There is another side to the story of chastity icon Nalayini

Nalayini, according to legend, is a symbol of absolute chastity. Wife of a disgruntled sage, she serves him in every possible way and that with a smile. He is said to have assumed the form of an old man with a dreaded disease just to test the level of her chastity. She is said to have even carried the disabled man in a basket to a prostitute’s house when he wanted to visit her. After several years of what could be certified as abuse and torture, he relents and grants her a boon.

Pretty Nalayini now wants to have all those years she missed compensated. She wants uninterrupted conjugal bliss with her husband. What’s more she wants five of him. The rishi obliges, now transformed into a dashing young man, five versions in fact, to keep his word.

Total bliss

So off they go on a honeymoon to every place under the sun and even the world of Indira to revel in bliss. They transform themselves into birds and beasts to frolick on hgh mountains and deep waters.

One can’t help thinking that a woman with such an appetite also had an extraordinary willpower. A layer in the story even says that with her power of chastity, she stopped the sun from rising and all the celestial residents had to plead with her to take back her command so that the planet could survive. That pushes her up several notches higher than the sage.

To come back to the story, the husband has reached saturation and wants to retire to the forests to do penance. But Nalayini is not ready. Fed up, he leaves after cursing her to be born as a woman, who will wed five men — yes, Draupadi. A crestfallen Nalayini seeks a solution and Siva, to whom she prays, says that her unfulfilled desire will tail her in the next birth, when she will marry five men. An appalled Nalayini is soothed with the blessing (!) that she will always remain a virgin — in spite of her unusual position.

Now, what does the trope try to convey? That a woman gets her pound of flesh (pun unintended), never mind her status? That it is such an offence bordering on sin to have a sexual desire that the spouse abandons her? And what is the retribution for the husband, who tortured his wife in order to check her chastity threshold and then left her unmindful of the selfless service she did all those years? No accountability there.

Again, it is the woman who bears the brunt and is cursed to carry the legacy into her next birth, where she is ridiculed and suffers all over again. But that is another story.