But Satī wanted to be alone when she reached the house where she was born, when she crossed the threshold of the place of sacrifice. She entered in silence, superimposed herself on the silence. Terrified as they were of Dakṣa, none of the celebrants dared so much as nod to her. Only her mother and sisters flocked around like a swarm of birds. They sobbed and laughed, having all been convinced that they would never see her again. Face set in an expression of severity, Satī looked more than ever like her father. Her cheeks were white as white. Refusing the place of honor Vīrinī had immediately offered her, Satī looked around, with the eyes of one long accustomed to taking in every detail of the ceremony.
The offerings for the gods had been laid in a line side by side. One for each god, but not for Śiva. Satī’s eyes came to rest on the empty place. Then, with horror, they saw she was walking over to Dakṣa, who was still unaware of her arrival, absorbed in the sacrificial ritual. But for the first time in his life, Dakṣa broke off from the sacrifice. They saw him turn slowly toward his daughter. It was as if he had been expecting her. Satī began to speak in a quiet, tense voice, a whisper that could only just be heard. “You and only you may dare be the censor of that which is. Thus do you condemn me, whom once you called Satī, ‘She-who-is.’ You and only you may list the offenses of he of whom the world is but a breath. You chase off fullness like some disreputable vagabond. You believe the world is made up of your rites. You believe these motions contain the whole. You have excluded wholeness from your invitation list. You offer sacrifice to all, but not to sacrifice itself. The flowers of your rituals are rain falling from Śiva’s feet. When the blue-necked god dallies with me and calls me ‘Dakṣa’s daughter,’ I am overcome by shame. For this body of mine is juice of your body, all I can do is expel it. spew it out like a vile food. You cannot live without performing sacrifice, but I am the sacrifice.”
Dakṣa listened, rigid and pale. He whispered a few words only Satī could hear: “Where shall I find you again?” Never had his voice been so soft and helpless. Satī replied in an almost identical whisper that only Dakṣa could hear: “You will find me everywhere, in every time, in every place, in every being. There is no thing in the world where I shall not be.” Then she crouched down to one side of the altar. She looked north, wrapped in her yellow robe. She wet her fingertips in a bowl of water and drank a sip or two. She closed her eyes. She remembered tapas, how she had first practiced it here as a child, evoking Śiva, the invisible lover. Now it was enough to evoke his feet. A heat rose from the depths of her body. Satī saw no one, though they were all staring at her. Her arms, her face turned thin mother-of-pearl over a shadow flickering behind. It was the flame that burst from within and consumed her, leaving her standing erect, a statue of ash.
The officiants, her sisters, her mother, the servants, the gods, the Genies, the children, Dakṣa: they all stared at what was left of Satī. When the thin crackling of hidden flame ceased, the silence settled heavily. Not a breath of wind. Far away across the plain to the north, a black clot formed in the air, a tiny flaw in the enameled brilliance of the sky. It grew slowly, spiraling. “Where does this dust come from?” the women whispered. “It’s the god who shreds the constellations,” said one of Dakṣa’s wives, as an evil wind lifted her robes. The place of sacrifice, which had been a dazzle of light, was filled with a gloom of dust. All became shadow churning shadow. Right around the enclosure, red and brown figures suddenly stood out stark like scarecrows, menacing sentinels, but turned inward rather than outward. Each one held an unsheathed blade. They were the Gaṇas, Śiva’s soldiery. Behind them snarled packs of dogs. In the center of the clearing, amid the whirl of dust, a huge shadow could just be seen, braid upon wheeling braid. “Who is it?” everybody asked. They couldn’t have known, because this monster had only just been born. When Satī burned, Śiva, watching from Kailāsa, had torn off one of his coiling plaits. As soon as the hairs fell on the rock, there was a roar and Vīrabhadra was formed. Mild and devout within, his appearance struck terror in them all. He moved toward Dakṣa’s sacrifice. Tall as a mountain, he was a flailing multitude of heads, arms, feet, swords. Laden with jewels, dripping with blood, decked out with snakes, tiger skins, and wreaths of flowers, he set about killing every creature he came across with indiscriminate ferocity. But there were those he was looking for in particular. He was looking for Sarasvatī, Brahmā’s wife, and he pulled off her nose, so that she looked like a slave. He was looking for Pūṣan, who had laughed while Dakṣa was railing against Śiva, and he broke his teeth. He was looking for Agni, to cut off his hands. As for Bhaga, he left it to Nandin the bull to gouge out the eyes that had narrowed in agreement at Dakṣa’s words. Kicked about by the Gañas, the gods rolled on the ground like sacks. No one bothered to touch the brahmans: a hail of stones smashed in their breastbones. There was not one ceremonial object that the Gana did not crush to pieces. They urinated in the hollows that should have held the fires. They splattered the colorful foods, now soggy, on the open wounds of the dying.
The sacrifice contemplated the massacre. Then it took the shape of an antelope and flew off into the sky. But an arrow from Vīrabhadra sheared off its delicate head. Now Vīrabhadra was looking for someone else. He went to the altar. Pressed against the bricks, Dakṣa huddled there, trembling. One of Vīrabhadra’s many hands gripped him by the back of the neck and dragged him through the dust to the sacrificial pit. A soiled head stuck out from the shapeless bundle of the body. Vīrabhadra cut it off. Dakṣa’s head was seen to disappear in the fire. Then Vīrabhadra laughed. A rain of flowers fell from the sky through an air now suddenly clear again. They settled on the broken bodies, drifted in pools of blood.
The destruction of Dakṣa’s sacrifice, the most radical criticism of sacrifice, came from within sacrifice itself: it showed how irresistibly sacrifice is transformed into massacre, and thus looked forward to the whole course of a history no longer yoked to sacrifice.
The premise was a simple breach of etiquette, of terrifying eloquence. If Śiva was not invited, sacrifice could no longer bring together the totality of the real. Thus he who was excluded took revenge. And the form of revenge he chose was once again the sacrifice. But this time a funereal sacrifice. The victim honored that day was sacrifice itself, the ceremony.
Since Satī had burnt from within, her body was left standing, calcinated, on the sacrificial clearing. It was light, but it did not disintegrate when Śiva lifted it up and began to make the steps of the Tāndava, repeating the dance that follows every destruction of the world. Always alarmed by the excesses of others, the gods looked down on the scene. The earth shook. Then, for safety’s sake. Viṣṅu took his sharp disk and set about mutilating Satī’s body as it turned on Śiva’s fingers. Down fell the arms, the breasts, the feet. breaking up in ashes as they settled on the ground. Śiva didn’t notice, rapt in the dance. But when Satī’s vulva fell on Kāmarūpa, the dance stopped. And they saw that the vulva had come to rest on the tip of a smooth column of rock. There it remained, like a rug.
Śiva went back to Kailāsa. Crouched in his cave, he realized that for the first time he was alone. No more Nandin with his powerful breath. No more snakes. No more Ganas. No bustling procession around him. All had withdrawn from the presence of the Lord of the Animals. A sinister wind was whistling, and the air was too clear, abrasive. On a shelf, he looked at Satī’s few remaining belongings. Some tiny makeup boxes. Her robes folded in one corner, a soft, lifeless heap. Satī had never grown used to not having a home. More than once, when the monsoon raged, she had asked Śiva if they were always to live as vagabonds beneath the sky. He had never answered.