Twinn Swan

When I wrote The Heart of Shiva, I wanted to confront the tension between a role sanctified by millennia of tradition and the personal history that overshadows it: the scars of past betrayals, the legacy of hurt and the pain which is passed down through generations.

The protagonist Tara, a priestess of Lord Shiva, is a woman; a potential mother. The story asks: what does it mean to embody a sacred threshold while being pressed into the longstanding human tradition of motherhood? What if this role, sanctified, revered and glorified in tradition, is at odds with her own inner reluctance to bring forth a child due to disappointments she faced in the past?

Her pregnancy is encircled by reverberations of previous lives where love was fractured and where both mother and child were wounded by those meant to protect them. This layered pain, which resides only in the deep subconscious, shapes her identity and her spiritual path.

For Tara, motherhood is a return. The wound she carries does not belong wholly to her current incarnation—it stretches backward through past lives and unhealed betrayals. Tara, therefore, is not the archetypal mother figure. There is nothing conventional about her character or the story she chooses to tell about the Divinity of Motherhood.

This story asks: How does one bring forth future generations while carrying the weight of ancestral grief? How do you nurture life when your soul still bears the echoes of abandonment and trauma? Tara’s devotion to Lord Shiva does not magically heal these wounds. Instead, it becomes the cremation ground from which she seeks transcendence and healing—both for herself and the unborn life she is destined to bring into the world.

The Heart of Shiva is her journey toward healing that wound—not through forgetting or idealising, but through embracing the fullness of her experience as a guardian and a protector of future lives. It is a meditation on how sacredness and suffering are intertwined in the most intimate spaces of existence.

Motherhood in The Heart of Shiva is complex, conflicted, and real. It is about confronting the lineage of pain and choosing to walk a path of healing rather than samsaric repetition. Tara resists the simplistic glorification of motherhood and instead inhabits it as a site of negotiation—between vulnerability and strength, despair and hope, dissolution and rebirth.