The Wedding on Kailash

When Shiva finally agreed to marry Parvati, the gods were relieved. They started preparations at once. Brahma himself would officiate. Vishnu would attend as a brother. The mountain Himavat had the wedding feast organised on a scale no court had ever seen — gold plates, silk tents, processions, music, the whole formal pageant a king’s daughter required.

Then came the wedding procession.

A bridegroom in this culture arrives at the bride’s house with his own procession — the baraat — friends and relatives in fine clothes on decorated mounts, the bridegroom himself in the centre, splendid.

Shiva’s procession was different.

He sat on his white bull Nandi as usual — not on an elephant or a chariot. He was smeared with cremation ash, as always. His matted hair was loose. His tiger skin was the same one he had been wearing on the mountain. The snake was around his neck. The trident was in his hand.

Behind him came his ganas — his attendants. They were not the proper gods who normally attend a wedding. They were the most peculiar collection of beings imaginable. Some had two heads. Some had no heads. Some had one eye in the middle of the forehead. Some were ghosts — bhutas and pretas — half-transparent, gliding along the ground. Some were tribes of small, fierce creatures who shouted and danced. Veerabhadra — the one who had destroyed Daksha’s sacrifice — walked among them. There were goblins. There were demons. There were a few sages in proper dress, looking nervous.

This was the wedding procession.

When it reached the gates of Himavat’s palace, Mena — Parvati’s mother, the bride’s mother — looked out of the window.

She fainted.

The Purana lets the scene be funny. Mena had been imagining a great god as bridegroom — Vishnu in his finery, or Indra in his ornaments. She got Shiva, in his actual form, with his actual companions. She went down in a faint and had to be revived.

When she came to, she begged her husband. “Anyone but him! Look at what he has brought with him! Look at him! My daughter is going to live with that?”

Himavat soothed her. The other gods — who knew Shiva — explained patiently. They said: do not look at the ash, look at what is under the ash. They said: Shiva is the lord of the worlds; the form he wears is the form he chooses to wear. They said: your daughter has chosen him with her eyes open. Trust her.

Mena was not soothed easily. But the ceremony proceeded.

Parvati was brought in. She was radiant. Shiva, the Purana adds — and this is the surprising line — transformed himself for her sake during the ceremony. He cleaned the ash off (well, much of it). He combed out the matted hair. He put on proper bridegroom clothes. He looked, for the only time in the literature, like a proper handsome god at his own wedding. Mena, recovering, saw this and was finally able to give her daughter away.

The ceremony was performed. The seven steps around the fire were taken. Brahma officiated. Vishnu blessed. The whole company chanted the wedding mantras.

And as soon as the ceremony was complete and the formal part was over, Shiva — affectionately, deliberately — returned to his usual form. The ash, the hair, the snake, the tiger skin. He looked at Parvati. She laughed once, gently, and said nothing.

She took his arm and they left for Kailash together — Nandi in front, ganas behind, a chariot of light around them.

The wedding was over. The household began.

The next story is one of its consequences: the form they took, once they were married, in which neither of them is wholly separate from the other.