As it is told at Sankranti
North and West India · 3 min read
The Sun had two wives, though he did not know it. The first, Sanjna, could not bear his heat. She made a woman out of her own shadow, set her in her place and went away. The shadow, Chhaya, kept house for the Sun as if she were his wife, and in time she bore him a son.
The boy was born dark, as dark as his mother was a shadow. When the Sun came to see him, he stared at the child and turned away.
"That is not my son," he said. "No son of mine could be so black."
He sent mother and son to live apart, in a house of their own. The house was called Kumbha, the Water Pot, and the boy, whose name was Shani, grew up there with only his mother for company. He was a slow, grave child, and he never forgot how his father had looked at him.
Chhaya did not forget either. One day, in her anger, she cursed the Sun with a disease of the skin, and the blaze of his body began to fail.
The Sun's eldest son, Yama, Sanjna's child, could not bear to see his father so. He prayed and worked over him until the disease left him. Then he spoke to his father plainly.
"You have wronged them," Yama said. "Chhaya kept your house. Shani is your son. Make peace with them."
The Sun was not ready to hear it. His anger flared up instead, and he turned his heat on the house called Kumbha and burned it to the ground.
Yama went to him again. "Now you have burned your own son's house. Will you leave it like that?"
This time the Sun was ashamed. He set out to visit Shani for the first time since the boy was born.
He found ash where the house had been. Shani was sitting in the middle of it. He had nothing left, no food, no flowers, no lamp. But when he saw his father coming, he stood up and went out to meet him, and in his hands he held what he had found in the burnt store room: a few black sesame seeds, which the fire had not destroyed.
"This is all there is," said Shani. "Take it, father. It is yours."
He worshipped his father with the sesame, as if it were the finest offering in the world.
The Sun took it, and his heart melted. He held his son for the first time.
"You have given me everything you had," he said. "So I give you a new house, Makara. And every year, when I come into Makara, I will come to you, and your house will be full of grain and wealth. Whoever worships me that day with black sesame will have nothing to fear from you."
So Shani became lord of two houses, Kumbha and Makara, the Water Pot and the Sea Creature, Aquarius and Capricorn. And every year, in the middle of January, the Sun goes into his son's house and stays a month.
On that day people bathe early and offer water and sesame to the Sun. They eat sesame and jaggery, and they give sesame away. In Maharashtra they hand each other little sweets of sesame and jaggery and say, "Take the sesame and the sugar, and speak sweetly."