The Moon in the Peepal Tree

In the city of Indraprasthapur there lived a Brahmin named Vedasharma and his wife Leelavati. They had seven sons and one daughter, Veeravati, and the seven brothers loved their little sister more than anything in the world.

Veeravati was married, and the first Karva Chauth after her wedding came while she was staying at her parents' house. With her mother and her brothers' wives she kept the fast from before dawn: no food, not even a sip of water, until the moon rose and she had seen it and offered it water.

It was a long day. By evening Veeravati was pale and could barely sit up. Her brothers came home and found her lying faint.

"Eat something," said the youngest. "You will make yourself ill."

"Not until the moon is up," said Veeravati. "That is the fast."

The brothers went outside and looked at the sky. It was still dark in the east, and the moon would not be up for hours. "We cannot watch her suffer like this," said one of them. So the youngest climbed a peepal tree at the edge of the village with a lamp and a sieve, and he held the lamp behind the sieve so that it glowed through the holes like the moon through the branches.

The others ran to Veeravati. "Sister, the moon has risen. Come and see."

She went up to the roof and saw a soft round light in the peepal tree. She offered it water, as the fast requires, and sat down to eat.

At the first mouthful she found a hair in her food. At the second she sneezed. As she lifted the third, a messenger came from her husband's house. Her husband was dead.

Veeravati wept until her brothers' wives could not bear it, and then one of them told her the truth. "That was not the moon. It was your brothers with a lamp. You broke your fast before it was over."

That night, in her grief, Veeravati was found by Indrani, the queen of the gods, who had come down to earth on Karva Chauth with the women of heaven. Veeravati fell at her feet. "What did I do wrong?" she said. "Give him back to me."

"You broke the fast before the true moon rose," said Indrani. "Your husband was taken because of it. If you want him back, keep the fast of the fourth day of every dark fortnight for a whole year, and keep the next Karva Chauth fast to the end."

Veeravati did. She sat by her husband's body all that year, and every month she kept the Chauth fast with her whole heart. When Karva Chauth came round again she kept the fast through the whole day, and waited, and saw the true moon rise, and offered it water.

Her husband stirred, and opened his eyes, and sat up as if he had only been asleep.

The vow books open the story in the Mahabharata's world. Arjuna had gone to the Nilgiri hills to keep a long penance, and he did not come back. Draupadi, left with the four other brothers, grew afraid that some harm had come to him. She called on Krishna and asked what a wife could do for a husband so far away. "I cannot go to him," she said, "and I cannot bring him home. Is there nothing left for me but to wait?"

Krishna told her that Parvati had once asked Shiva the same question. Shiva had answered with a vow: on the fourth day of the waning moon in Kartika, a wife should fast from dawn until the moon rose, worship Shiva, Parvati, Ganesha and Kartikeya, and break the fast only after offering water to the moon. Then he told her of Veeravati, who broke the fast early and lost her husband, and of the year of fasts that brought him back.

In this telling it is Parvati, not Indrani, who meets the grieving girl. Parvati pricks her own little finger and touches the dead man's lips with the blood, and he wakes. In some households it is the brothers' wives who send Veeravati to Parvati, and in others she sits a whole year by her husband, keeping the grass on his body clean.

When Kartika came, Draupadi kept the fast as Krishna told her, with the karva pot of water beside her and the story read aloud, and before long Arjuna came home safe. That, the vow books say, is how the fast came to the women of the earth.