Mother, you see the ash and the ghosts. I see the god who is the source of everything. I see the one who holds all of existence together. I see the one whose love, once given, is beyond all taking back. There is no safer place in the three worlds than at his side.
Mena looked at her daughter’s face and saw there something she had not expected: peace. Not the peace of ignorance but the peace of complete and certain knowing.
She stepped aside.
Shiva and Parvati were wed, and the universe exhaled. The mountain mother and the destroyer and the ascetic and the dancer — the impossibly different and perfectly matched — became one household. From their union came Kartikeya, who would slay Tarakasura. From their union came Ganesha, who would stand at the beginning of all endeavours. From their union came the teaching that love does not require the beloved to be easy.
It requires only that we see clearly, that we see truly, and that we stand in what we see without flinching.