On the slopes of Kailasa, a goddess asks for a story

High on Mount Kailasa, in one of the pleasure-groves where he lived with his wife Parvati, the god Shiva found himself, on one particular evening, in an unusually generous mood. Parvati had been praising him, and he had gathered her onto his lap and asked what he could do to please her. She did not hesitate. Tell me a story, she said — something delightful, and something entirely new. Shiva, who had lived through every age of the world and remembered all of them, pointed out that there was very little left in the past, present, or future that she did not already know. But she pressed him anyway, the way a wife who has caught her husband in an unusually soft mood tends to press, and he gave in.

A story about herself doesn't satisfy her

He began, to flatter her, with a story about her own divine power — how Brahma and Vishnu had once wandered the earth trying to find the end of a great pillar of flame that was Shiva himself, and failed, and worshipped him instead; how Vishnu had been rewarded by being made one with Shiva's own nature, while Brahma's presumption in asking to be adopted as a son had cost him his standing ever since. And, Shiva added, Parvati herself had been his wife once before, in an earlier life as the daughter of the sage-king Daksha, before a cruel insult from her own father had driven her to give up that body in grief and be reborn as the mountain's daughter she now was. It was a fine piece of history. It was not, however, new — Parvati had heard every part of it already, and she said so, accusing him outright of being a deceiver who dangled the promise of a story without ever quite delivering one.

Shiva relents, and orders the world sealed shut

Stung by the accusation, Shiva relented properly this time. He told Parvati that he would tell her something genuinely new: the extraordinary history of the Vidyadharas, the demigods of magic and flight. But first, he wanted no interruptions — he gave orders that nobody at all was to be let into their private chamber while he spoke, and set his loyal attendant Nandi at the door to enforce it. Then he began.

An eavesdropper who cannot resist a locked door

It happened that a favorite of Shiva's named Pushpadanta, one of his personal attendants, arrived at the chamber just as this rule went into effect, and found himself turned away by Nandi along with everyone else. This struck Pushpadanta as strange — he was rarely refused anything — and his curiosity got the better of him. Using a magical power that let him move about unseen, he slipped past Nandi and into the chamber anyway, and stood there invisible while Shiva told Parvati the whole wondrous tale of the seven Vidyadharas, start to finish.

A secret that travels exactly as far as a wife's ear

Pushpadanta could not keep a secret this good to himself, and made the mistake every keeper of secrets eventually makes: he told his own wife, Jaya. Jaya, unable to resist a secret of her own, went straight to Parvati and, in a fit of pride at knowing something the goddess did not expect her to know, repeated the whole story back to her. Parvati was delighted for exactly as long as it took her to realize what this meant — that the tale she had just been promised as new was already common gossip among her own household staff. She confronted Shiva in a fury, certain now that he really had been stringing her along all this time.

The truth comes out, and a curse falls on two

Shiva, searching his memory for how this could possibly have happened, realized in a flash of insight exactly what Pushpadanta had done, and told Parvati so. Enraged at the intrusion rather than relieved to have her honor restored, Parvati had Pushpadanta summoned at once and cursed him on the spot to be reborn as a mortal man, stripped of his divine standing, for the crime of eavesdropping and disobedience. When another attendant, Malyavan, dared to plead on his friend's behalf, Parvati's anger swept him up too, and she cursed him exactly the same way. Both Ganas fell at her feet, along with the terrified Jaya, and begged only to know when — if ever — this sentence might end.

The terms of two curses, tied together

Parvati's anger cooled just enough to set the conditions of their release, and the conditions turned out to be woven together like a chain. Somewhere in the wild Vindhya forest lived a Yaksha named Suprabha, himself once cursed by the god of wealth Kubera and now living as a flesh-eating spirit called Kanabhuti. Pushpadanta, she said, must find this Kanabhuti, and — recovering the memory of who he truly was — tell him the very story Shiva had just told her. Only then would Pushpadanta's own curse lift. After that, Malyavan must in turn hear the same story from Kanabhuti's own mouth, and only by spreading it further into the world would he, too, finally be freed. Kanabhuti, for his part, would be released only once Malyavan had heard it from him. Having laid out this long, strange relay of storytelling, Parvati fell silent, and the two Ganas vanished instantly, like flashes of lightning, down into the world of mortal men.

Where the two exiled gods were reborn

Some time afterward, moved by a pang of guilt for two servants who had never once been disloyal to him before, Shiva told Parvati where their mortal lives had begun. Pushpadanta, he said, had been born in the great city of Kausambi under the name Vararuchi. Malyavan had been born in the equally splendid city of Supratishthita, under the name Gunadhya. And with that, Shiva returned to his quiet life on the mountain with his wife, while far below, on the earth, two men who did not yet know their own true names were growing up to fulfill a promise neither of them remembered making.