Savitri chooses Satyavan knowing from Narada that he has a year to live, and her father-in-law and her husband both fail to talk her out of it. On the appointed day she fasts, follows him into the forest, and holds his head in her lap when he falls; when Yama takes the soul she walks behind him and will not be sent back. What follows is not a plea but a negotiation conducted in flattery and formal argument, and she extracts boons — her father-in-law's sight, his kingdom, sons for her father, and finally a hundred sons of her own — until Yama, having granted the last, is bound by his own word to return the only man she will accept as their father. The story is enacted every year in the Vat Savitri vrat, when married women in western and northern India tie thread round a banyan tree, and it is worth noting what it actually shows: the fast is for a husband's life, and the woman wins it by out-arguing Death.