The Boy Who Rode Home on a Tiger

When the gods killed the buffalo demon Mahishasura, his sister Mahishi swore revenge. She did penance until Brahma came to her, and she asked him for a boon.

"Let no one be able to kill me," she said, "except a son born of Hari and Hara, of Vishnu and Shiva."

Since two gods could not have a son, she thought herself safe, and she went to war on heaven.

But a son was born. On the bank of the river Pampa, in the forests of Kerala, the king of Pandalam, Rajashekara, was out hunting when he heard a baby crying. He found a little boy lying by the river, alone and perfectly calm, with a chain of gold round his neck.

The king had no children. He stood there not knowing what to do, and an old ascetic came out of the trees.

"Take him home," said the ascetic. "Call him Manikandan, the one with the golden neck. When he is twelve you will know who he is."

So the king took the baby home, and the queen loved him, and the whole kingdom loved him. Then the queen had a son of her own.

The king's chief minister wanted the throne for himself, and Manikandan was in his way. He went to the queen.

"The king will make the foundling his heir," he told her, "and not your own son."

The queen was frightened, and she let herself be persuaded. She took to her bed and said her head was splitting. The minister's physician came and examined her gravely.

"Only one thing will cure her," he said. "The milk of a tigress."

No one would go into the forest for tigress's milk, and that was the point. But Manikandan stood up.

"I will go," he said.

The king begged him not to. The boy would not be stopped, and he went alone into the forest.

There, in the hills, he met Mahishi. She had come down from the world of the gods, where she had been fighting, and he threw her down out of the sky. She fell on the bank of the Azhutha river, and he danced on her body until she died. Out of her rose a beautiful young woman, freed at last from the demon's shape, and she asked him to marry her.

"I have vowed to stay unmarried," said Manikandan. "But go to the hill beside mine. In a year when no new pilgrim comes to me, I will marry you."

She went, and she is still waiting there, as Malikappuram, the goddess on the neighbouring hill. Every year new pilgrims come.

Then the gods came to the boy. Indra took the shape of a tiger, and the other gods became tigers and tigresses, and Manikandan rode home to Pandalam on the tiger with the whole herd behind him. The people ran screaming into their houses. The queen's headache was gone at once.

He was twelve that day. He told the king who he was, and said he must leave.

"Build me a temple," he said, "where my arrow falls."

He shot an arrow into the hills, and it fell on the hill of Sabari. The temple was built there, and the image set up, they say, by Parashurama himself, on the day of Makara Sankranti.

The pilgrims on the road to Sabarimala tell how a son of Shiva and Vishnu could be born at all.

There was a demon, Bhasmasura, who had been given the power to turn anyone to ash by touching their head. He tried it first on Shiva, who had given him the boon, and Shiva ran. Vishnu came to the rescue as Mohini, the most beautiful woman ever seen. She danced, and the demon danced with her, copying every move, until she put her hand on her own head, and he did the same, and burned.

Shiva had seen Mohini. Afterwards he asked Vishnu to show him that form again. Vishnu did, and Shiva lost his heart to her and ran after her.

The Bhagavata Purana tells the chase after a different occasion, the churning of the ocean, when Vishnu had used the same form to take the nectar from the demons. Shiva heard of it and came with Parvati to ask Vishnu to show it to him. Vishnu smiled and vanished, and Shiva found himself in a garden where a young woman was playing with a ball. The wind caught her garment, she looked at him sideways, and Shiva forgot Parvati and everything else and ran after her. Wherever his seed fell as he ran, gold and silver came into being. Then he came to himself, and Vishnu praised him for how quickly he had done so. The Bhagavata does not speak of a child.

The pilgrims do. From that meeting, they say, a boy was born, the son of Hara and Hari, and he was carried to the bank of the Pampa and left there for a king to find.