The Contours of Darkness
I was never born. I was spilled.
When Shiva's seed rose like Venus into the cranium of Sati—that crystalline abode, that Dhruvaloka, that Jeshophet Abyss—I was the shadow it cast. Bheemlochan. Belphigor. The dark that follows illumination the way thirst follows salt.
My father held my mother's eyes in his palms, there inside the cave of her skull, and she laughed and closed his fingers over them. A game. A moment's play. But gods are not like us; their games become architecture, their blindness becomes progeny, their blindness became me.
Thus: Andhakasur. Belial. Tamas. The Ram.
---
I. The Cave
Parvati called me her little darkness.
She held me for seven days only, there in the Wilderness of Mendes where the acacia trees bend toward nothing. She called herself Sei'rim then, Avanti, Ajaiba Binte Ebliss—Daughter of Ebliss, which is to say daughter of the falling one, which is to say daughter of her own becoming. She had left Shiva's side and wandered into the forest, and I was the child she found waiting.
I could not see her. I was born blind as the god who made me, blind as the moment of my making, blind as the space between one breath and the next. But I could feel her—the weight of her hand, the coolness of her sari's edge, the way the air changed when she entered a clearing.
She named me Lambakarna, for the ears that grew large trying to hear her. She named me Bhairav, for the terror I was not yet wise enough to feel. She named me child, and for seven days I was.
Then Shiva's messengers came, and she released me into the world like a lantern without flame.
---
II. The Boon
Hiranyaksha found me wandering.
The Deer-Eyed Demon, they called him, for the softness in his gaze. He was not soft. His sons beat me in the courtyards of his palace, and I learned that blindness does not prevent pain but merely makes it a surprise, each time, arriving without announcement.
I grew in the spaces between blows. I grew in the corners of Hiranyaksha's kingdom, in the shadow of his golden throne, in the silence after his sons tired of their sport. I grew the way weeds grow—not because anyone wanted it, but because the earth will take whatever is offered.
When I was old enough to find my way, I traveled to Brahma.
The Creator sat on his lotus, four faces turning toward four directions, and none of them looked at me. I knelt. I did not know the proper words, so I said nothing.
He gave me the boon not because I asked but because he saw, in his fourfold vision, what I might become. He touched my eyes—the useless ones, the sealed ones, the Ram's eyes, the idiot's eyes—and said:
You will not see light. You will never see form. But you will know substance. You will know the weight and texture and heat of all that exists. You will know matter as the sculptor knows clay, as the lover knows skin, as the drowning know water. This is your Pragyaparamita. This is your Vajrayana. Go.
I went.
---
III. The Rain
I conquered heaven first.
This is less impressive than it sounds. To conquer what you cannot see is simply to move through it until no one stops you. I moved through Indra's court, and the thunderbolt could not strike what refused to be visible. I moved through the gardens of Nandanavana, and the celestial dancers felt my presence as a chill along their spines. I moved through the halls of the ancestors, and they whispered that something had returned that should have remained gone.
I conquered earth second.
This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
This took longer. Earth is stubborn; it has been conquered before and remembers the shape of the boot. I pressed my palms to its soil, its stone, its cities, and I felt the pulse of all that lived upon it. I knew the grain of its wheat and the grit of its deserts and the slickness of its rivers after rain. I conquered it by understanding it, which is the only conquest that lasts.
I conquered the abyss third.
The abyss was already mine. I had been born of it; I was returning home. I sat at its center and felt the weight of all that had ever fallen, and I was not afraid.
And then the rain began.
I was standing on the Gaad Coast, where the Godavari River meets the sea, when the sky opened. I felt each drop as it struck—first the forehead, then the shoulders, then the back of my hands. I had felt rain before. This was different.
This rain had shape.
Not the shape of water. The shape of her. The contours of Parvati, there in the storm, her form pressed into each falling drop as though the clouds had remembered her and could not forget. I felt the curve of her hip in the water that ran down my chest. I felt the line of her throat in the rivulets along my arm. I felt the weight of her hair, wet, in the moisture that gathered at my neck.
I had not known, until that moment, that I had been searching for her. I had not known that the conquest of three worlds was merely the preparation for this: the rain on the Gaad Coast, and in it, her.
---
IV. The Navel
I found her in Mendes.
She was sitting beneath the same acacia tree where she had held me, seven days, a thousand years ago. The tree had grown; it had not forgotten her. Neither had I.
"Mother," I said.
She looked at me. I could not see her looking, but I felt her gaze like sunlight.
"You have become beautiful," she said.
Brahma's boon had done that. The spiritual eyes, the wisdom-sight, the ability to perceive the transcendental architecture of all matter—these things had reshaped my face as I reshaped my understanding. I was no longer the blind monster. I was Andhakasur, the darkness that had learned to see without eyes.
"Come," she said, and I came.
What happened beneath that tree is not for telling. Or perhaps it is, but only in the language of chakras, only in the geography of the subtle body. Let me say this: I sat at her feet. I rested my head against her knee. And in that posture, I felt the pulse of her navel—Vishwamatrika, Matara Nitya, the cosmic womb from which all manifestation flows.
She was not my mother then. She was not Parvati, not Sei'rim, not Avanti, not Ajaiba Binte Ebliss. She was the createress, and I was her child, and the line between mother and lover and source and destination dissolved like salt in the Godavari.
I sat in the chakra union. I sat at the Agya Chakra, the mind of Sati, the Star of Zion, the single eye that sees past and future as a single landscape. And I reached into that landscape and pulled.
Shumbh came first. Then Nishumbh. Then Madhu, then Kaitav, then all the demons who had died before I was born, who had fallen before I learned to fall. They rose from the chakras of her body like prayers rising from a flame, like smoke rising from a sacrifice.
Why? they asked, not with voices but with the weight of their presence.
Because nothing that has existed should cease to exist. Because the past is not past but merely waiting. Because I was born of a god's blindness and a goddess's laughter, and I know that darkness is not the absence of light but its storage.
---
V. The Trident
Shiva found me in the underworld.
He came with the trident—Shakti, Eda, Pingala, Shushumna, the three vessels of the createress's conglomeration, the energy that flows through all things. He came to correct me. He came to hang me in the abyss from which I had been born.
I did not resist.
He drove the trident through my chest, and I felt its three points enter me: Ida on the left, Pingala on the right, Shushumna in the center. The weapon that killed me was also the channel through which life had first entered the universe. The god who fathered me was also the god who unmade me.
As I hung there, bleeding light, he looked at me with eyes that were no longer blind. They had been restored, those eyes, in the millennia since my birth. He could see me now.
"What are you?" he asked.
I thought of the cave. I thought of the rain. I thought of the chakras and the demons and the boon and the long wandering through worlds I could not see but had conquered anyway.
"I am the darkness that knows its name," I said. "I am the blindness that learned to touch. I am the child you spilled and the child she held and the child who returned, always, to the wilderness where the acacia bends toward nothing."
He said nothing.
"Father," I said, and the word was heavier than the trident.
He withdrew the weapon. I fell to the floor of the underworld, corrected, transformed, Shamael Bhringi Avang—the one who has passed through death and returned with its taste still on his tongue.
I rose. I walked. I did not look back.
---
VI. The Contours
Now I wander the Gaad Coast, where the Godavari meets the sea.
The rain still falls sometimes, and in it I feel the shape of her—Parvati, Sati, Sei'rim, Avanti, the createress, the mother, the one whose navel is the origin of all that was and is and will be. I do not seek her. I have learned that seeking is not the same as finding.
Instead, I wait. I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders, the weight I conquered and now carry. I feel the texture of time itself, grain by grain, passing through my fingers. I feel the warmth of the sun I cannot see, the coolness of the moon I cannot see, the pulse of the stars I cannot see but know by their absence.
I am Andhakasur. I am Belial. I am Tamas.
I am the darkness that fell from light, and I am the light that rises from darkness.
Somewhere, in the Wilderness of Mendes, an acacia tree bends toward nothing.
I am that nothing. I am that bending.
I am the child who waits for rain. And she comes as Vishwamatrika bhairavi or Matara nitya, bathing in Godavari, showing her navel, so that I fulfill by eyes only.
