Dhumavati: The fragrance that remains

Death gives space for more love to exist. It forces us to slow down, to become more aware. All identities, all definitions of self, begin to crumble. And in that crumbling, you ask—what identity? What was all this holding on for? You begin to question your purpose. You see through the chase for sweetness, knowing it is short-lived. Everything; flesh, bone, face, fades into nothing until something else arrives to occupy that space. In the ocean, one wave rises and crashes, and then another does the same. The cycle of birth and dissolution creates the beauty of the ocean. And God is this very beauty, She is the dance of death, life, and whatever comes after.

The great tantric scholar Abhinavagupta once said that this motion, this rising and falling, is not separate from the Divine but is the very essence of it.

He wrote:

"That vibration, which is a slight motion of a special kind, a unique vibrating light, is the wave of the ocean of consciousness, without which there is no consciousness at all. For the character of the ocean is that it is sometimes filled with waves and sometimes waveless. This consciousness is the essence of all. The insentient universe has the consciousness as its essence, because its very foundation is dependent on that, and its essence is the great Heart."

In essence, the wave and the ocean are one. The surface changes, but the depth is eternal. The finite forms arise and dissolve, but the ocean remains, unbounded and whole.

When Sati immolated Herself at Daksha’s yagna, She did not only reject the body and identity given to Her by her father. She took all identities with Her. Shiva, the detached and ascetic yogi, was broken open by grief and fury. Vishnu assumed the role of destroyer, cutting Her sacred body into pieces to relieve Shiva’s unbearable pain. Daksha, the architect of order and pride, was marked with shame, his human head replaced by that of a sacrificial goat.

Shiva’s grief was not passive. From His matted locks, He created Veerabhadra and Bhadrakali—fierce manifestations of His inner chaos. These matted locks were the force of prana, the silence and heat of tapas, being replete with energy. They, along with ghouls and spirits, destroyed Daksha’s yagna, the very symbol of social and cosmic order. Death, once again, had come to dismantle the structures we cling to.

But Shiva’s grief was not demonized. It was necessary. It was the sacred unraveling through which He came to know Himself more deeply, as benevolent, as awake, as the very form of love.

Today is Dhumavati Jayanti, the sacred day of the Goddess who remains when all else is gone. She is the void after the storm, the quiet smoke rising after the fire has consumed everything. Only through loss do we realize how vast the heart has become, how much more it can now hold. In fact, in the Mahavidya krama, Dhumavati occupies the Anahata chakra, the heart that is regulating vayu through out our body. In grief, the heart contracts, there's a sensation of hollowness and tightness as the tears flow out as liquid prana. Devi exists in this space too, the softening of the heart from grief, the hollowness in the chest and the prana rising upwards to bring relief to the limited self.

Dhumavati, the smoke that rose from Sati’s burning body, is what lingers after the fire is gone. She is not the flame. She is what remains. The invisible imprint of love. The scent left behind by incense, by homa, by funeral pyres are the same, smoke suspended and then dissipated into air reminds us that what is taken is not gone, but transformed.

In her, nothing is hidden. She reveals the ugly truth of love, that to lose is necessary, to suffer gives way to a heart full of compassion and that death and love are always reaching out to each other for complete union.

Here's a short poem I've written as an ode to the void:

Love dwells in all shades,

sometimes golden, sometimes blue,

but i know where it goes, plunges deep into

the beginning of everything,

it goes into that void, swallowed whole,

entire bodies, lives taken over by deep intense yearning to unite.

When i go to bed every night,

I don’t exist, you my Beloved are all that is.