Ascetic's Daughter Obtains Boon for Five Husbands
A beautiful ascetic's daughter, cursed to remain unmarried, performs severe austerities to win a husband from Shiva. When the god offers her a boon, she asks for a husband with every quality. Shiva grants her request in a way she never imagined.
In a hermitage, a great-souled rishi had a daughter. She was slender of waist, wide of hips, with beautiful eyebrows and every quality one could desire. Yet, because of deeds in a past life, she was unfortunate. Despite her beauty and purity, she remained without a husband.
With sorrow in her heart, she turned to the only path she knew. She began to perform severe austerities, her focus single-minded: to obtain a husband. Her penance was so intense, so unwavering, that it satisfied Shankara — Shiva himself.
Gratified, the illustrious god appeared before the ascetic lady. “O fortunate one! O beautiful one!” he said. “Ask for a boon and I shall give it to you.”
Desirous of ensuring her own welfare, she told the supreme god what she had sacrificed everything to achieve. “I want a husband,” she said. Then, thinking of the ideal, she added the condition that had lived in her heart through all her years of loneliness: “A husband with all the qualities.”
The eloquent Ishana, Shiva, heard her request. He saw the depth of her desire, the repetition of her wish in the very phrasing. He told her, “O fortunate one! You will have five husbands.”
The woman was stunned. This was not what she had asked for, not what she wanted. She addressed Shankara again, trying to clarify. “Give me only one husband,” she pleaded.
But a boon, once granted by a god, cannot be undone. Shiva addressed her in excellent words, explaining the logic of the divine. “You have repeatedly asked me for a husband five times,” he said. The word “husband” had been spoken once, and the phrase “with all the qualities” — a phrase implying every virtue, every possible attribute — had been, in the god’s hearing, a request for four more husbands, each to embody a portion of that impossible totality.
Therefore, it would be as he had said. Not in this life, but in the next. “When you are reborn in another body,” Shiva declared, “it shall be as I have just said.”
That daughter of divine form was reborn in King Drupada’s family, as the unblemished Krishna Parshati — Draupadi. And the five husbands destined for her were the Pandavas, to whom this story was told as proof that their shared wife was no accident, but the fulfillment of a divine boon granted long before any of them were born.