The story
Once Shiva and Parvati, wandering the earth, came to a beautiful Shiva temple in the city of Amravati and sat down to play a game of dice. Parvati asked the temple priest who would win. Without thinking, the priest said, “Shiva.” Parvati won the game, and angered by the careless answer, cursed the priest with a painful skin disease.
The priest suffered for a long time. One day apsaras from heaven came to the temple and, seeing his condition, taught him the vow of sixteen Mondays: to fast each Monday, worship Shiva, and on the seventeenth Monday offer a churma of wheat flour, ghee and jaggery, share it, and eat the rest as prasad.
The priest kept the vow faithfully and was healed. When Shiva and Parvati returned and saw him well, Parvati asked how, and on hearing of the vow she kept it herself so that her son Kartikeya, who had grown distant, would come back to her. He returned, and asked her the secret.
Kartikeya kept the vow to meet a dear friend who had gone abroad, and the friend came home. The friend in turn kept it, wishing to marry; at a princess’s swayamvara the royal elephant placed the garland on him, and he became the king’s son-in-law and later the king.
When the new king made the offering of the seventeenth Monday, the queen refused to join, thinking it beneath her, and she was driven from the palace into hardship until she repented and kept the vow herself. The story ends by saying that whoever keeps the sixteen Mondays with a clean heart receives Shiva’s grace.
Retold in our own words from the traditional story; versions told in families and booklets differ in details.