The Day of First Letters

Three Namboodiri houses stood near the temple tank at Panachikkad, in the green country south of Kottayam, and the one called Kizheppuram had no children in it.

The man of that house did what a man of his time did when the gods seemed to have forgotten him. He took up his palm-leaf umbrella and set out for Kashi. On the way he came to the temple of Mookambika at Kollur, and stopped there for the night.

The goddess came to him in his sleep, and she did not make him wait for the answer.

"You do not have the luck to have children in this birth," she said. "But listen to me. In your own village, in the house of Karunattu, a lady will bear twins. Ask for one of them and he will be given to you. That boy will have ten children of his own, and your house will be full."

He woke with the words whole in his mind, and he went home.

At the temple tank he left the umbrella on the bank, went down the steps, bathed and came up. Then he bent to pick up the umbrella, and it would not come. He pulled. It stayed where it was, as if it had put down roots. He stood there dripping and stared at it.

A sage was passing along the bank, and he stopped.

"Leave it," he said. "It is not the umbrella that is heavy. The goddess herself has followed you home from Kollur, and she wants a temple here. Her image is lying in the forest near the temple of Vishnu. A Yakshi guards it. Do not go near it until the Yakshi is pleased. Take her tender coconut water, fried rice powder and jaggery, and ask her."

"And then?"

"Then she will let you pass."

He went into the forest with the three things, set them down, and asked. The Yakshi let him pass. He found the image, carried it out and set it up facing east. The sage shook his head.

"Not that one," he said. "Set a second stone beside her, with no face and no form, and let it face west. Worship that one. Leave the first to herself."

So it was done, and so it is still. The west-facing stone, which has no form, is the one the priests wash and the lamps are lit for; water falls on it without stopping. The east-facing goddess, who has a face, is left alone. Creepers grew over her, a plant the village calls Panathi Kuthu Chedi, and nobody has cut them since. People say they have never wilted. On a day of wind or rain the leaves part for a moment and she can be seen. The village calls her the Mookambika of the south.

On Vijayadashami, at the end of Navaratri, the path to the tank fills with families, and every family has a small child in it who has never held a letter.

The child is set in a teacher's lap. The teacher takes a gold coin, or a silver one, and writes on the child's tongue with it, saying the words as he writes.

"Hari Sree Ganapataye Namah."

Then he guides the small hand down to the rough sand spread before the goddess, and the same letters are drawn there with one finger, crooked and enormous, and the child looks up to see whether that was right. It was right. The goddess under the creepers is not watching, and the one with no face is.

At Tirur in Malappuram, a day's journey north, the same morning happens on ground that is not a temple at all. Thunchan Parambu is the birthplace of Thunchath Ezhuthachan, the poet who gave Malayalam its Ramayana and its Mahabharata and is called the father of the language. Children come there from all over Kerala. The child sits before a lit brass lamp, the letters go onto the tongue with a gold ring and then into a tray of rice, and the iron stylus the poet wrote with is kept there and carried in procession each February. Nobody tells a legend for it. The poet is the legend.

The day itself was chosen before there were any children to write on it. The Devi Bhagavata says that Krishna worshipped Saraswati with his own hands on the fifth day of the bright half of Magha, the day when learning is commenced, and that everyone else followed him; how that first puja was done is told in Born from the Tongue. Bengal, Bangladesh, Nepal and Odisha have kept the date ever since, and there the fifth of Magha is simply Saraswati Puja.

The house wakes early and nobody eats until the puja is over. The smallest child is dressed in yellow, because everything is yellow that morning, the sari on the mother, the flowers, the light itself at the start of spring, and the older girl of the house has been allowed, this one day, to wear her mother's sari.

Before the image, white as the moon and dressed in white, with a book in her hand and the swan at her feet, the floor has been cleared, and on it the family has laid everything it owns that can learn: the schoolbooks, the exercise books, pens, pencils, the music things and the paints. The child reaches for a pencil, and a hand comes down on hers.

"Not today," says the mother. "Today they are hers. Nothing is read, nothing is written, nothing is practised. Tomorrow."

So the puja goes forward with the books lying there like guests. The priest chants and describes her, white, in white, with the book. The flowers are held up in cupped hands for the anjali and let fall at her feet, and then the child is brought forward for the part of the morning that is hers alone. In Bengal it is called Hatekhori, the hand's first letters. A slate and a piece of chalk are put into her hands, or a pencil is closed inside her fist, and the first mark she ever makes is made in front of the goddess, so that everything written afterwards begins there.

Then there is nothing to do, which is the point. The schools are shut, but every school has an image of its own that morning and expects its pupils to come and stand before it, and so they do, in yellow, and then run off. Later there will be loud music in the pandal and dancing to it.

Two things are said of her in Bengal that are not said everywhere. The swan beside her, people tell the children, can drink the milk out of a bowl of milk and water and leave the water behind, and that is what a student is for. And she is Durga's daughter there: when Durga comes home in autumn with her children, Ganesha and Kartik, Lakshmi and Saraswati stand on either side of her, and in spring the daughter has a day of her own. In Odisha the same first letters are called Khadi Chuan, and the chalk goes into the hand on this day or on Ganesha's.