Andhaka

Andhaka's origin is unlike any other Asura's in this series, because he was never born an Asura at all. In one of the best-known episodes of Shiva and Parvati's life together, Parvati, playing, crept up behind Shiva and covered his eyes with her hands — plunging the entire universe into sudden darkness, since Shiva's eyes were themselves a source of the world's light. In that darkness, heat and sweat from Shiva's forehead are said to have combined with the blackness itself, and from the resulting drop a child was born: blind, deformed, and unwanted by the very darkness that had made him. His name, Andhaka, means simply "the blind one."

Shiva and Parvati, by most tellings ashamed of the child's grotesque and sightless form, gave him away rather than raise him themselves — handed over to the Daitya king Hiranyaksha, the very first king covered in this series, to be raised as his own son in the absence of an heir of his own.

Raised among the Daityas with no memory of his true origin, Andhaka grew into a powerful king in his own right, performing austerities and winning from Brahma an unusual and highly specific boon: that he would lose his invincibility only if he ever felt desire for a woman as virtuous and pure as his own mother. It was, on its face, about as safe a condition as Tarakasura's had once seemed — Andhaka had no mother he could name or remember, no standard by which such a woman could ever be measured, and no reason to imagine the exclusion would ever be triggered.

Years later, Andhaka's forces came upon Mount Kailash, and there he saw Parvati — radiant, and unlike any woman he had ever encountered — and was overcome with a desire to possess her as his own consort, demanding that Shiva surrender her to him. He had no way of knowing, and nothing in the story suggests he ever suspected, that the woman he was demanding was his own birth mother, the very source of the boon's one exclusion. It is one of the few moments in this entire series where an Asura's downfall is triggered by something he could not possibly have avoided, because the one fact that would have stopped him — who Parvati actually was to him — had been kept from him since before he could remember anything at all.

Shiva, enraged at the demand, met Andhaka's forces in battle. The condition of the boon fulfilled itself the moment Andhaka's desire for Parvati became an act of aggression against her, and Shiva ran him through with his trident, lifting him into the air on its point. Where every other death in this series is final, Andhaka's is not: rather than dying outright, he is said to have hung impaled on Shiva's trident for hundreds, in some tellings a full thousand, years — and in that suspended, unending agony, began to turn his mind toward devotion rather than defiance, praying to the very god who held him aloft.

Moved by the sincerity of Andhaka's prayer and the endurance of his suffering, Shiva at last relented — releasing him from the trident and, in most tellings, restoring at least some measure of sight and dignity to him. Rather than being cast out or destroyed, Andhaka was accepted into Shiva's own retinue as one of his ganas, his attendant spirits, given a place of trust close to the god who had killed him and, unknowingly to Andhaka for most of the story, was his own father all along. Some traditions identify him thereafter with Bhringi, one of Shiva's most devoted attendants, though this identification varies across sources.

No other Asura in this entire series ends the story reconciled with the god who defeated him. Every other chronicle closes on a death, however dignified or however costly to the victor. Andhaka's closes on a return — the blind, unwanted child, raised by a stranger, forgiven at last by the parents who once gave him away.