Tarakasura Vadha: Devasena and Valli

The spear, the victory, two marriages

A demon's boon says only Shiva's son can kill him. The six-day-old boy Kartikeya lifts a spear of fire and ends him. Then come two marriages: Indra's daughter Devasena, a match of duty, and Valli, a tribal girl of the Tamil forests, a match of love. Two wives, two worlds, one Murugan.

A Boy on a Battlefield

It is the seventh day of the boy's life. He is sitting on the back of a peacock, in the grass at the edge of the Saravana lake, in the foothills of the southern range. The sun is hot. The lake smells of reed and mud. Around the boy, nine hundred million celestial soldiers are forming ranks. He is six days old. He has six faces. In his small right hand he holds a spear that has just been placed there by his mother Parvati. The spear is so bright that the soldiers cannot look at it directly.

In front of him, on the far side of the field, is Tarakasura, the demon who has held the three worlds hostage for years. Tarakasura is the size of a small mountain. His army covers the horizon. He has a boon from Brahma that says no being in creation can kill him, except a son born from Shiva's own seed. The boon was meant to be unbreakable. No one believed Shiva, the world-renouncer, would ever have a son.

The boy on the peacock is that son. His name today is Kartikeya. By the end of this story he will also be called Skanda, Murugan, Subrahmanya, Guha, Shanmukha. He has not yet learned to speak in full sentences. In about an hour, he will throw the spear.

This lesson is the story of that throw, and of what came after it. The throw was the easy part.

Why Tarakasura Could Not Be Killed

To understand why a six-day-old child has been put in charge of a war, walk back a generation. Tarakasura was no ordinary demon. He was the son of the asura Vajranaka, and from the time he was a boy he had one ambition: to make himself unkillable.

He went to the Pariyatra mountains. He stood on one toe. He stopped eating. He stopped drinking. He stared at the sun. He did this for a hundred years, then a thousand, then ten thousand. The flesh fell away from his bones. His tapas grew so hot that the gods began to suffer in heaven. Brahma himself came down and stood in front of him and asked what he wanted.