The Goddess of the Full Plate

It began, as their quarrels did, with something he said.

They were talking on Kailash, the way they talked, about the world. Shiva had been a long time in meditation and had come back with the view from there.

"All of it is maya," he said. "The mountain, the body, the grain on the plate. Illusion. Nothing in the world of things is real."

"Food too?" said Parvati.

"Food too."

She did not argue with him. The world of things was hers. She had told him so on the ridge above her father's city when she was eight years old: Prakriti makes it, keeps it and ends it. If it was nothing, he could have nothing. She went.

She did not go into the forest this time, and she did not go home to her mother. She simply withdrew herself from the world, and the world found out what she was.

The grain did not come up. The fruit did not set. The cows stood dry. In heaven the gods' plates were empty, and in the world below the demons', and on the earth between them the people's: the three kinds who agree on nothing all went hungry together. The gods, who had never had to ask anyone for anything, went out begging, and found no one with anything to give.

Shiva watched it from the mountain. What he had said was still true, and it was no help to anyone.

Then word came up the mountain. There was one kitchen still open. In Kashi, the city on the Ganga that was his own, a woman was giving food to everyone who came to her door.

He went down. He did not go as the lord of the city, with his bull and his ganas behind him. He took a bowl, and he walked into Kashi on foot like any man with nothing, and came to the door.

There she was: seated, the golden ladle in her right hand and the pot in her left, and the pot was full.

"Alms, mother," said Shiva, and held out the bowl. "Give me alms."

She looked at him for a moment the way she had looked at him on the ridge, when he called a woman a trick of illusion. Then she filled the bowl, and when it was full she fed him herself, with her own hand, the way a mother feeds a child.

He ate. Then he said what he had come to say.

"I called it illusion. To the one who hungers it is not. Brahman may be beyond hunger; the people who worship him are not."

And at her door he made the vow the city still holds him to.

"Whoever comes to Kashi will not go hungry while you are here. Under your care this city will never know hunger or want."

She came back to the world then, and the grain came up.

The hymn the tradition gives to Shankara ends ten of its twelve verses the way Shiva ended his walk, with a plea at her door: give me alms. The eleventh calls her the ever-full one, Shankara's beloved, and asks for the alms that bring knowledge and let go of the rest. The twelfth is the line every pilgrim in Kashi can say for himself: my mother is the goddess Parvati, my father the god Maheshvara, Shiva's people my kin, the three worlds my country.

The temple beside Vishwanath, rebuilt in 1729 by the Peshwa Baji Rao, keeps two images of her. One is brass, and is seen every day. The other is gold, and is shown once a year at Annakut, the day after Diwali, when the city heaps its food before her and Shiva stands at her side with his bowl held out.

In 1752 a poet at the court of Nadia sat down to write the goddess a song, and he gave the famine to her, not to a quarrel.

Bharatchandra Ray wrote the Annada Mangal for Krishnachandra, the king of Nadia, and the first of its three books is hers. It begins where her life does: Sati at Daksha's sacrifice, and her death there; Daksha left standing with a goat's head on his shoulders by Nandi; the mountain's daughter born, grown and married to Shiva. Then the poem comes to what it is for.

Annada, the giver of food, takes the food of the world away. The poet does not stop to argue about illusion. She empties the world, and she waits, and the first beggar at her door is her husband, as hungry as anyone. She feeds him. And Shiva, fed, dances: a loud, stamping, delighted dance, the kind a poet writes with sounds instead of words, so that the verse itself thumps on the floor.

When he can speak he sends for Vishvakarma.

"Build her a temple," he says, and the builder of the gods builds it. "And a city round it." And the city is Kashi, walled and full, and hers.

One man will not have it. The sage Vyasa, who forbids the worship of Shiva and finds Kashi a hard city to live in, announces that he will make a second Kashi of his own. Annada comes to look at it as an old woman and lets him talk, and when he has boasted enough about his city he says the one thing he cannot take back.

"Whoever dies here will become a donkey."

She holds him to it.

After that the poem turns for home. Annapurna sends two of her heavenly servants, Vasundhar and Vasundhara, down into the mortal world, and Harihor, the man Vasundhar becomes, and Bhabananda Majumdar, the king of Nadia's ancestor, carry her worship east into Bengal, so that the goddess of Kashi comes by road and river to the house of the poet's own patron. Every section of the song ends with a line in praise of the king who paid for it.