The Hill of Fire

It began as a game.

Shiva had spent the day pleasing Uma with songs and dice in his jewelled court, and she came up behind him and put her hands over his three eyes: the sun, the moon and the fire.

The light went out. Half a moment of his is crores of our years, and for that half-moment nothing moved. The gods withered, the Vedas lost their shine, every creature faded, and only Prakriti was left standing in the dark. The sages who could see inward knew where it came from, and prayed.

"Gauri," said Shiva, "take your hands off my eyes."

She did, and the worlds came back.

He was smiling when he turned to her. "You did that without thinking, child. You, the mother of the universe. I end the worlds at their proper time; you ended them early for a joke."

"Then tell me what I must do."

That moved him. "What penance can I set you? You are my own self. None is owed. But you keep the path of dharma for everyone, so do one anyway, and let it be for the world and not for you. Go to Kanchi, to the Kampa river and the single mango tree. I will be in your mind the whole time."

At Kanchi she put on bark and rudraksha, ate gleaned grain, bathed three times a day and made a linga of sand on the riverbank. Then Shiva sent the Kampa down in flood to test her. Her friends screamed at her to run. She put both arms round the sand linga and held it, and when the water went down the linga carried the marks of her embrace.

"Let go," said a voice out of the air. "The flood is gone. This linga will be great for ever. Now go to the red hill, to Gautama, and he will show you his own light."

She told the gods to stay and worship the linga she had marked. "I am called Kamakshi," she said. "Whoever bows to me by that name will have what they wish."

At Arunachala, Gautama was out gathering twigs. When he came back his hermitage was a city of jewelled halls, and he ran.

The gods came to her there, hunted by the demon Mahisha, and asked her to kill him.

"I will not kill a man who has done nothing," she said. "Let him come."

She set four Batukas on four hills to watch and went on with her penance. Mahisha, hunting, found her there, and came in disguised as an old man and offered her himself, his kingdom and the nine treasures.

She laughed. "Only a strong man will do. Show me your strength."

"Who are you to ask?"

She stood up as Durga. He swelled into a buffalo the size of Meru. The three gods quietly handed her their weapons, and she mounted her lion and sent him an envoy with a monkey's face: give up your pride, or bring your army. He brought it, and her yoginis ate it. Then he came at her himself, as buffalo, lion, tiger, elephant, warrior and buffalo again, until Gautama called to end it. She pinned him with the trident, sat on him, and took his head with the sword.

In his open throat she saw a linga. He had been a devotee of Shiva. She lifted it to worship it, and it stuck to her palm.

"I have killed a devotee," she said to Gautama. "Tell me what to do."

A lake of every tirtha, he said; three baths a day with the linga in your hand; at the month's end, worship the hill. On the Krittika evening of Karttika she asked the linga to show her his true form, and the hill blazed like crores of suns and a golden Purusha came out of it.

"The fault was his. He wore me without being given me. You are Apitakucha now, and you will protect my devotees."

"Then let your light be seen on this hill every year on this day, so that everyone may be freed."

"So be it," said Shiva, and went back into the mountain.

She walked round the hill with her women as if it were the marriage fire, and Shiva took away her shyness and sat her on his lap, and the separation was over.

Tiruvannamalai tells it shorter, and tells it with a lamp.

The goddess, the temple says, put her hands over Shiva's eyes for a joke, and the joke put out every light there was. The whole earth went dark. It was Shiva who ended that: he opened the third eye in his forehead, and by its light the world could see again. She asked his forgiveness. He did not scold her. He sent her south, to the plain where the pillar of fire that Brahma and Vishnu could not measure had cooled into a red hill, and told her to do her tapas at the foot of it, at the ashram of the sage Gautama.

She lived there as an ascetic, a princess in bark cloth. While she was there a buffalo demon, Mahishasura, came to break her penance, and the quiet penitent at the hermitage stood up as Durga and killed him where he stood.

On the full moon of Karthigai Shiva took her back. Not beside him, the temple says, but into him: he made her the left half of his own body, and the god of the hill has been half woman ever since. The temple's greatest night is that night. At dusk on Karthigai Deepam a beacon is lit on the summit of the hill, seen from far across the plain, and the people say it is two things at once, the hill showing itself as the pillar of light it was, and the evening the goddess was taken back into her husband.

The hill is walked, not climbed. The girivalam goes fourteen kilometres round the base of it, barefoot, on every full moon and on the night of Shivaratri, and the walkers are doing what she did, going round the mountain as a bride goes round the fire. Inside the temple the goddess is Unnamulai Ammai, and the saint Manikkavacakar sang of Annamalai and Unnamulai together, the hill and its lady, in his Tiruvempavai.

What the temple keeps is the ending the Purana only reaches for. The Purana seats her on his lap; the temple puts her inside him. Both say the same thing about the hill: that on one evening in the year it is not a hill at all.