The Child with Six Mothers

A thousand years of the gods had passed since the wedding, and the door of Parvati's rooms on Kailash had not opened.

Down on Meru the gods counted the years. Taraka was still alive, and no son had come to kill him. Vishnu warned them.

"Whoever comes between a husband and a wife pays for it. And once the seed is out, nobody can hold it back. It will become the boy wherever it falls."

They went anyway and praised at the door. Shiva came out. He had held back for years for fear of offending her; now he let the seed fall.

"Take it up, whoever wants it."

A dove came down out of the crowd, swallowed it and flew. The dove was Agni.

Parvati, finding him slow to come back, came to the door and saw what they had done.

"You have made a barren woman of me," she said. "Wicked, selfish, every one of you. Your wives will bear no children." Then, to the fire, with the thing still inside him: "And you will devour everything. You will burn."

She took her husband in and shut the door.

The gods eat what the fire carries, and every god who had taken an offering through Agni was soon heavy with the seed and scorched by it. They lay at her threshold and begged Shiva to let them live.

"Vomit it," he said, and they did: a golden mass as big as a mountain. Agni alone still burned.

"Put it in the womb of a good woman," Shiva told him.

"No woman in the three worlds could hold it," said Agni, "except Parvati."

Narada found the way. "The women who bathe at dawn in Magha."

Six of the seven sages' wives came out of the winter river shivering and went to the fire to warm themselves; Arundhati, the seventh, would not, and told them not to. The seed entered the six through the roots of their hair. Their husbands cast them off. They set the burning thing down on Himavat's peak; the mountain threw it into the Ganga; the Ganga left it in a forest of reeds. There, on the sixth bright day of Margashirsha, it became a boy.

At Kailash, nobody had told Parvati anything. Milk came to her breasts.

Six Krittikas came down to bathe and found a child crying in the reeds. All six wanted to hold him first, and while they argued he settled it himself: he grew six faces and drank from all six at once. They carried him home, named him Karttikeya after themselves, and loved him more than their lives.

Years went by. One day Parvati said to Shiva, "Where did your seed go? It fell on the ground, not in me. Did they hide it? Is there a child somewhere?"

Shiva called the witnesses of all things and asked. They looked at one another. Then Brahma: "It fell to the ground." The fire: "I dropped it on the mountain." The Ganga: "I left it in the reeds." The Sun: "I saw him crying, and I had to set." The Moon: "The Krittikas took him home." And the Dusk: "They call him Karttikeya."

Then Parvati sent for her son.

The ganas went down in force, Virabhadra and Nandi at their head, and surrounded a house where six women were raising a boy. The Krittikas saw the spears and turned to him.

"What do we do?"

"Do not be afraid," said the boy. "Nothing can stop me."

Nandi came to the door. "Your father sent us. Your mother urged the search. He will crown you, and you will kill Taraka. These good women can no more hold you than a dry tree holds a fire."

"These women nursed me," the boy answered. "They are wise, and they are part of me. They are my mothers. And Parvati is my mother too."

He took his leave quickly, because it could not be done slowly, and went up the mountain. The brother his mother made for him with her own hands, and the race the two of them ran, are told in How Ganesha Got His Elephant Head and The Race Around the World.

In the Tamil country the boy is Murugan, and his mother does not have to send for him.

Surapadman and his brothers, Simhamukha and Taraka, sons of Surasa by the sage Kashyapa, had won their boons from Shiva and turned them on the gods. Heaven was emptied; Indra's people were put to menial work. Indra, Brahma and Vishnu climbed to Kailash. Kama was sent in to wake the lord and was burnt for it. Then Shiva, who could not touch the demon in his usual shape because of the boons he had given, took a shape with six faces, and from the third eye of each face came a light that filled all space.

He gathered it in his hands.

"Carry this to the Ganga," he said, and gave it to Vayu and Agni.

The wind tired and handed it to the fire; the fire could not hold it and dropped it in the river; and the river, who could not bear it either, carried it to a small pond ringed with sara reeds, the Saravana Poigai. There, on the water, the light became six babies, each on his own lotus.

Six Karthigai maidens found them and nursed them, one to each. Brahma and Vishnu and the gods came to look. Then Shiva came, and Parvati with him.

"Six," said Shiva.

She went down to the water's edge and looked at the six of them for a while. Then she bent and gathered them up, all six at once, into her arms, and in her arms they became one child with six faces and twelve hands.

"One," said Parvati.

They called him Skanda, the one who leaped out and the one who was joined; Kartikeya, for the maidens who had fed him; Saravanabhava, for the pond; and in the Tamil country, Murugan. He led the army of the gods against the asuras.

Every year in the month of Aippasi the Tamil country keeps six days of fasting for him, the Kanda Shashti, and on the sixth evening, on the shore at Tiruchendur, the vel is laid on the demon's neck and Surapadman's heads fall. The next day they keep his wedding.