Parvati — her name means "daughter of the mountain" — was born to Himavan, lord of the Himalaya, and his wife Mena. From the start she was no ordinary princess: she is understood as the rebirth of Sati, Shiva's first wife, who had given up her life in grief and resolved to be born again to win him once more. Love, in this telling, is older than a single lifetime.

Her beloved was the most unlikely of suitors. Shiva, the supreme ascetic, sat in unbroken meditation upon the heights, smeared with ash, indifferent to the world, the very emblem of renunciation. To desire him was to desire the one being who had renounced desire itself. When the gods, troubled by a demon only Shiva's future son could defeat, sent Kama, the god of love, to pierce Shiva with an arrow of longing, Shiva opened his third eye and burned Kama to ashes in an instant. Beauty alone could not move him.

So Parvati chose another path — the path of tapas, ascetic discipline, the very austerity Shiva himself embodied. She withdrew to the forest, set aside comfort and ornament, and undertook penances of staggering severity: enduring heat and cold, fasting, standing through storms, at last living, the poets say, even on fallen leaves — earning the tender epithet Aparna, "she who took not even a leaf." She would meet the ascetic on his own ground.

A famous scene tests her resolve. A young brahmin appears and, to dissuade her, mocks Shiva — wild, homeless, garlanded with serpents, an unfit husband. Parvati rises to defend him fiercely, and the brahmin reveals himself: it is Shiva, come to see whether her devotion was real. It was. Their marriage, celebrated in countless retellings, unites the ascetic and the householder, renunciation and love, in a single divine couple.

The theology beneath the romance is profound. Parvati is Shakti, the active power of the cosmos, and Shiva is pure consciousness; without her, the tradition says, Shiva is shava — an inert corpse, awareness without the power to act. Their union is not the taming of an ascetic but the joining of the two principles by which the universe lives. Their son is Ganesha; their family — Shiva, Parvati, Ganesha, and Kartikeya — is honoured across India as the very model of the divine household. And in her supreme form she is Mahadevi, the Great Goddess, the mountain's daughter who is also the mother of all.