The Brahmin's Wife

In the city of Pratiṣṭhāna there lived a brahmin named Kauśika, who for wrongs done in another birth was stricken with leprosy. His wife served him as if he were a god. She rubbed his feet and his limbs, she bathed him and clothed him and fed him, she washed away his phlegm and his urine and his filth and his blood, she cared for him in private and spoke to him kindly. And though she served him with every humility, he was harsh and quick to anger and abused her always. Still she bowed before him, and thought of him as her god, and held him, loathsome as he was, to be the best of all men.

One day this brahmin, who could not walk, said to her: Take me to the house of the courtesan I saw living on the king's road. Take me to her, you who know what is right. She is in my heart. I saw her at sunrise, and now night has come, and since I saw her she has not left my heart. If she does not take me in her arms, you will see me dead.

His wife was of good family and faithful to her husband, and when she heard him she tied up her garment, took a large fee with her, lifted her husband on her shoulders and set out slowly. It was night, and the sky was covered with clouds, and the flickering lightning showed the way, as she went along the king's road to do what her husband wanted.

On that road the sage Māṇḍavya had been impaled on a stake, though he was no thief, on suspicion of being a thief, and he was in great pain. In the darkness Kauśika, riding on his wife's shoulders, touched him with his foot and shook him. Māṇḍavya was angry and said: The one who has shaken me with his foot like this, when I am already in such misery, that wicked man, lowest of men, will lose his life at sunrise, without doubt. As soon as he sees the sun he will die.

When his wife heard that terrible curse, she cried out in her distress: Then the sun will not rise.

And the sun did not rise. The night went on without end, through the length of many days, and the gods were afraid. Without the day, they said, there is no study of the Veda, no offering, no rite for the ancestors. Without the order of day and night there are no months and no seasons, no years, no reckoning of time. The word of a faithful wife has stopped the sun, and without the sunrise there is no bathing and no giving, no fire is lit, no sacrifice is made. We are nourished by the shares men give us in sacrifice, and we favour them with rain so that their crops may grow. How will this world not perish?

Brahmā, the lord of creatures, heard the gods as they spoke together in fear for the sacrifice, and he said to them: Power is quelled only by power, and austerity only by austerity. Hear what I tell you. It is by the greatness of a faithful wife that the sun does not rise, and because it does not rise, men and gods alike are suffering. So go to the wife of Atri, the faithful woman rich in austerity, Anasūyā, and win her favour, if you want the sun to rise.