Part 1 of 12 · 14 minThe Wish of Gajasura

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine a mountain that walks.

Its feet are as wide as village ponds. Its ears flap like the sails of a great boat. It has a long grey trunk that can pull a banyan tree out of the ground as easily as you pull a blade of grass, and two white tusks that shine in the dark. When it stamps, the rivers jump out of their beds. When it trumpets, the birds in seven forests fly up into the sky all at once.

That was Gajasura, the elephant-headed asura. And long, long ago, in the age when gods still walked among the forests, everybody was afraid of him.

In the villages at the foot of the Himalayas, mothers would hear a far-off BHOOOM, BHOOOM, and pull their children indoors. Farmers would leave their ploughs in the middle of the field and run. Once, a little girl named Chinni was too slow. She was chasing a runaway goat, and when she looked up, there he was, blotting out the sun, the ground shaking under his feet. She was so frightened she could not even scream. She just stood there holding the goat.

Gajasura looked down at her. For a long moment he did not move. Then, very carefully, he lifted one enormous foot and stepped over her, and the goat, and walked away.

Chinni told everybody in the village that night, and nobody believed her. "Gajasura does not step around anything," the grown-ups said. "He tramples palaces. He tore down the gates of Indra's garden. He is a monster."

And that was true. But it was not the whole truth. Because Gajasura had a secret, and the secret was this.

When he was very small, no bigger than a buffalo calf, he had been lost in a snowstorm high on the mountains. His mother was gone. The wind was screaming. The snow was up to his little knees, and then up to his chest, and he was so cold that his trunk went numb and his ears froze stiff. He lay down in the snow and closed his eyes, because he did not know what else to do.

And then someone picked him up.

He remembered it all his life. Tall, warm arms. A smell of sandalwood and smoke. A shawl of tiger skin wrapped around him. A small fire that seemed to burn out of nowhere, right there in the storm. Somebody humming a low, slow song, and a light shining above the stranger's head, curved and silver, like a little piece of the moon.

When Gajasura woke up in the morning, the storm was over, the fire was ashes, and the stranger was gone. There were no footprints in the snow. Only, on the rock beside him, a line of white ash in the shape of three stripes.

It took him many years to understand who had saved him. It was Shiva, the Lord of Kailasa. The one with the moon in his hair.

Gajasura grew up. He grew huge, and proud, and wild, and did many terrible things. But he never, ever forgot the warm arms in the snowstorm. And one day, when he was the most powerful asura in the world, he decided there was only one thing left that he wanted.

He wanted to be close to Shiva. Forever.

So he climbed back up to the snow line, to the very same rocks where he had once lain freezing as a calf, and he began to do tapas, the kind of deep prayer and meditation where you give up everything, even food and sleep, and think of only one thing.

He stood on one foot. He ate nothing but the wind. He curled his trunk against his chest and chanted a single name, over and over. "Shiva. Shiva. Shiva."

Summers melted into winters. Winters hardened into summers. Snow piled on his shoulders and slid off in little avalanches. Vines crept up his legs. A pair of mountain sparrows built a nest in the fold of his left ear, and Gajasura, who had torn down palaces, held that ear perfectly still for a whole season so the eggs would not fall. The chicks hatched, and cheeped, and learned to fly, and flew away. The next year their chicks came back and built a nest in the same ear.

Now, you might think the gods would be pleased that a terrible asura had stopped trampling things and started praying. They were not pleased. They were terrified.

Up in Amaravati, the shining city of heaven, Indra, king of the devas, called an emergency meeting.

"Do you know what happens when an asura does tapas for this long?" Indra said, pacing up and down in front of his throne. "The heat of his prayer builds up and up until some god has to come down and give him a boon. And what do asuras always ask for?"

"To live forever," said Agni, the god of fire, gloomily.

"To rule heaven," said Varuna, the god of the oceans.

"To never be defeated by anybody," said Vayu, the god of the wind.

"Exactly," said Indra. "He must be stopped before he finishes. Vayu, go and blow him over."

So Vayu flew down to the Himalayas and blew. He blew a blizzard. He blew so hard that the snow came off the mountain in sheets, pine trees bent flat, and boulders went rolling down the slopes like marbles. WHOOOOSH!

Gajasura did not move. He only folded his left ear down gently over the sparrows' nest so the wind would not touch it, and kept chanting. "Shiva. Shiva. Shiva."

Vayu came back to heaven completely out of breath. "He is like a mountain," he gasped. "You cannot blow over a mountain."

Then Indra himself went down, riding his white elephant Airavata, and threw thunderbolts all around Gajasura. KRAAACK! KA-BOOM! The whole sky flashed purple. The rocks split. The snow boiled into steam.

Gajasura opened one eye, looked at Indra, and closed it again.

"Shiva. Shiva. Shiva."

Indra flew home with his crown on crooked, and the devas sat in their golden hall and wrung their hands and waited for the worst.

But the heat of Gajasura's tapas did not go to heaven. It went somewhere else. It rose up from the snow line, up and up, past the glaciers and the clouds, to the highest, quietest mountain in the world.

It went to Kailasa.

On Kailasa, it was an extremely boring afternoon.

Shiva had been sitting in deep meditation for weeks, still as a stone. When Shiva meditates, nobody on Kailasa is allowed to make any noise, and Shiva's ganas, his wild and wonderful attendants, were finding this very hard. The ganas are not quiet creatures. Some of them have three eyes and some have none. Some are tall as palm trees and some are small as cats. They love to sing and shout and dance and wrestle, and now they had to tiptoe.

Bhringi, the thinnest gana of all, whose legs looked like two sticks, was trying to dance without making a sound. He spun on one toe, very slowly, with his arms out, and wobbled, and fell over into a snowdrift. PHUMPH.

"Shhhh!" hissed a hundred ganas.

Kumbhodara, whose name means "pot-belly" and who was always, always hungry, was sitting behind a rock trying to eat a banana silently. It is impossible to eat a banana silently. Every time he chewed, the ganas nearby glared at him. At last he gave up and put the banana behind his ear for later.

Nandi, the great white bull who carries Shiva wherever he goes, lay beside his master with his chin on his hooves, pretending not to be bored, because he was far too dignified to be bored.

Then the snow around the rocks began to melt.

Drip. Drip. Drip-drip-drip. Little streams began to run down the slopes of Kailasa. The ganas looked at each other in amazement. Snow never melts on Kailasa.

"What is that warmth?" whispered Bhringi, climbing out of his snowdrift.

Shiva opened his eyes.

"Parvati," he said, and his voice was soft and deep and pleased, "there is someone down below who has been calling my name for a very long time."

Parvati came and stood beside him. She was the daughter of Himavan, the king of the mountains, and when she looked down through the clouds, she could see all the way to the snow line, and a grey shape standing on one foot with sparrows in its ear.

She frowned. "Swami, that is Gajasura. Be careful what you give him. Asuras never pray for small things."

Shiva only smiled, the way he always smiled when somebody warned him. People call him Bholashankara, the simple-hearted one, because he has never once in all of time been able to say no to someone who truly loves him. He stood up, and his tiger skin swirled around him, and he patted Nandi on the neck.

"Come, Nandi. Let us go and see what he wants."

Nandi leapt to his feet, delighted to be doing something at last. Shiva climbed onto his back, and in a single breath, with a sound like a waterfall, the great bull carried him down the mountain. They landed in front of Gajasura in a shower of sparkling snow.

"Open your eyes, Gajasura," said Shiva. "I am pleased with your tapas. Ask for whatever you want."

Gajasura's eyes opened.

He saw the tall figure. The ash stripes on the forehead. The tiger skin. The snake curled at the throat. And, shining in the matted hair, a little silver crescent, like a piece of the moon.

The same stranger. The same warm arms. After all these years.

The great asura's eyes filled with tears, and the tears ran down his trunk and froze into little icicles.

"Swami," he said, and his voice was so big and so shaky that the whole valley trembled. "You found me in the snow once, when I was small. You don't remember. You find so many."

"I remember," said Shiva gently.

Gajasura made a sound that was half a sob and half a trumpet. "Then you know. I don't want heaven. I don't want to live forever. I don't want to beat anybody. I only want to never be cold and alone again. Swami, come and live inside me. Stay in my belly, always, so that wherever I go, you go with me."

The wind stopped blowing. The sparrows stopped cheeping. Nandi's ears went flat against his head, and he took a step forward and let out a low, worried moo.

Because Nandi knew the rule. Even the gods must obey it. When a boon is promised, and a wish is asked, the wish must be granted.

Shiva had said, "Ask for whatever you want."

He did not hesitate. He looked at Gajasura with something like tenderness.

"Tathastu," he said. So be it.

Nandi cried out, "Swami, no!"

But Shiva was already growing smaller. Smaller, and smaller, until he was the size of a man, then a child, then a lamp flame, then a single glowing seed of light. And the seed of light floated gently through the air and into Gajasura, and settled deep inside the dark of the asura's great belly.

Gajasura shuddered from his ears to his toes. His grey skin began to glow from the inside, softly, as if he had swallowed the moon. He put both hands on his belly. He felt warm. Warm all the way through, for the first time in his whole life.

He threw back his head and laughed a huge trumpeting laugh that rolled down every valley of the Himalayas. Then he turned and lumbered away down the mountain toward his fortress, humming, with the Lord of the Universe inside him.

The sparrows flew after him. They did not want to lose their ear.

And Nandi was left alone in the snow.

He stood there for a long time. He called, "Swami?" and only the echo answered. He ran after Gajasura and butted him with his horns, and Gajasura did not even notice, as if a fly had bumped into a hill. He ran back to the place where Shiva had stood and sniffed the snow, and the footprints were already filling up. When night came, he did not go home. He lay down right there on the rock with his chin on his hooves, the way he always lay beside his master, and waited.

In the morning, there was frost on his eyelashes and nobody beside him.

Very slowly, with his head hanging so low that his nose almost touched the ground, Nandi began the long climb back to Kailasa alone.

Up on the mountain, nobody knew yet what had happened.

The evening lamps were lit, and Shiva did not come home. The next evening, the lamps were lit again. The ganas waited. Then they worried. Then they began to fall apart.

Without Shiva, nobody played the damaru, his little hourglass drum, and without the damaru, the ganas forgot the rhythm of their dances and kept stepping on each other's feet. Bhringi, who danced only for Shiva, stopped dancing at all and sat on a rock staring at the path. The river Ganga, who lives in Shiva's hair and pours down from it, had nowhere to pour from, and hung in the sky above Kailasa in a confused, sparkling cloud.

And Kumbhodara, who had never in his life refused a meal, took the banana out from behind his ear, looked at it, and put it back.

"I'm not hungry," he said, and all the ganas gasped, because that was the most frightening thing that had happened yet.

Parvati waited. Days turned into weeks. She sent her maids Jaya and Vijaya to look for him. She sent messengers down every side of the mountain. And at last, one grey afternoon, a white shape came slowly up the path, and it was Nandi, alone, with frost still in his fur and his eyes full of tears.

He told her everything.

"He is inside the asura, Devi," said Nandi. "He gave his word. He cannot come out unless Gajasura lets him go. And Gajasura loves him so much that he will never, never let him go."

The ganas began to wail. Jaya and Vijaya clutched each other. Kumbhodara sat down in the snow with a bump.

Parvati did not cry. She was the daughter of the mountains, and mountains do not cry easily. She sat very still for a long time, so still that a snowflake landed on her eyelash and did not melt. Then she stood up, and when she spoke, her voice was quiet but it carried to every corner of Kailasa.

"Then someone," she said, "must make Gajasura let him go. And I know exactly who can do it."

She went to her brother, Vishnu.

Far away, in the middle of the ocean of milk, on the soft coils of the thousand-headed serpent Adishesha, Vishnu was resting. His eyes were closed, but he heard her before she said a word. He always did.

"Sister," he said, sitting up, "you have come about Shiva."

"You know already?"

"All of heaven knows." Vishnu's eyes were thoughtful, and just a tiny bit amused. "Gajasura has been dancing around his fortress for a month, telling the rocks and trees that he is the only creature in creation who carries God in his tummy. Indra is so worried he has stopped eating."

"Can you bring him back?"

Vishnu was quiet for a moment. The milk-white waves rolled around the serpent bed.

"A boon cannot be broken," he said. "Not by me, not by anyone. Gajasura asked Shiva to stay inside him, and Shiva said yes." Then he smiled, the smile that had once fooled the proud king Bali and a hundred other kings who thought they were clever. "But a boon can be outwitted. Gajasura asked Shiva to stay. He never said what would happen if Gajasura himself decided to give him away."

Parvati stared at him. "Why would he ever give him away?"

"Because," said Vishnu, getting up and stretching, "I am going to ask him for Shiva, very nicely. And he is going to be too proud to say no."

"How?"

"With music," said Vishnu. "With drums. With bells. And with a very, very grumpy bull."

He called for Brahma, the Creator. He called for the devas who could play a drum or blow a horn. He called for two particular ganas from Kailasa, one who could dance and one who could eat. And he sent a message up the mountain to Nandi: "Come at once. And bring a good appetite for embarrassment."

Parvati watched them gather, and for the first time in many weeks, she let herself hope.

Far below, in his fortress of black rock, Gajasura lay on his back in his great hall, patting his glowing belly, humming a lullaby to the god inside him. The sparrows sat on his ear and hummed along.

He did not know that the strangest band of street performers the world has ever seen was already practising for its very first show.