The Girl on Trikuta Mountain

In the village of Hansali, near where the town of Katra stands now, there lived a brahmin called Shridhar. He was very poor and very devout, and every day he worshipped the goddess, though he had almost nothing to offer her.

One day a little girl came to him. He had never seen her before.

"Hold a feast," she told him. "Invite the whole village, and all the holy men in the hills. Feed them all."

"With what?" said Shridhar. "I can barely feed myself."

"Invite them," said the girl.

He did, though he was sick with worry, because he could not refuse her. On the day, the people came, the villagers and the sadhus, more than his house could hold. And the girl served them. She went from guest to guest and gave each of them whatever they wanted, and however many came, the food never ran short.

One guest was not satisfied. He was Bhairon Nath, a Tantric, a disciple of the yogi Gorakhnath, and he had come with his own followers.

"I want meat," he said. "And wine."

"This is a brahmin's feast," said the girl. "There is no meat and no wine here. Eat what everyone else is eating."

Bhairon looked at her more closely. He saw that she was no ordinary child, and he wanted to find out what she was, and he reached out to seize her.

She vanished from his hand and ran, up into the Trikuta mountains behind the village, the three-peaked hills. He went after her.

On the way up she grew thirsty, and her companion with her, and she shot an arrow into the ground. Water sprang up. That stream is the Banganga, the river of the arrow, and she washed her hair in it. Further up she stopped and looked back to see if he was coming, and where she stood her footprints stayed in the rock. That place is Charan Paduka, the footprints.

Higher still she found a narrow cave, shaped like a womb, and went inside, and sat in meditation, and for nine months he could not find her. That cave is Adhkuwari, and it is called Garbh Joon, the womb.

At last Bhairon found it. As he came in at one end, she struck the back wall with her trident, broke through it and climbed on up the mountain, to a cave near the top.

He followed her even there. At the mouth of that cave she turned to face him, and she was no longer a little girl. She was Mahakali, black and terrible, and with one blow she struck off his head. His body fell at the mouth of the cave. His head flew through the air and landed on a peak above.

And there, as he died, Bhairon knew who she was.

"Mother," he said, "forgive me."

She forgave him. More than that, she gave him a gift.

"Anyone who comes to me," she said, "will come to you as well. Their pilgrimage will not be finished until they have climbed to where your head lies."

Then she left her human body behind and became stone: a rock in the cave with three heads on it, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati. Shridhar, grieving, found the cave in a dream, and spent the rest of his life worshipping there. His descendants still keep a share in her worship.

The pilgrims also tell how the girl came to be on the mountain at all, long before Shridhar's feast.

Once, in an earlier age, the three great goddesses, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati, gathered their light together into one new goddess, to protect the good. She was called Vaishnavi, and she was born on earth, in the south of India, in the house of a man called Ratnakar.

She was strange from the first, and holy, and as she grew she wanted one thing only, which was Vishnu himself, as her husband. She went into the forest to do tapas for him.

In that age Vishnu was on the earth as Rama, and one day Rama came through the forest where she sat. She knew him at once, and stood up, and asked him to marry her.

"I cannot," said Rama. "In this life I have made a vow to have one wife, and she is Sita."

"Then what shall I do?" said Vaishnavi.

"Wait," said Rama. "When the dark age comes, I will come again, as Kalki. Then I will marry you. Until then, go north. There is a mountain with three peaks, Trikuta. Find the cave there, and stay in it, and help everyone who comes to you."

So she went north to the mountain, and sat down in her cave, and she is waiting still. It is because of this that her worshippers say she is a virgin goddess, who eats no meat and is waited on by no husband, only by her pilgrims.