The observance kept in Savitri's name is centred on a tree. Married women fast, gather at a banyan, wind unspun cotton thread around the trunk while circling it, and hear the story recited. The banyan is chosen because Satyavan died beneath one and because the tree, which drops roots from its branches and spreads without dying back, is the standing Indian image of a life that does not end.
The timing splits regionally, which is a useful reminder that a single festival name can sit on two calendars. In Maharashtra, Gujarat and parts of the south the observance falls on the full moon of the month Jyeshtha and is called Vat Purnima. In much of the north and east it is kept a fortnight earlier, on the new moon of the same month, as Vat Savitri Amavasya. The difference follows the two conventions for where a lunar month begins, and both communities are keeping the same day by their own reckoning.
The story has also had a substantial modern life. Sri Aurobindo worked for decades on a long blank verse poem, Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol, published in full in 1951, which takes the episode as the frame for an account of consciousness descending into death and returning. It runs to some twenty four thousand lines and is the longest poem written in English by an Indian author. That a short forest tale about a wife who out argued Yama could carry that weight says something about how much the original leaves unexplained.