Śiva had been saying, to anyone who would sit still, that the world is māyā — not that it does not exist, but that it is not what it looks like, and you should not get attached to any of it.
Pārvatī let this run for a while. Then she asked him whether that included food.
He said it did. Obviously it did. Food is a thing in the world, and a man who has understood the world does not need it.
She said: all right. And she left.
Not in a temper, and not for long, but completely. What went with her was every part of the world that feeds anything.
Nothing ripened. The rice stood green and hard. Fruit hung and never came ready. Fires burned under pots, and whatever was in them was exactly as raw at the end as at the beginning.
So it was not a drought. There was food everywhere. It simply would not feed anybody.
Kāśī went hungry first, being her city and his. And after a while Śiva was hungry too, which he had not expected, having a whole position on the matter.
A god who has gone a thousand years on a mountain without a meal found that he was thinking about food, and could not stop, and that the thinking was not philosophical.
Then somebody said there was a kitchen in Kāśī. She had set up in the middle of the city with a ladle and a pot that did not run out, and there was a queue, and everyone in it was being fed.
So he took his bowl and went and stood in the line. He is a beggar by trade — not by choice, but as an old penance — and he had carried the bowl to more doors than anybody could count. He had never once had to do it at his own.
She saw him coming and said nothing clever. She filled the bowl. Then she filled it again, because he was very hungry.
He had argued that nobody really needs feeding. He was the one who found out otherwise — in a queue, holding a bowl, at his own door.