Part 5 of 12 · 14 minThe Mouse and the Umbrella

For a while after the day of the promised head, Kailasa was the noisiest, happiest mountain in all creation.

Vinayaka grew into his new face the way a child grows into new shoes, by running in them. He ran everywhere. He used his trunk to steal jalebis from the kitchen and then used it again to put the empty plate back, very carefully, so nobody would notice. Everybody noticed. He hid inside the folds of his father's elephant-skin shawl and jumped out at the ganas, those wild, many-shaped attendants of Shiva, shouting "Boo!" And every single gana, even the ones with three eyes and tusks of their own, pretended to be terrified and fell over backwards.

His best friend was a gana called Kumbhodara, whose name means "pot-belly." Kumbhodara was round and jolly and hungry all the time, and the two of them together could empty a basket of bananas faster than a troop of monkeys.

Nandi, the great white bull, pretended to disapprove of all this. "In my day," he would say, lifting his nose, "young ones did not climb on the Lord's bull as if he were a hill." Then Vinayaka would climb onto him anyway, and Nandi would sigh a very long sigh, and carry him three times around the courtyard.

And every evening Vinayaka sat in his mother's lap while she combed his big ears, and he asked questions. Why does the moon sleep in Appa's hair? Why is Appa's throat blue? Where does the Ganga go when she leaves his head? Do stars get tired?

Parvati answered every question. Some of the answers took a whole evening.

But far below the snows of Kailasa, down where the rice fields spread green and gold and people lived in villages of mud and thatch, something was eating the world.

In one of those villages lived a little girl named Gowri. She was seven, she had two plaits tied with red ribbon, and she had spent the whole of a long afternoon helping her mother make sweets for the harvest festival. Laddus, round and golden. Sesame balls sticky with jaggery. A whole plate of soft kudumulu, steamed rice dumplings, still warm.

They put the plate in the storeroom, under a cloth, behind a locked door, ready for the morning.

In the morning, the plate was empty.

Not a crumb was left. The cloth had a small round hole chewed in it. The door was still locked. And in the corner of the storeroom wall, where the mud met the floor, there was a tiny, perfect, mouse-sized hole.

Gowri cried. Her mother went to the big granary to fetch rice for a fresh batch, and when she opened the granary, she dropped her lamp. The granary was empty too. So was the next one. So was every granary in the village.

"It's a rat," said Gowri's father.

"No rat could eat a whole granary," said her grandmother, very quietly. "That is Mushikasura."

Now, you might ask, who was Mushikasura?

He had once been an asura, a demon, like many others. But he had done hard penance and won two gifts. The first was that no weapon made by any god could kill him. The second was that he could change his size whenever he liked. He could be a monster as tall as a palm tree, with teeth like ploughshares and a tail like a whip. Or he could be a mouse, small and grey and quick, who could slip through any crack in any wall.

And Mushikasura was always, always hungry.

He ate the rice from the granaries and the millet from the fields. He crept into temples and ate the offerings laid before the gods. He licked the ghee lamps dry in the rishis' forest ashrams until their holy fires sputtered out. When angry villagers came after him with sticks, he grew huge in an instant and chased them screaming into the river. When they set traps, he became a mouse and laughed at them from inside the trap, and then walked out through the gap in the bars.

Soon the sages came up the long cold road to Kailasa, thin and shivering, and knelt before Shiva.

"Mahadeva," they said, "the offerings are being stolen before they reach the gods. When the gods get no offerings, they grow weak. When the gods grow weak, the rain stops. When the rain stops, the whole world goes hungry. Mushikasura will eat the world one grain at a time."

Shiva listened with his eyes half closed. Then, to everyone's surprise, he turned to the round little boy sitting on the steps with Kumbhodara, sharing a banana.

"Vinayaka," he said. "You have been leading the ganas in games. Would you like to lead them for real?"

Vinayaka's ears shot straight up. Kumbhodara dropped the banana.

"Me, Appa?"

"You guarded your mother's door against the whole of heaven," said Shiva. "Mushikasura is a thief who comes through doors that are closed. Who better to stop him than a guardian of doors?"

Before he left, his mother gave him something. It was a rope, soft and golden, that she had woven herself from threads of light while he slept. "This is a pasha," she said, a noose. "It will catch whatever you throw it at, and it will never let go unless you say so. And no god made it. I did."

And his father gave him an ankusha, a small silver hook on a handle, the kind a mahout, an elephant's keeper, uses to guide a big elephant. "The mind is an elephant," Shiva said. "It runs wherever it likes. Learn to guide it gently, and you can guide anything."

So down the mountain went Vinayaka, with Kumbhodara at his side and a crowd of cheering ganas behind him, all carrying drums and sticks and far too much lunch.

They reached Gowri's village on the evening of the third day. The streets were empty. Doors were shut. And the fields at the edge of the village, the very last fields with rice still standing in them, were rustling in a way that was not the wind.

"There," whispered Kumbhodara.

In the middle of the field, gorging on whole sheaves of rice, stood Mushikasura in his giant form. He was grey and enormous, bigger than a temple cart. His whiskers were as thick as ropes. His eyes glowed red. Every time he chewed, a whole row of rice plants vanished.

The ganas, who were very brave when they were singing about it, suddenly all found reasons to stand behind Kumbhodara.

Vinayaka stepped forward.

"Stop!" he shouted. "Those fields belong to the people of this village!"

Mushikasura turned. He looked down. He saw a small boy with a round belly and an elephant's head, holding a golden rope and a little silver hook. And he laughed so hard that rice fell out of his mouth.

"The gods sent this?" he roared. "A baby with a trunk? Go home, little elephant, before I eat you as well. You look like you'd taste of sweets."

"Get him!" cried Vinayaka.

And the ganas charged, and that was the first mistake.

Mushikasura swung his tail. Dhadaam! Twenty ganas flew into the pond. He sneezed, and ten more rolled away into the haystacks. Vinayaka ran at him with his pasha raised, but the moment he threw it, the monster was gone, shrunk into a grey mouse, and the golden rope landed on nothing but mud.

"Where did he go? Where did he go?" shouted the ganas, running in circles, bumping into one another.

From somewhere in the dark came a squeaky little laugh. And then, behind them, the monster was huge again, snatching Kumbhodara's lunch bag right out of his hands and swallowing it whole.

"My lunch!" wailed Kumbhodara.

All night it went on like that. Big, small, big, small. Every time they surrounded him, he became a mouse and slipped between their feet. Every time they chased the mouse, he became a giant and knocked them flat. By morning the ganas were muddy and bruised, Kumbhodara was starving, and Vinayaka was sitting on a bund between two fields with his chin in his hands.

That was when he felt a small tug at his dhoti.

It was Gowri. Her ribbons were crooked, and her eyes were red from crying.

"Are you the god who's going to catch the thief?" she asked.

"I'm trying," said Vinayaka. "I'm not doing very well."

Gowri looked at him for a long moment. Then she said, "My mother's kudumulu were for you, you know. For the festival. He ate them."

Something changed in Vinayaka's face. The thief had not just eaten rice. He had eaten a little girl's festival and an offering made with love.

"Gowri," he said slowly, "can your mother make one more laddu? Just one? The biggest, sweetest, best-smelling laddu she has ever made?"

Gowri frowned. "There's no rice left. There's hardly any jaggery."

"Hardly any is enough," said Vinayaka. "Just one."

So that evening, in the middle of the empty threshing floor, Gowri set down a single laddu on a banana leaf. It was round and golden and it smelled of ghee and cardamom and roasted sesame, and the smell drifted all through the village on the evening breeze.

Then everybody hid. The ganas hid in the haystacks. Kumbhodara hid behind a well, trying very hard not to look at the laddu. And Vinayaka did not hide at all. He sat very still in the shadow of a tamarind tree, closed his eyes, and did something only an elephant can do.

He listened.

Can you guess why Vinayaka has such big ears?

He heard the frogs in the pond. He heard the crickets in the grass. He heard Kumbhodara's stomach rumbling behind the well. And then, underneath all of that, he heard it: the tiny patter of four small feet. The whisper of whiskers brushing against the ground. The sniff, sniff, sniff of a nose that could not resist a laddu.

A grey mouse slipped out of a crack in the threshing floor.

It crept toward the banana leaf. It stopped. It looked around. Nothing moved. It crept closer. It opened its mouth, and Vinayaka opened his eyes and threw the pasha.

The golden rope flew through the dark like a shooting star and dropped over the mouse.

Squeeeeak! Mushikasura swelled instantly into his giant form, roaring, to snap the rope. But the pasha grew with him. He shrank to a mouse to slip out of it, and the pasha shrank too. He grew. He shrank. He grew as tall as the tamarind tree and shrank as small as a grain of rice. He bit at the rope and clawed at it and rolled over and over in the dust, and it only held him tighter.

"My boon!" he howled. "No weapon made by any god can hold me!"

"No god made this," said Vinayaka, walking toward him. "My mother did."

The monster lunged at him with open jaws. Vinayaka did not step back. He lifted the little silver ankusha his father had given him and touched it, very gently, to the top of Mushikasura's head, the way a mahout touches a wild elephant that has forgotten itself.

And all the rage went out of the demon at once.

It drained away like water out of a cracked pot. The red glow left his eyes. His great chest heaved. He sank down onto the threshing floor, and he was only a very big, very tired, very frightened mouse, tangled in a golden rope.

The ganas came out of the haystacks with their sticks raised. "Finish him, Vinayaka!" they shouted. "Finish him!"

Vinayaka held up his hand.

Mushikasura looked up at him with wet eyes. "Spare me," he whispered. "I only wanted to eat. I have always been hungry. Always. Since before I can remember."

Vinayaka crouched down beside him in the dust, so they were eye to eye.

"I'm hungry all the time too," he said, patting his round belly. "Ask anyone. Being hungry isn't bad. But you took everything, from everyone, and left nothing for a little girl's festival. That's what's bad."

The mouse hung his head.

"So here is what we'll do," said Vinayaka. "I won't kill you. But you have to stop eating the world. Instead, you'll come with me. You'll carry me wherever I go. And whenever people offer me food, and they will, I promise you they will, you'll share it with me. You'll never be hungry again. And you'll never have to steal."

The demon stared at him. Nobody had ever offered him anything in his whole life. Everyone had only ever tried to kill him.

"You would let me share your food?" he said.

"Half of every laddu," said Vinayaka. Then he thought about it. "Well. A good piece of every laddu."

Kumbhodara, behind the well, made a small unhappy noise.

Mushikasura bowed his head all the way to the ground. "Then I will carry you, Swami," he said. "For as long as the worlds last."

The golden pasha loosened by itself and slid back into Vinayaka's hand. And the demon changed one last time. He did not become a monster, and he did not become a tiny mouse. He became a large, sleek, silver-grey mouse with bright black eyes and neat pink ears, big enough for a small god to ride.

The rishis who had come down to watch gave him a new name: Mooshika. And they gave Vinayaka a new name too: Mooshika Vahana, the one whose vehicle is the mouse.

Then came the first ride.

Vinayaka climbed onto Mooshika's back. Mooshika's legs wobbled. His whiskers trembled. His eyes went very wide.

"Swami," he gasped, "forgive me for asking. What exactly have you been eating?"

"Everything," said Vinayaka happily.

Mooshika took one step and swayed to the left. He took another step and swayed to the right. The ganas held their breath. And then he found his balance, lifted his nose proudly, and trotted around the threshing floor in a perfect circle while the whole village, which had come out of its houses in astonishment, cheered.

Gowri laughed so hard she had to sit down.

A young disciple of one of the rishis tugged at his teacher's sleeve. "Gurugaru, I don't understand," he whispered. "The gods ride lions and eagles and peacocks. Why should the cleverest god ride the smallest animal?"

The old sage smiled. "Because the mouse is desire," he said. "It creeps into everything. It nibbles at everything. It is never, ever full. Vinayaka didn't kill it. He sits on top of it and tells it where to go. That is the whole secret."

As he spoke, the night sky above the village began to glow.

The devas, the gods of heaven, came floating down in their shining chariots to honour the victory. Indra came, and Agni, and Varuna and Vayu, and they brought gifts. There were garlands, and silks, and a crown far too big for an eight-year-old. But the gift Vinayaka loved most was carried by four devas together.

It was a white umbrella, a chhatra, with a handle of gold and a fringe of tiny pearls that clicked softly in the breeze.

"In the kingdoms of the earth," said Indra, "only a true king may walk under a white umbrella. It means: this one protects. This one gives shade to all who shelter under him." And the devas held it over Vinayaka's head.

Gowri looked up at the umbrella, and then at the round little god under it. "Does that mean you'll protect our village?" she asked.

"It means," said Vinayaka, "that your mother will make kudumulu again next year, and nobody will steal them." He bent down and whispered, "And I'll come and eat one."

Then he rode home up the long road to Kailasa: a small god on a large mouse, the golden pasha over one shoulder and the silver ankusha in his hand, the pearl-fringed umbrella shading his head, Kumbhodara still complaining about his lunch, and the village children running beside him singing all the way to the snow line.

Parvati was waiting at the palace door. She looked at the umbrella. She looked at the mouse. She looked at her son, dusty and grinning from ear to enormous ear.

"I sent you to catch a thief," she said, "and you brought him home as a pet?"

"He's not a pet, Amma," said Vinayaka. "He's family."

Mooshika bowed so low his nose touched the step.

Parvati laughed until tears came to her eyes. But Shiva, watching from the courtyard, did not laugh. He was looking thoughtfully at his elder son, the boy who had caught a demon with a laddu and then forgiven him. And beside Shiva, a slim boy with six faces and a spear in his hand was looking at the umbrella, too, with all twelve of his eyes.

The ganas had a victory to celebrate. But soon they would have a question to answer: which of Shiva's two sons should lead them?