Nala is a king with every advantage and Damayanti chooses him at her swayamvara over four gods who had come disguised as him, identifying the human by the fact that he blinks, sweats and casts a shadow. It is a small detail that the story will return to. Kali, the spirit of the age, is offended by the choice and waits for an opening, finding it years later in a moment of ritual carelessness, after which Nala gambles away his kingdom exactly as Yudhishthira later will.
What follows is the hard part. Exiled and destitute, Nala abandons the sleeping Damayanti in the forest, convinced she will fare better without him, which the epic presents as a failure rather than a sacrifice. He is then bitten by a serpent and transformed into a misshapen dwarf named Bahuka, and takes work as a charioteer and cook in another king’s household. Damayanti, meanwhile, survives alone, returns to her father, and refuses to accept that her husband is dead.
The recognition scene is the point of the whole construction. Damayanti does not identify Nala by his face, since he does not have it. She arranges a second swayamvara as a lure, and identifies him through his skill with horses and his cooking, the specific competences that were his before the kingdom was. What she recognises is not the king and not even the body but the particular way this person does things. Fortune was distributed by circumstance and taken back by it; the residue that persisted through the ruin was of a different order, which is the distinction karma makes between what happens to a person and what a person actually is.
Nala and Damayanti asks what would still be identifiably you if everything external were removed. To see how consequence and character are separated in this system, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 62 of 100 — Series II: To the Eternal
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