As the households tell it
North and East India · told on Vasant Panchami · 3 min read
When Vishnu told Brahma to make the world, Brahma sat on his lotus and made it. He made the mountains and the rivers, the forests and the animals, and last of all he made people, men and women, to live in it.
Then he looked at what he had made, and something was wrong.
It was all quiet. The rivers ran down from the mountains without a sound. The wind moved through the trees and the leaves did not rustle. The birds opened their beaks and nothing came out. The people walked about and looked at one another, and they could not say a word, because there were no words. Nobody laughed, nobody sang, nobody called a name.
Brahma watched for a long time. "It is finished," he said, "and it is empty."
He went to Vishnu. "I have done what you asked, and the world is dead," he said. "There is nothing in it that answers."
Vishnu looked down at the silent earth. "Then call for the one who can make it answer," he said.
Brahma took up his kamandalu, his water pot, and sprinkled a little water from it over the earth. Where the drops fell, a light rose up, and in the light stood a goddess. She was dressed in white and sat on a white lotus, and she had four hands. In two of them she held a veena. In the third was a book, and in the fourth a string of beads.
"Who are you?" said Brahma.
She did not answer him. She lifted the veena and touched the strings.
The first note went out over the world, and the world woke up. The rivers began to murmur over their stones. The wind sighed in the trees. The birds sang, all at once, and the bees hummed. And the people turned to one another and opened their mouths, and found words in them, and spoke.
They spoke her name first. They called her Saraswati, the flowing one, because speech came out of her like a river, and Vagdevi, the goddess of speech, and Sharada, and Veenavadini, the one who plays the veena.
Brahma listened to the noise of his world, the talking and the singing and the running water, and he was content at last. "Now it is finished," he said.
The day she appeared was the fifth day of the bright half of the month of Magha, at the very end of winter, when the mustard flowers cover the fields in yellow and the mango trees come into bud. That is why the day is kept as her birthday, Vasant Panchami, the fifth day of spring.
On that day students lay their books and pens at her feet and do not study, because the books are hers that day. Musicians put their instruments before her image. Small children are sat down in front of her to write their first letters. People wear yellow, cook yellow rice with saffron, and offer her yellow flowers, and in Bengal and Bihar her clay image is worshipped in every school and immersed the day after.