The Goddess from the Poison

The demon Daruka had prayed until Brahma gave him a boon, and he had chosen it carefully. No god could kill him, and no man. Only a woman.

He did not think a woman would try.

He drove the gods out of heaven and made them his servants, and the sacrifices stopped, because nobody dared to make an offering that Daruka had not allowed. When the gods crept away to Brahma to complain, he could only tell them what he had done. They went together to Shiva.

"Only a woman can kill him," said Brahma.

Shiva turned to Parvati.

"Will you?" he said.

Parvati did not answer. She went into Shiva's body, the way water goes into water, and was gone. Inside him she found the poison he had swallowed long ago when the gods and demons churned the ocean, the dark poison that had stuck in his throat and turned it blue. She took it for her body, and she came out of him again as someone else.

She was black, as black as the poison. She had a third eye in her forehead like his, and a trident in her hand, and a crowd of ghosts and flesh-eaters behind her. The gods saw her and ran.

"I am Kali," she said. "Where is he?"

She went out with her ghosts and found Daruka and his army, and fought them, and killed him.

But when he was dead she was still angry. Her anger had been made from poison, and it did not go away because the enemy had. It went on burning, and the world began to burn with it, the forests and the towns and the people in them.

Shiva saw it, and did not fight her. He went to the burning ground, where the dead are cremated, and took the shape of a little baby, and lay down among the ashes, and cried.

Kali heard the baby crying. She stopped. She came and looked at him, and picked him up, and held him to her breast, and fed him.

He drank, and as he drank her milk he drank her anger too, all of it, until there was none left.

Then, at twilight, he got up out of her arms as himself, and danced in the burning ground with his ghosts, and she danced with him, until she was calm.

In Kerala the demon is Darika, and he and his brother won from Brahma a boon that no man could kill them. But a curse came with the boon, as curses do, that a woman would.

Darika conquered the three worlds. The sage Narada went to Kailasa with the news.

"Only a woman," he said, "and he is not afraid of any woman alive."

Shiva opened his third eye, and out of the fire of it came Bhadrakali, huge and dark and burning. The gods gave her their weapons. She mounted the Vetala, the great ghost, and rode out to fight.

Darika's wife, Manodari, had a secret mantra that would keep her husband safe; the goddess learned it from her by a trick and took it away. Then Bhadrakali met Darika on the battlefield, and they fought all night, and at last she cut off his head and carried it to Shiva.

That whole night is still fought every year. After the rice harvest, in the Bhagavati temples of central Kerala, the villagers perform Mudiyettu.

First, on the temple floor, they draw the goddess in coloured powders, a huge figure of Kali with her weapons, and sing to her until she is present. Then the play begins. Narada comes in with the news, and Shiva sends out the goddess, and Darika and his general Danavendra strut and boast in towering painted headdresses. A comic character, Kooli, teases the crowd between the fighting.

"Where is the woman who will kill me?" Darika shouts.

She comes, and the village is her army, and the battle goes on by torchlight until near dawn, when the demon falls and the goddess has her head.