Now Śiva looked around and saw how the moonlight had set apart an array of powder puffs and makeup brushes with mother-of-pearl handles, and beside them something of a yellowish white: the begging bowl, the top of Brahmā’s skull. His gaze rested long on these objects. They resisted him. It was they that oppressed him. The fierce pangs for the loss of Satī. The dull throb of guilt: not only had he decapitated the Creator, not only had he mocked and mutilated the father of all beings. But worst of alclass="underline" he had wounded a brahman. That was the most heinous thing anyone could ever do. He who strikes a brahman swallows a tormenting hook, lives scorched by a firebrand in the throat. Śiva took the bowl of bone in his hand. It stuck to his palm like a sucker. He tried to hurl it away. He couldn’t. Someone was watching, a shadow lurking in the cave. He knew who it was, that silent and abhorred companion. A girl with red eyes, dressed in black and noble rags: Brahmahatyā, the Fury of the Brahmānicide. Of that woman alone might Satī have been jealous. She alone jolted his mind without truce, like a bat beating against the walls of a cave. Śiva watched pain and guilt slowly fusing together, as like substances will. They came rushing from the ends of the earth: they were all the pain and all the guilt, compressed and sealed within him. He remembered the stories of tortured lovers. Of the lost and the suicides. Of those whose name no one knows. They came like fine dust. Sparks flew and fell back in the brazier. He recognized every one of them. They greeted him, like his own faithful. A blink of Śiva’s eyelids was their response. Each had a name. All lapsed back into him.
It was never clear for what reason and to what end, if end there was, Śiva left Kailāsa. Motionless, he was accustomed to entertaining everything within his mind. But now, ever alternating, merging, just two images afflicted him: the bone and the ashes. Brahmā and Satī. Was it this persecution that goaded him to set off on his travels, like the commonest of wretches who seeks to lose himself along the highways and byways of the world? Clad in rags, surly, his eyes fiery and dark, the vagabond Śiva flitted across village and valley like a shade. His bowl never filled with water when he held it under a fountain. That was the most painful moment of all. He looked at that modest piece of bone and was bound to admit that it was bottomless: no liquid, be it blood or water, would ever fill it. No one recognized him. Śiva begged before Śiva’s temples. Sometimes the devout would trample him as they thronged to worship. Sometimes he would writhe and yearn like a madman lost among other madmen. He was the nameless, he who has no country, no caste, he was the lover forever bereaved, the murderer who cannot be pardoned, the missing person who is missed by no one. He got no more attention than a charred log. It was a breath of warm and quivering air that brought him back to himself. He felt a sudden tremor in the ground, the distant thunder of spring. And all at once his wanderings found a destination: the Forest of Cedars.
As he was approaching the Forest of Cedars, his light, feverish steps obedient to an inflexible determination, Śiva was aware of being inhabited by three passions, all living together within him and each exasperated by the presence of the others, even though each was exclusive and ought to have repelled all others. The first, the most remote, was the guilt for his brahmanicide. It seemed to Síva he had been born with that guilt, even though he well remembered how many millennia had passed before his left thumbnail had sliced off Brahmā’s fifth head like a ripened fruit. But that seemed no more than a belated consequence. A consequence of what? Perhaps of the existence of the world.
The second passion was his mourning for Satī. And again, although this was recent, a still open wound that cut through his fiber from one end to the other, nevertheless it seemed it had always been part of him. Every lover loves, first and foremost, an absentee. Absence precedes presence, in the hierarchical order of things. Presence is just a special case in the category of absence. Presence is a hallucination protracted for a certain period. But this in no way diminishes our pain. Looking into the future, Śiva could see certain presumptuous and ingenuous natives of the distant West, who would one day believe they were the only ones to suffer, sectarians of the irreversible. Seeing them, Śiva felt sympathetic and, murmuring words they would never hear, addressed them as follows: “Whether the world be a hallucination or the mind be a hallucination, whether all return or all appear but once, the suffering is just the same. For he who suffers is part of the hallucination, of whatever kind that may be. What then is the difference? This: whether in the sufferer there is — or is not — he who watches him who suffers.” More than that, for the moment, he would not say.
Then there was a third passion, something that the first trembling of the air had awakened within him and that now grew, swelled in a wave that thrust him forward along the most rugged of paths, invaded by a euphoria, an insolence, a rashness that he hadn’t felt for a long time. What was it? The premonition of many women as yet unknown, the remote agency of bodies he had never seen but sensed he could already glimpse, ready as he was to overwhelm them. But who were they? Stern women, the purest of women, princesses careless of principality, charioteers of the mind, flushes of celestial heat that had settled on the earth, conserving within themselves the substance of the stars.
Śiva toiled on, climbing toward the Forest of Cedars. Only rarely did he find traces of travelers who had gone before. Nature greeted him, hurrying on his awakening. To anyone passing by, he would have looked like a pilgrim or beggar, lost on his way to a sanctuary. Or, if ever he had lifted his eyes from his feet, like a bandit gone to ground in the mountains. He was seeking the one place that is sufficient unto itself, which is within the world but ignores the world. Sometimes an antelope would come out of the undergrowth and rear up on its hind legs, pushing its muzzle into Śiva’s hand, to feed on the leaves he offered. Their eyes met, and there would be a flash of recognition. At that moment, they were the only creatures who would have known how to find him.
In the Forest of Cedars life was quiet, almost static. There, in society, lived those who had chosen to sever all ties with society. Rude huts of twigs were scattered among bushes and tall trunks, set apart but within sight of each other. One constant sound: running water — which sometimes merged with the mighty rustling of the wind. Here lived the ṛṣis and their wives. There was no market, no carts, no soldiers: none of those things that make up a community. Yet the inhabitants shared every rule of thought and deed. Such was their unspoken accord that the place was like a hard, transparent stone. Solitary women, magnificent and proud, walked the forest ways. They went to fetch water, or to bathe, or to see friends. It was pointless to ask what the ṛṣis did: they practiced tapas. Was this fullness? Was it emptiness? Was it tedium? Was it freedom? Was it memory? Was it renunciation? Was it happiness? No one ever established that with any certainty. Another dweller in that stasis was doubt.
Why did Śiva want to upset the life of the ṛṣis in the Forest of Cedars? Wasn’t it as close as any could be to the life he himself had lived for so long on Kaīlāsa? Wasn’t that perenníal practice of tapas, that pure abandonment to mind and sex, as like the breath of Śiva as anything to be found in all the world? Then to live alone with one’s partner, in solitude and withdrawal, with a tapasvinī, mightn’t that even have seemed like an imitation of the happy time when Śiva had met no other gaze but Satī’s? Or was that exactly what provoked Śiva’s malice?