Shiva was married twice, first to Sati, granddaughter of Brahma and daughter of Daksha; then to Sati again, reborn as Parvati, daughter of Himavan, king of the mountains. To all intents and purposes he was a model husband, faithful to one woman over two of her lifetimes. Yet there was nothing personal in either of these marriages, no courtship in the normal sense, no exercise of personal choice. He had his energy, his shakti, and had even manifested as half-female in a grandiose gesture of total acceptance of the feminine principle. But those were exercises in divinity. Strangely, love did not enter the picture or rather, it did, only to beat a retreat, twice over. At the third attempt, the god of love, who rarely failed in his missions, did not escape unscathed- literally. But that was just before Shiva's second marriage.

Shiva's resistance to the matrimonial tie was natural. He was yogi and a wandering ascetic who shuddered at the thought of bondage and shunned the very idea of womankind. He lived in the Himalayas with no roof over his head and roamed its icy slopes, scantily clad in animal skins and wearing all that he possessed on his person- snakes, skulls and unholy ash which he gathered from cremation grounds, his favourite haunts. He wore his hair piled high in tangled heaps with the sacred Ganga trapped in it, forever trying to find a way out. His forehead was marked by a fierce third eye which sparked off the hidden fires of destruction at he least provocation. When the spirit moved him, which was frequently, he would select a rock, spread his antelope skin and, assuming a yogic posture, lapse into the stillest of silences, eyes firmly shut and turned inwards to the core of his mysterious being, which he seemed to find eternally fascinating. His quest began and ended with and within himself. The faintest flicker of his third eye, at such times, was enough to warn anyone approaching him, for it opened only to burn and to destroy. He was not anyone's idea of a likely husband, let alone an ideal one.