As the Punjab tells it
Katas Raj temple tradition · 2 min read
Long ago, the people of the Salt Range say, Shiva lived in those hills with his wife Sati, the daughter of Daksha. It was there, among the white rocks and the thorn trees, that they spent the years of their marriage.
Then Daksha held a great sacrifice and invited every god but one. He did not invite his son-in-law, because he despised him, the ash-smeared wanderer of the burning grounds.
"I will go anyway," Sati said. "He is my father. A daughter does not need an invitation to her father's house."
"Do not go," said Shiva. "He will insult you, and you will not bear it."
She went. In front of all the gods her father mocked her husband, and Sati stood up in the sacrificial hall. "I will not keep a body that came from you," she said to Daksha, and she gave herself to the fire and was gone.
When the news reached Shiva, his rage tore the sacrifice apart. But when the rage was over, the grief came. He lifted Sati's body from the ashes and put it on his shoulder, and he walked out across the world with it, not knowing where he was going. He would not put her down. He would not stop. The worlds trembled as he went.
As he walked, he wept. The tears ran down his face and fell, and two of them, the people of the Punjab say, fell to the earth and became lakes. One fell in the desert of Rajasthan, and became the lake at Pushkar. The other fell in the hills of the Salt Range, among the rocks where he and Sati had lived together, and became the pool of Katas.
"The earth has two eyes," the old saying goes. "Pushkar is the right eye, and Katas is the left."
The pool at Katas was deep and clear and green, and people said it had no bottom. Its name, Katas, comes from kataksha, the Sanskrit for tearful eyes, and in Persian it was called Chashm-i-Alam, the eye of sorrow. Temples to Shiva grew up round it, built by the Hindu Shahi kings and by others after them.
The Pandavas came there in their exile, the Punjab says, and it was at this pool that the Yaksha stopped them and asked his questions, and Yudhishthira answered and brought his brothers back to life.
And every year at Baisakhi, when the sun entered Aries and the wheat was ripening, people came from all over the Punjab to bathe in Shiva's tears. Ascetics and holy men came. Whole families came, with their tents and their best clothes. They went down into the water and washed away their sins, and came out into the spring.