As the katha tells it
North India · read with the Karva Chauth fast · 2 min read
There was once a woman called Karva, who lived with her husband in a village beside a river. She was devoted to him, and people said her devotion had given her a power of her own, though she had never had cause to use it.
One morning her husband went down to the river to bathe. He waded out to his waist, and a crocodile came up under the water and seized his leg in its jaws. He screamed for his wife.
Karva came running down to the bank. She did not stop to think. She pulled a length of raw cotton thread from her spinning, waded in and wound it around the crocodile's jaws and its body, and tied it fast. Thin as it was, the thread held. The crocodile could not move, and it could not let go, and it could not drag her husband under.
"Stay there," Karva told it, and she set out for the house of Yama, the lord of death.
She walked until she came to the place where Yama sits with his scribe Chitragupta and the great books in which every life is written. She stood before them with the river water still dripping from her sari.
"A crocodile has hold of my husband," she said. "I have bound it with a thread. Send the crocodile to your hell, and give my husband a long life."
Yama looked at Chitragupta, and Chitragupta turned the pages. "Lady," said Yama, "the crocodile's life is not finished. It still has years written to it. I cannot take it before its time."
"Then I will curse you," said Karva, "and you will be the one to be destroyed."
The scribe stopped turning pages. Yama knew what the curse of a true wife could do. He had seen it before. He was quiet for a long moment, and then he bowed his head to her.
"Go home," he said. "It will be as you ask."
Karva walked home. When she came to the river, the crocodile was gone. Yama's messengers had taken it to his hell, and the thread lay loose on the bank. Her husband was sitting in the shallows, alive, holding his leg.
He lived a long time after that, and Karva with him. And the women of the north, keeping their fast on the fourth day of the dark half of Kartika, ask the goddess to protect their husbands as Karva protected hers.
