Parvati's austerities purified the grove and transformed it into a holy sanctuary: sacrificial fires burnt in newly-built huts of leaves, the long-standing hostility between warring beasts had disappeared, and the trees honoured all guests by providing them with the fruits they liked.
But when she realised that what she desired was not to be attained by the austerities and meditation she had been practising so far, then, disregarding the delicateness of her body, she embarked upon a path of extreme asceticism.
She, who would feel tired after playing with a ball, plunged into a life of amazingly rigorous practices. Indeed her body seemed made of gold lotuses, being at the same time delicate like a flower and tough like a hard metal.
In summer the lady of slender waist, smiling so very innocently, stood in the middle of four blazing fires, eyes wide open, fixing her gaze on the heavenly ball of fire above her head and refusing to be overpowered by its blinding light.
First, her face, greatly scorched by the rays of the sun, shone like a pink lotus. But gradually, and only around the long corners of her eyes, the skin slowly darkened.
A tree does not ask for water; it simply absorbs whatever it receives. Similarly Parvati would live only on that water ' dew or rain ' that would come to her of its own accord, and on the moon beams dripping with nectar.
Encircled by the four roaring fires and exposed to the fierce rays of the sun, she let herself be completely burnt, and when the showers of the late summer arrived, an intense heat came out of her, as out of a parched earth, and ascended upwards.
The first drops of water remained suspended for a while on her long eye-lashes; then after falling on her lips which they bruised, they broke against the top of her firm breasts. Finally, rolling through the delicate lines of her bust, they reached her deep-chiselled navel.
She stood there, unprotected in the middle of raging tempests, drenched by incessant rains or lashed by the winds, and all she had to rest on was a bare rock. Flashes of lightning, the eyes of the night, at times pierced the darkness and through them the nights bore witness to her extraordinary sacrifice.
Winter came. The cold winds blew and scattered around masses of hardened snow. Unflinchingly she stood in water like a pillar of strength. Yet at night when she heard the plaintive cry of the two chakravaka birds calling each other, she felt the pain of their separation and her soft heart filled with compassion for the two estranged lovers.
The snows had robbed the streams of their beautiful lotuses. But her face, as fragrant as the lotus itself, was reflected at night in the icy waters: shining brightly with the quivering petal of the lower lip, it restored its lost splendour to the streams of the mountain.
Edited by Sweet24 - 13 years ago
Jodha Akbar
Anupamaa
