The Wife Who Left the Sun

Being married to the Sun sounds like a fine match, until you try to look at him across the breakfast table.

Saranya, daughter of Vishvakarma, the architect of the gods, did exactly that for years. In the Puranas she’s also called Sanjna, and her husband is Surya, whose brilliance burned so hard she could only meet his gaze with her eyes shut. They had children: Manu, the father of humankind, and the twins Yama and Yamuna.

Then one day she decided she was done.

She didn’t argue. She didn’t make a scene. What she did is one of the strangest things anyone does in Hindu mythology.

She made a copy of herself.

The shadow

From her own shadow she shaped a woman identical to her, named Chhaya, whose name simply means shadow. Saranya asked her to stay, to run the house, to raise the children and to say nothing. Chhaya agreed, on one condition: if she were ever pulled by the hair or cursed, she’d tell the truth.

Then Saranya walked out of the brightest house in creation, went to her father and, when he sent her back to her duty, went further still. She took the form of a mare and wandered the far grasslands, grazing alone in the cool.

Stay with that image a moment. The woman who couldn’t bear the light chose to be a horse in the shade.

And for a long time, nobody noticed. Surya, who sees everything on earth, didn’t see that his own wife was gone.

What the children knew

The children noticed.

Chhaya had children of her own with Surya, among them Shani, the planet Saturn, and she loved them more. Yama felt the difference, the way any child feels it. In some tellings, in a rage, he raised his foot at her, and she cursed him.

And there it was. A mother doesn’t curse her own son like that. When Surya confronted her, Chhaya told him everything, just as she’d said she would.

What the Sun did next

Here’s the turn I didn’t expect the first time I read this. He doesn’t punish anyone. He goes to Vishvakarma, and in many tellings the father-in-law tells him plainly why she left. He says that it was too much. You are too much.

So Surya agrees to be trimmed. Vishvakarma puts him on a lathe and shaves away part of his blaze, and the versions disagree about how much. From those shavings, the texts say, came some of the great weapons of the gods, including Vishnu’s discus.

Then Surya took the form of a stallion and went to find her in the grasslands. She took him back. From their reunion came the Ashvins, the twin physicians of the gods, whose very name means the horsemen.

Why I keep thinking about it

There’s a lot here that’s meant cosmically. Scholars have read it as a story of dawn and dusk, of light and its shadow. All of that may be so.

But it’s also a story about a marriage. She needed less of him, and he didn’t know. It took a shadow, a curse and a very long time for him to find out. The most powerful being in the sky had to be told he was too much, and his answer was to get on the lathe.

Most husbands, I’d point out, have never been asked for anything so hard.

Next time you stand in the morning sun, you’re getting the reduced version. You have Saranya to thank for that.

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