अनसूया की परीक्षा: वह दिन जब ब्रह्मा, विष्णु और शिव शिशु बन गए

Anasuya, recognising through her own spiritual perception exactly who stood before her, did not argue with the terms. She meditated briefly on her husband's power and her own accumulated tapas, and then agreed to serve them precisely as asked: unclothed, and with alms.

What she did next was to use that same accumulated spiritual force to transform all three gods into infants before serving them, reasoning, in effect, that a mother nursing her own babies violates no vow of chastity whatsoever, whatever state of undress the situation required.

The three great gods of the Hindu pantheon, by this account, spent a period as literal infants in Anasuya's care, fed and looked after exactly as any newborn would be, which the tradition treats less as a humiliation of the gods than as a demonstration of just how far real tapas can reach: far enough to reshape the form of the very beings whose test she was undergoing.

When their wives grew anxious at the prolonged absence and came searching, they found their husbands as babies in another woman's arms, and it was only after Anasuya restored the three to their true forms, at their own request and with Atri's return, that the test concluded.

Pleased rather than humiliated, the three gods offered Anasuya a boon, and in the most widely told version each of the three chose to be born to her as a son, carrying forward one aspect of himself: Brahma's portion becoming Soma, the moon, Vishnu's portion becoming Dattatreya, and Shiva's portion becoming Durvasa, whose own origin has its own entry in this series.

Some regional and sectarian tellings compress the three into Dattatreya alone, since Dattatreya's iconography already shows him with three heads representing all three gods together, which some traditions read as this very story folded into a single figure rather than three separate births.

Either version makes the same underlying claim: that Anasuya's household became, through one act of extraordinary composure under an impossible demand, the origin point of some of the tradition's most significant later figures, and that her chastity was not merely preserved through the test but proven powerful enough to reshape divinity itself for as long as she needed it reshaped.

Anasuya's name is still invoked in the Panchakanya verse recited by some as protection against sin, alongside Ahalya, Draupadi, Tara and Mandodari, each remembered for a different kind of trial survived rather than for any single uniform virtue.