Part 7 of 12 · 12 minThe Night the Moon Laughed

Before we come to the feast, you should meet someone. He will only appear for a moment tonight, but it is a moment nobody in the three worlds ever forgot.

His name is Chandra, the Moon.

Chandra lived in the matted hair of Shiva, tucked in like a silver hairpin, and from up there he could see everything. He was cool and bright and very, very beautiful, and nobody knew that better than Chandra himself. Every night, when he rose over the snows of Kailasa, he would look down at the frozen lakes, because the lakes made the best mirrors.

"Look at that glow," he would sigh. "Look at that curve. Poets write about me. Lovers sing to me. Children point at me from their mothers' hips. Is there anything in creation more lovely than the Moon?"

The ganas thought he was a bit much. Bhringi, who was thin as a stick and danced everywhere he went, once muttered that if the moon admired himself any harder he would fall into a lake. Nandi said nothing, because Nandi was far too dignified to gossip. But he snorted, and everyone knew what the snort meant.

Remember Chandra. We will need him later.

Now, the feast.

It was the fourth day of the bright fortnight of Bhadrapada, the very day Vinayaka had become Ganapati, lord of all the ganas. And the gods decided that a new king deserves the grandest birthday puja the worlds have ever seen. A puja, if you have never been to one, is worship with lamps and flowers and prayers and, very importantly, food offered to the god.

From the first light of morning, they came.

Brahma came riding his swan, carrying the Vedas and a tall stack of kudumulu, soft steamed rice dumplings, still warm and wrapped in turmeric leaves. Vishnu came with Lakshmi, and Lakshmi herself had made the modakas, little sweet dumplings pinched at the top like closed lotus buds, filled with coconut and jaggery that oozed out golden when you bit them. Indra came on his white elephant Airavata, and Airavata knelt and touched his trunk to Vinayaka's trunk, one elephant to another, and Vinayaka giggled because it tickled. Indra's servants carried laddus in baskets so heavy they had to set them down every few steps.

The sages came from their forests with undrallu, small round balls of rice and dal, made the way their wives made them. The celestial musicians came with pots of panakam, a cool drink of jaggery, black pepper and cardamom that makes your tongue sing. Surya the Sun sent sugarcane, so tall that it had to be carried sideways through the gate. Varuna the lord of the waters sent coconuts. The river goddesses sent bananas, bunches and bunches of them, and payasam, sweet milk pudding, in brass vessels so big that two ganas had to carry each one, arguing the whole way about who was doing more of the lifting.

And down on earth, in thousands of villages, humans shaped little clay images of the elephant-faced god, set them on wooden planks, and laid before them leaf plates of vadapappu, soaked moong dal, and chalimidi, a sweet of rice flour and jaggery. They lit lamps. They rang bells. Jhan, jhan, jhan. And every single offering, from heaven and from earth, arrived in front of Vinayaka.

"Please, eat," said Brahma.

"Please, eat," said Lakshmi.

"Please, please, eat," said a very old farmer's wife in a very small village, and somehow Vinayaka heard her too.

Now, you and I both know what happens when your grandmother says "please, eat." You eat. You cannot say no. It would break her heart. And Vinayaka, who had the biggest ears in all creation and heard every single "please, eat" from every single home, could not say no to any of them.

So he ate.

Beside him sat his best friend Kumbhodara, a gana whose name means "pot-belly", and it suited him perfectly. And beside Kumbhodara sat Mooshika, the mouse who had once been the demon Mushikasura, now sleek and grey and very interested in laddus.

"I bet," said Kumbhodara, cracking his knuckles, "that I can eat more undrallu than you, mouse."

"You bet wrong," said Mooshika, his whiskers quivering. "I once ate a whole kingdom's harvest in a single night."

"That was stealing. This is a contest. Totally different."

"Boys," said Vinayaka, with his mouth full of modaka, "be nice. It's a puja."

But he did count for them. One undralla. Two undrallu. Ten. Twenty. The ganas gathered around and began to cheer. "Kum-bho-da-ra! Moo-shi-ka!" Bhringi danced in circles around them. At forty, Kumbhodara slowed down. At fifty-one, Mooshika lay on his back with his little paws on his round tummy and whispered, "I surrender. But only because they are too big for my mouth."

"Ha!" said Kumbhodara, and fell asleep sitting up.

Vinayaka, meanwhile, had not stopped at all. Brahma's kudumulu were gone. Lakshmi's modakas were gone. The laddus, the bananas, the payasam, the panakam. Every time he thought, now I am full, a new leaf plate would appear, with a new pair of hopeful eyes above it, and he would say, "Oh, all right. Just one." And then he would eat the whole plate, because it seemed rude to leave the rest.

By the time the sun went down behind the peaks, Vinayaka's belly was as round as a temple bell and as tight as a drum. When Bhringi tapped it, just for fun, it went boom.

"I should go home," said Vinayaka, very slowly, as if even his words were full. "It is my birthday, and I have not yet touched Amma and Appa's feet. A son should bow to his parents on his birthday."

He climbed onto Mooshika.

Mooshika's legs went flat.

"Swami," said the mouse, in a small squashed voice, "with the greatest respect, and all my love, what did you eat?"

"Everything," said Vinayaka honestly. "Can you walk?"

"I can try," said Mooshika. "I cannot promise."

And so they set off, up the long road to Kailasa, in the dark.

It was a very wobbly ride. Mooshika took three steps and stopped to breathe. He took three more and wobbled to the left. He took two more and wobbled to the right, and Vinayaka had to hold on to his ears. Every time the mouse stumbled on a stone, Vinayaka's belly went boing, and every time his belly went boing, Mooshika groaned. Behind them, Kumbhodara had woken up and was following with a lantern, humming.

"Why did they build the mountain so steep?" panted Mooshika.

"Appa likes it high," said Vinayaka. "He says you can see everything from up there."

"Then Appa should carry you."

They passed a snake crossing the path, and Mooshika jumped, because even a mouse who used to be a demon does not like snakes, and Vinayaka nearly tumbled off. They passed a frozen stream where the ice creaked under them, and they all held their breath until they reached the other side. And somewhere around the middle of the night, up in Shiva's hair, the moon woke up and began to shine.

Chandra was in a wonderful mood. He had just admired himself in every lake on the mountain, and he was glowing his very brightest.

At last, at the top of the road, the palace gates came into view, with the lamps still lit in the courtyard. Shiva and Parvati were sitting on the steps, waiting up for their son, the way parents do. And when they saw him coming, round as a pumpkin, wobbling on his exhausted mouse, with a gana holding a lantern behind him, they both smiled.

"Our boy has had a good birthday," Parvati whispered.

"Our boy has had everyone's birthday," Shiva whispered back.

Vinayaka slid off Mooshika, who flopped flat on the stones like a grey handkerchief. He waddled up to his parents. He stood in front of them and put his palms together.

"Amma. Appa. Namaskaram." And he tried to bow.

He could not.

He bent forward, and his belly bumped into the air in front of him and stopped him. He tried again, reaching down with his hands toward their feet, and his hands stopped far, far short, waving at the ground. He bent his knees and nearly rolled backwards, and Kumbhodara had to catch him. He tried bowing sideways. He tried leaning on his trunk. His ears flapped with effort. His face went warm. And he was so determined, so serious about touching his parents' feet on his birthday, that his tongue poked out of the corner of his mouth.

Up in Shiva's hair, Chandra looked down.

He saw the round little boy with the elephant's face, puffing and wobbling and failing to bow, his ears flapping like washing on a line, his trunk waving, his tongue sticking out.

And Chandra, the most beautiful thing in the night sky, laughed.

It was not a kind laugh. It was not the laugh of a friend who laughs with you and then helps you up. It was a bright, silvery, mocking laugh, a laugh that said, look at the funny fat boy, a laugh that rang across the courtyard and bounced off the snow and echoed down every valley of the Himalayas.

Everything went still.

There is a saying in our villages: when a mocking eye falls on something, even a stone will crack. Grandmothers say it when they draw a black dot on a baby's cheek to keep away the evil eye.

And at that laugh, Vinayaka's poor, overstuffed belly split open.

It happened quietly. There was a small sound, like a ripe fruit giving way. Kudumulu and undrallu and laddus rolled out across the courtyard stones. And the brave boy who had guarded his mother's door, who had tamed Mushikasura, who had won the race around the worlds, folded softly down in front of the very feet he had been trying to touch, and lay still.

Kumbhodara dropped his lantern. Mooshika sat up and squeaked, "Swami?" Nandi, at the gate, lowered his great head and made a sound like a sob.

Parvati did not scream at first. She could not. She knelt and gathered her son into her lap, his trunk limp across her arm, and for a long moment she only held him. Then she lifted her face toward the moon.

Chandra had stopped laughing. He had gone very pale, even for a moon. He tried to slide behind a lock of Shiva's hair.

There was nowhere to hide.

"You," said Parvati.

Her voice was quiet, and that was the most frightening thing about it.

"You are proud of your beauty. You laughed at a child who was trying to honour his parents. You mock what you do not understand. Then hear me. From this moment, whoever looks at you shall be touched by disgrace. Whoever sees your face shall be blamed for things they never did. People will call them thieves and liars when they are innocent. Let them carry the stain of lies, as you carry the stain of what you have done tonight."

The moon's silver light turned grey and cold, like old ashes.

All across the three worlds, people who had been looking up at the night sky felt a chill and turned their faces away. Mothers pulled children indoors. Poets tore up their moon poems. Lovers who had promised to meet by moonlight met in the dark instead, and bumped their heads. The frozen lakes of Kailasa, which had always held Chandra's reflection, now showed only a dull grey smudge. For the first time since the world was made, nobody wanted to look at the Moon.

But Parvati was not thinking about the moon anymore. She was only thinking about her boy.

Shiva knelt beside her. There were tears in his eyes. He had brought this child back once already, on these very steps. He could not bear to think he might fail.

"Devi," he said softly, "he is our son. He is the Lord Who Comes First. The worlds cannot begin anything without him. He cannot be gone. We will not let him be gone."

He laid his great ash-covered hand over the torn belly. Parvati laid her small hand over his. And together, the Father of the Universe and the Mother of the Universe breathed their life into the child between them.

The spilled food shimmered and melted away like morning mist. The wound began, very slowly, to close. But it would not close all the way. Something was needed to hold it.

Shiva looked around the courtyard. Then he reached up to his own throat and lifted the great serpent Vasuki, who had lived coiled around his neck for longer than anyone could remember.

"Old friend," Shiva said, "hold him together for me."

Vasuki flicked his tongue once, as if to say, of course. The snake slid down Shiva's arm, poured himself across Vinayaka's round belly, and wound around it, once, twice, three times, and tied himself in a neat knot at the front, like a sacred belt.

The courtyard held its breath.

Vinayaka's trunk twitched.

His chest rose. His big ears gave one small flap. His eyes opened, blinked at the lamplight, and found his mother's face.

"Amma," he said weakly. Then he looked down at the snake around his middle, and then up at Chandra, and then back at his mother. "I'm sorry. I think I ate too much."

Parvati laughed and cried at the same time, and hugged him so tightly that Vasuki hissed, "Careful, Devi, careful, I am holding things in here."

Mooshika burst into tears and licked Vinayaka's hand. Kumbhodara picked up his lantern and danced a very bad dance. Bhringi danced a very good one. Nandi turned away and pretended there was snow in his eye.

"Next year," Vinayaka whispered to Kumbhodara, "remind me to eat only half."

"I will," said Kumbhodara. "But you won't listen."

And that, if you have ever wondered, is why in every picture of Vinayaka you will ever see, in every temple and every home, there is a snake tied around his belly like a belt.

That night Vinayaka slept in his mother's lap, and everyone on Kailasa slept too, finally, happily.

Everyone except the Moon, who hung grey and ashamed in the sky and could not sleep at all.

Because a curse, once spoken by the Mother, does not simply float back into her mouth. It had already flown out across the worlds like a seed on the wind. It was looking for somewhere to land.

And the first people it found were people who had done nothing wrong at all.