Ratiरति

Rati (रति) is the goddess of erotic desire, delight and pleasure — the word rati means exactly that — and the constant consort of Kamadeva, the god of love. Where Kama is the arrow, Rati is the ache it leaves; Sanskrit poetics pairs them as the presiding couple of shringara, the erotic sentiment. In most Puranic accounts she is a daughter of Daksha, given to Kama as the perfect match for his powers, and she rides beside him in his parrot-drawn progress through the world with her retinue of spring.

The widow of love

Rati's defining story is her bereavement. When the gods sent Kama to break Shiva's meditation so that a son might be born to destroy the demon Taraka, Shiva opened his third eye and burned the love god to ash. Rati's lament over the ashes is one of the set pieces of Sanskrit literature — Kalidasa gives an entire canto of the Kumarasambhava to her grief. Moved, Shiva promised that Kama would live again. In the Puranic sequel, Kama is reborn as Pradyumna, son of Krishna and Rukmini; the infant is stolen by the demon Sambara and cast into the sea, swallowed by a fish, and delivered to Sambara's own kitchen, where Rati — living disguised as the maid Mayavati — recognises her husband, raises him, and, when Pradyumna comes of age and kills Sambara, is reunited with him as his wife. Love, the story insists, outlasts even its own destruction.

Presence

Rati has little independent cult, but she is everywhere Kama is: invoked in spring festivities, carved beside him on temple walls, and named in the poets whenever beauty needs a superlative — to be 'like Rati' is the standard compliment paid to a heroine's loveliness.