brahmā cālīsā

A Hindi chalisa to Brahma which spends its middle on the one story that explains why he has almost no temples. He is described first in the ordinary way — four faces, four arms, red-bodied, white-bearded, in white cloth with the sacred thread, Savitri for a wife and Sarasvati for a daughter — and then the narrative begins. Seated on the lotus, he looks about and concludes that there is nobody else in the world; he takes hold of the lotus stalk and vows to find its end; he travels it for crores of years and cannot; and out of that failure he decides that everything must be contained in himself, and grows proud. A voice from the sky corrects him, and he goes down the stalk to find Vishnu asleep. The chalisa is unusually frank about it, and closes at Pushkar, the one place that is his.