The abhigraha, the unspoken conditional vow, is the mechanism of this story and it is characteristically severe. Mahavira resolved that he would take food only if it were offered by a woman who was a princess by birth and now enslaved, with shaven head, feet in iron shackles, standing with one foot inside a doorway and one outside, at a time when the ordinary alms hour had passed, offering boiled horse-lentils from the corner of a winnowing basket, having fasted for three days, and weeping. He told nobody. He then fasted for five months and twenty-five days while the people of Kaushambi grew frantic. Chandanbala, confined in a cellar by her master's jealous wife, met every condition except the last: she was not weeping, because she was glad of the chance to give. He turned away, and only then, at the loss of the opportunity, did she weep, and he returned and accepted. The story is recited at Paryushana and enacted; its structure is odd and worth sitting with, since the vow's conditions describe a person in an extremity of degradation, and the point being made is about who is in a position to give.