There was a hundred years without rain, and it started with a man asking for exactly the right thing.
Durgama sat still for a very long time, and at the end of it he was offered anything he liked. He asked for the Vedas. Not books — the words people said. Over a fire, over a field, over a morning. He took them, and nobody could remember any of it.
The fires went out. The rain, which in those days came when it was called, was not called. So it did not come.
The wells went first, and then the rivers. Then the seed grain, which is the last thing a family eats, because eating it means there is no next year. Then there were children who had heard the word rain and had no picture to put with it.
The ones who were left said her name. They said it badly, in cracked voices, with none of the right words, because the right words were gone.
She came anyway. And then she did nothing at all, for nine nights.
She looked at them. The text gives her a hundred eyes to do it with, so that she could see all of it at once and never have to choose which part to look at. They called her Śatākṣī afterwards, which only means the hundred-eyed, and it is not a name about power.
And she cried. For nine nights, without stopping, and it ran off her onto the ground and filled the rivers, and it was the first water anything had had in a hundred years.
Then she fed them, and the food was growing on her. Greens and roots and gourds and grain — the ordinary things, the things you would actually cook.
She handed them out. She made no speech first and asked nobody anything. She fed the nearest person, and then the next one, and then the next. Śākambharī, they called her for that: the one who carries the vegetables.
She could have started with the food. She started with the looking, and the looking took nine nights.