Gajamukha: The Beheading and the Elephant Head

Identity beyond the body

Shiva returns to Kailasa and finds a boy at the door who will not let him past. A battle ends with the boy headless on the floor. Parvati's grief shakes the cosmos. An elephant's head is fixed on the boy and he rises as Ganesha, the god who has lost one identity and been given another.

At the Door of the Bath

The air on Mount Kailasa is thin and cold. The path up to Parvati's chamber is cut from white rock, smoothed by the soft feet of her companions, lined on one side with a thin curtain of running water from the snow above. It is mid-morning. The doors of her chamber, plain wood with a brass ring, are half open. Inside, a copper vessel of warm water is steaming. Parvati is alone. Shiva has gone down the mountain to wander, as he often does, with no fixed time of return.

She wants to bathe. She wants no one at the door. There is no servant outside. The ganas, Shiva's wild attendants, take their cues from him and not from her, and even Nandi, the great bull at the gate of the mountain, will step aside if his master comes back. So Parvati, daughter of Himavan, does what only the mother of the cosmos can do. She takes a small lump of turmeric paste from the bowl beside her, mixes it with a drop of the oil from her own body, and rolls it in her palms. She breathes on it once. The paste warms in her hand and, in the next breath, stands up beside her as a boy of perhaps seven years.

He has her cheekbones. He looks her in the eye without fear. She does not name him. She says only this: Stand at the door. Let no one in until I tell you. The boy bows. He picks up a small staff from the floor of the chamber. He walks to the door. He sits down on the step. Parvati closes the inner door behind him and steps into the warm water.

The boy at the door does not yet know his name. He does not know his mother's name. He does not know his father's name, or that his father is on the path right now, walking back up to the mountain, in a mood the cosmos has learned to clear from. All he knows is that he is to keep the door. That is enough.