“I don’t!” said Nandini. “I told Parvati yesterday that…” Parvati stared abstractedly at her nails; then she began to plait her rather unwieldy hair. After she’d finished, she insisted she plait Nandini’s hair, which she began to, admiring it at the same time. “I wish I had your hair,” she said, “so straight and simple.” A little later, they began to walk again, towards a higher slope. They didn’t know how long they’d walked, but it became noticeably cooler, and they came to a clearing where there was no shade. There, on a rock, in front of a hilltop covered with snow, a figure was sitting by himself, looking rather small and alone, completely still but for the cobras stirring about him. The girls hesitated, not wishing to intrude, because the figure was unkempt and seemed somewhat threatening, although there was no fence indicating this was private property. At the same time, Kama was hovering semi-nakedly in mid-air, without a single tree to hide behind, hoping to take correct aim. Parvati had advanced a little more than the other two, partly out of curiosity, to see if the man was a hermit, and she was the first to be struck, in the breast, by the arrow. She experienced an instant of discomfort, and then, oddly, she found this untidy man to be far more interesting than she’d first thought, and, almost immediately, she realized he wasn’t a hermit, but the Destroyer of the Universe. “So this is what he does all day,” she thought, feeling strangely protective towards the considerably older man. Meanwhile, Kama, after much procrastination and introspection, and weighing the dubious good and certain trouble that would come of this act, especially to him, released the second arrow, resignedly. Immediately, Shiv opened his eyes and, seeing the approaching Parvati, felt what every member of the male sex feels at one point or another, from the fourteen-year-old boy daydreaming or staring surreptitiously at a picture, to self-respecting pillars of society, although, admittedly, it had taken Shiv a much longer time to experience this than most others. Enraged at the interruption of his meditation, he looked at Kama. Kama felt an unpleasant tingling near his toes, going up to his head; and then he turned to ashes. His bow fell with a heavy, muffled sound to the ground.