Before you begin
It was the season of summer, the months when the land cracks for want of rain and every creature that wears a body waits for the sky to soften. Yet in Vrindavan it was as though someone had caught the weather and held it still. The colors of spring still lay scattered across the forest, unhurried and unfading. The reason was plain. In that wood lived the sweetest of all, Bhagavan Shyamasundara Krishna, and fair Balarama, and where those two stay, summer cannot settle in.
The shrill of the crickets went under, drowned in the rush of the waterfalls. Cool spray flew off those falls without pause and settled on the leaves of the trees, so that whole stands of them wore their green wet and glittering, worth the walking just to see. The breeze came off the ripples of the river, the ponds, and the streams, and it carried the pollen of lotuses, of kahlar and utpala and their kin, until the air itself seemed to have been poured through flowers. In that cool, slow, scented air the people of the forest were spared the heat of the wildfires that stalk every dry wood in that season and the burn of the sun overhead.
The rivers ran deep past sounding. Great waves came up and kissed the banks, washed them, and left them clean, and the ground on either side stayed damp because of it, dark and cool underfoot. Even the sun’s rays, fierce as poison in those months, could not draw the moisture out of that earth or dry the green grass standing on it. Green lay over everything, as far as a boy in a treetop could see.
Row on row, the trees stood heavy with blossom. Somewhere peacocks cried, somewhere bees worked the flowers in a low, steady hum, somewhere a cuckoo called, somewhere the cranes kept up a line of their own, and all of it braided together into one long song of the forest. Seeing a wood so lovely, Shyamasundara Krishna and fair Balarama felt the pull to walk out into it.
So they went. The cows moved in front, the cowherd boys came behind, and in the middle, playing his flute at his elder brother’s side, walked Krishna. The boys had dressed themselves with care, the way boys do when a day feels like a festival. One wore a garland of fresh young shoots. One had tucked peacock feathers into his hair. One had drawn lines all over his arms and legs with red ocher and colored mineral clays, stripes and whorls of his own invention.
Then the games began. One boy would fill up with delight and start to dance, and Krishna would play the flute for him while he danced. One would smack his arms and set to wrestling. One would strike up a tune, and the two brothers would keep time with their palms, sound their horns, and now and then call out their praise of the singer. The way a player in a troupe praises the hero of the show, so too the gods themselves took the shape of cowherd boys and came down from their heaven, and hidden among the gopa folk, unknown even to the boys whose games they had joined, they sang the praise of Balarama and Krishna.
Sometimes the two brothers clasped hands and spun like a potter’s wheel until the forest blurred around them. Sometimes they leaped in a contest to see who could jump the higher. They tossed wood-apples and kumbha fruit and fistfuls of myrobalan at a mark. They split into two lines for a tug of war and hauled against each other, heels dug into the grass. They wrestled. One would clap his hands over another boy’s eyes from behind and make him guess whose hands they were, and the whole ring would fall about laughing.
They played every game that ordinary children play in this world. They hopped about like frogs. They pulled faces at one another and mocked and laughed. They tied a rope to a branch and swung. Sometimes two of them stood while a third hung by his arms from theirs. Sometimes one mimicked some king until the whole lot of them collapsed laughing.
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In that same forest, on one such day, a new face joined the ring.
He came in the dress of a cowherd. A staff in his hand, a blanket over his shoulder, and in his walk the same easy carelessness that marked the boys of Vrindavan. He had studied them well. No one had seen him before, but in the middle of a game nobody stops to ask whose son you are. He came, he stood among them, he laughed when they laughed, and he melted into the play.
He was no cowherd. His name was Pralamba, and he was an asura, first among the Danavas. Vrindavan had met his kind before, a nurse whose milk was poison, a crane the height of a hill, a serpent whose open mouth the boys had taken for a cave, and each one had worn a shape that lied. This one had chosen the friendliest shape of all, a playmate. He had come with one intent: to wait inside the game for his moment, lift Krishna and Balarama, both brothers at once, out of the thick of it, and carry them away.
Krishna sees everything. He knew the stranger for what he was the instant he looked at him. Yet he did not startle, did not warn the others, did not send the demon off with a word. He gave him the welcome any new boy gets, took the offered friendship as if it were real, and inside his own mind, behind the easy smile, he began to turn the question over: by what means the killing should be done.
Then Krishna, the best player of them all and the teacher of every game ever played, called the boys close. “My dear friends,” he said, “today let us divide ourselves fairly into two sides, and then play till we have had our fill.”
The boys chose the two brothers for their leaders. Some went to Krishna’s side, some to Balarama’s. The rule was set this way: the losing side would carry the winners on their backs to a fixed goal, a banyan that stood far off across the meadow, the great tree the whole district knew by name, Bhandira. The winner rode. The loser was the mount. At the tree the rider came down, and the game began again. And so, taking turns to ride and to carry, and grazing their cattle as they went, the whole company made its way toward the Bhandira tree.
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The game ran on. Wins came and went, losses came and went, and the backs kept changing under the riders, to shouts and wagers and mock protests at every turn.
Once, Balarama’s side won. Shridama, Vrishabha, and the other boys of that side became the riders, and Krishna’s side had to carry them. Krishna himself had lost, so the one who carries the worlds bent his back and took Shridama up onto it. Bhadrasena lifted Vrishabha. And to Pralamba’s share fell Balarama, the son of Rohini.
Here the demon’s plan caught.
He had meant to carry off Krishna. But Krishna felt to him like something no shoulder could bear, and the thought settled in the demon, cold and certain, that he would never lift this one. So he turned to Balarama instead, reckoning the quiet brother the lighter load. He took the fair boy up onto his back, and the moment he had him there the asura hidden inside him woke. This is the hour, he thought. With Balarama on his shoulders he ran, and he ran fast. The fixed goal, the Bhandira banyan, the mark where every carrier before him had stopped and set his rider down, dropped away behind him, and he did not stop at it. He carried straight on past.
For a while Balarama rode easy, taken up in the pleasure of the game, the wind slipping past his ears, the ground pouring away beneath him. A fast mount is half the joy of that sport. But when the banyan fell behind and the running did not slow, when the trees he knew gave way to trees he did not, he understood that this was no longer a game.
Then a second thing began. The weight on the demon’s back started to grow.
Balarama grew heavy. Then heavier. Soon he weighed on the demon’s back like Mount Meru, the golden mountain at the center of creation, the chief of all the mountains of the world. Pralamba could carry him no distance at all. The swift stride he had been flying on grew slack, one step at a time, the way a fire goes out coal by coal, and then it halted altogether. He stood pinned under a boy, and he could not move that fair boy forward by a single pace.
Beaten, he let his true shape come back, the natural body of the asura.
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The one who a moment before had passed for a cowherd now stood up into the sky and touched it, a black demon towering over the whole forest. Gold ornaments burned on his dark body, and with fair Balarama held aloft on his shoulders he looked like a storm cloud shot through with lightning, carrying the moon along on its back.
His eyes blazed like pans of fire. His tusks curved up as far as his knotted brows. His red hair stood wide around his head as if flames were climbing off it. Bracelets on his arms and his legs, a crown on his head, rings swinging in his ears, and by the shine of all of it together he was a terrible marvel to look at, dreadful and dazzling in the same glance. With Balarama held fast he flew higher, away along the road of the sky.
Watching that dreadful thing tear upward through the air at such speed, Balarama felt afraid, a little, for the space of one breath. The shoulder under him belonged to no friend now. Below, Vrindavan was shrinking to a scatter of rooftops, then to nothing. Above was only the open sky, and it went on without end.
The fear did not outlast the moment.
In the very next instant the knowledge of his own nature came back to Balarama. He remembered who he was, and whose brother he was, and what he had always been under the shape of a cowherd’s boy: Ananta, the endless one, the serpent on whose thousand hoods the worlds are set down like beads on a string, the one who carries the weight of everything that is and has never once felt it. The demon had meant to carry him off the way a thief carries off another man’s wealth, hugging the prize close and running for the dark. What the demon had picked up was the very one who holds up the ground every thief runs on. The fear went out of Balarama, and a cool, level clarity came into the place where it had been.
Then he grew angry.
As Indra once brought his thunderbolt down on a mountain, Balarama closed his fist, and the strength that steadies the worlds gathered quietly into it, and he drove it down on the asura’s head in a single blow.
One fist. That was the whole of it.
The head burst apart. Blood came up out of the demon’s mouth, the sense went out of him, he let go one enormous cry that rolled from one end of the forest to the other, and he fell dead to the earth that same instant, the way a mountain falls when Indra’s bolt has split it. Where he came down, the floor of the forest shook, and the birds went up out of the trees all around.
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The cowherd boys on the ground below stood without a word.
They had just watched a companion of theirs turn into a demon high in the sky, with their fair friend riding alone on his back, farther up than any of their voices could reach. Their breath had stopped in them. Then they saw the fist come down, and saw the demon drop out of the sky like a felled cliff, and saw Balarama step off him unhurt.
After that their wonder had no edge to it. “Sadhu. Sadhu. Well done, well done.” They said it over and over, because no other words would come. They ran and threw their arms around Balarama, the way you hold someone who has died and come back to you. Every blessing they knew rose up in them for the elder brother, and they crowded in around him, undone with love. He had earned every bit of it.
And above them the gods, whom this wicked asura had troubled for a long age, breathed easy at last. They let a rain of flowers fall on Balarama out of the open sky and praised him, calling down, “Well done, well done.”
That day Vrindavan learned what it had never quite seen before. The brother who always walks behind, who keeps the beat behind the flute, carries in his one arm the same strength by which mountains were brought down in the old days. And when the boys told the tale at home, word for word, sparing nothing, the elders of Vraja looked at one another over the children’s heads and began to say quietly that these two brothers must be gods come down to walk among them.
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This katha has a smaller, earlier thread running into it, out of the same forest, out of those same days.
While the boys were sunk in their games, their goats and cows and buffaloes had grazed their way far off, nose to grass, with no one watching. In their greed for the green blades they pushed on into a thick wood, and passing from one wood into the next they came at last into a stand of tall reeds, the reed-forest they call Munjatavi. There, hemmed in by the rushes, worn down by the heat and by thirst, they began to bellow.
When Krishna and Balarama and the other boys looked up and saw no animal anywhere, the game turned sour in their mouths and they were sorry they had played so long. A herd is a cowherd’s entire wealth, and theirs had walked clean out of the known world. They went after the cattle by the marks of hooves and the cropped grass, tracking them wood by wood, and in the end they found them, trapped and crying among the reeds. Then, in voices deep as a rain cloud, the two brothers called the cows by their names, each cow her own name, and the cows, hearing the sound of themselves in those beloved voices, lowed back for joy.
Just then, on every side of that forest, a wildfire broke loose, as if fate itself had struck the flint, and a hard wind rose to feed it. The furious flames climbed to burn every living and unmoving thing to ash, and the ring of them drew in tighter. The cowherds and the cattle, out of their minds with fear, ran to Krishna and Balarama for shelter, the way creatures in the fear of death run to Bhagavan for shelter. “Krishna. Mighty Balarama.” they cried. “We are yours, and those who are yours should never have to burn. You are our one protector and our lord. Save us out of this.”
Krishna said only this to them. “Do not be afraid. Close your eyes.”
They closed their eyes. When they opened them, the fire was nowhere. The heat was gone from the air, the roar was gone from their ears, and they were all standing beside the Bhandira banyan again, boys and cattle together, whole and safe, a full ten miles from the reeds where they had shut their eyes. Krishna, the lord of yoga, had drawn that entire terrible fire in through his mouth and drunk it down, and what the children carried away was one plain fact: their friend was a god wearing the shape of a boy, and a god had been standing among them the whole time.
Literary context
The slaying of Pralamba stands in the eighteenth chapter of the tenth Skandha of the Shrimad Bhagavata, and the rescue of the cows and cowherds from the wildfire follows it in the nineteenth. It is one of the few kathas in the whole book where Balarama holds the center and Krishna steps to one side. The banyan’s name, Bhandira, and the demon’s name, Pralamba, both follow the Gita Press text, which also names Balarama for what he is beneath the cowherd’s shape: Ananta, the serpent on whom the worlds rest. The same text records that the Bhandira tree stood a full ten miles from the reed-thicket where the fire caught the herd, the measure of the marvel worked in the space of one closed eye. Among the many childhood episodes of the Bhagavata, this killing by a single fist is the shortest and the most startling.