Festival story · 2 tellings · East India, Pan-India
The king and the merchant (the frame of the Devi Mahatmya)
A king who has lost his kingdom and a merchant thrown out by his family meet at the sage Medhas's hermitage and cannot stop grieving. Medhas tells them it is the Goddess's power, and tells them her three stories. They worship her for three years and she grants each his wish; Bengal calls it the first Durga Puja.
Suratha, a world-ruling king defeated by enemies and robbed by his own ministers, rides into the forest and comes to the hermitage of the sage Medhas. There he meets Samadhi, a merchant thrown out by his wife and sons, who still worries about them. Both ask the sage why they grieve for what they know is lost. Medhas says it is Mahamaya, the Goddess who binds and frees the mind, and tells them her three great deeds. They make a clay image on a riverbank, worship her for three years, and she appears: Suratha gets back his kingdom and a future birth as Savarni Manu; Samadhi asks for and receives liberating knowledge.
In Bengal Suratha is a king of Bengal with his capital at Bolpur. Driven out, he crosses the Ajay into the forest to the hermitage of Medhas, placed at Garh Jungle near Durgapur. Medhas tells him and Samadhi to make a clay image of the Goddess and worship her, and they do so in spring, in Chaitra: this is called the first Durga Puja, kept since as Basanti Puja, before Rama's autumn worship made the Sharadiya puja the greater one.
What is different here:
A place (Garh Jungle) and a season (spring, Basanti Puja) that the text does not give.
Sources: Markandeya Purana 81 to 93, the Devi Mahatmya (F. E. Pargiter, 1904); Garh Jungle, Medhas Ashram (Paschim Bardhaman district; Times Now on Basanti Puja)