Trishasti Shalaka Purusa Caritra Part 1

Author(s): Hemchandracharya, Helen M Johnson
Publisher: Oriental Research Institute Vadodra

Page 74

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TA
is a miserable householder, named Nágila. Wandering like a ghost daily to fill his stomach, he goes to bed hungry and thirsty and gets up the same. He has a wife, like hunger to poverty, named Nāgaśrī, crest-jewel of the unfortunate. He has six daughters, daughter after daughter, like boils on the body of a man with skin-disease, boil under boil. These daughters were voracious by nature, ugly, ridiculed by all, like offspring of village swine. In course of time, his wife conceived again. For generally the women of the poor conceive quickly. Then he reflected : 'Of what karma is this the fruit, that I experience the calamities of hell in this world ? I am destroyed by this poverty, fully developed at birth, hard to cure, very great, as a tree is destroyed by ants. Now I am tormented by these daughters, as if by enemies of a former birth, whose bodies have no lucky marks, like misfortune personified. If another daughter is born now, then I intend to go to a foreign country and surely leave behind the family.'
While he was reflecting thus, his wife bore a child, and he heard the news of the birth of a daughter like a needle piercing his ear. His face upturned, Nāgila deserted his family and went away, like a vicious bull that has suddenly thrown off its load. To her (his wife) suffering from child-birth, the pain of her husband's departure was like acid thrown on a wound. In her great sorrow Nāgaśri did not even give her a name, and the people called her 'Nirnāmikā.' She took no care of her at all, but still she grew up. For there is no death for a person, whose life-term has not expired, even if struck by a thunderbolt. Very ill-favored, causing distress even to her mother, she spends the time performing menial tasks in others' houses.
One day in a festival she saw sweetmeats in the hands of rich children and asked her own mother for some. Grinding her teeth, her mother told her: 'You ask for sweetmeats! That is fitting! Did your father eat