Bhagavatam · The Lifting of Govardhana

The Ganga ran slow and heavy that morning. Parikshit lifted his head, like a man who had been holding a question in him all through the night.

“Bhagavan, since last night one thing has stayed lodged in my mind. I have heard from my forefathers that when the worship of Indra was stopped, seven days of the deluge that ends an age broke over the land, and a boy of seven lifted a whole mountain on a single hand. I have exactly that many days left too, Munivar. Seven, to the last one. This is what I need to understand. When a disaster that size stands over your head, and you cannot even recognize the hand that is holding you up, what do frightened people put their trust in?”

In Shukadeva’s eyes was the quiet light that kindles the moment a story of Krishna begins. He spoke gently.

“Rajan, that day the whole trust of Braj came to rest on a hand they knew only as their lala’s, a hand that wandered among them begging for butter. Listen.”

Every year in Vrindavan there was a yajna, the worship of Indra. Indra is the king of heaven and the lord of the clouds. The cowherds held that he was the one who sent the rain, and from that rain the grass grew, and the grass raised the cows, and the cows carried their whole life.

Every year the preparations were grand. The elders sat together and worked it through. Rice, milk, sweets, all of it gathered. A great pit was dug for the sacred fire, and Indra was worshipped.

This year too the work was under way. Nanda Baba sat outside his house among the elders, and the accounts were being settled: whose field would send how much grain, how much ghee would be melted. It was Baba’s way never to let an old custom go without turning it over a hundred times. And yet, each time his eye fell on this one son, the careful old man in him melted somewhere he could not name.

Then Kanha arrived. Seven years old, the morning’s wet mud still on his feet, and in his eyes the mischief that hid from no one.

“Baba, what is all this?”

“Son, we are preparing the worship of Indra.”

“Why the worship of Indra, Baba?”

Baba set the account leaf aside. His son had asked, and the question would not be waved off. “Indra is the king of the gods, the lord of the clouds. He is the one who sends the rain down from them. From that rain the grain grows, the grass rises, the cows are fed, and our life runs on. Through this worship we win the three things a man lives for: the merit of a duty done, the food on our plates, and whatever we manage to hold and keep. This custom has come down our line for generations. And a man who throws over the way of his own people out of appetite, greed, fear, or spite, my son, never comes to any good.”

Kanha was quiet a moment. Then he spoke, softly, the way a child says a thing that has been turning in him far longer than the grown-ups suspect.

“Baba, may I ask one thing? A creature comes into the world by its own actions and leaves by them. Its comfort and its grief, its fear and its safety, all of it reaches it through what it has itself done. Even suppose some lord does sit above us, handing out results. He can only answer for what a creature has already earned. Over one who has done nothing, he has no power at all. So what is left for Indra to do, in the middle?”

Baba turned it over. “It is not so simple, son. The worship pleases him, and pleased, he sends the rain in fuller measure.”

“But does the rain fall because someone in the sky is pleased, Baba? Or because that is the nature of clouds, the way this whole moving world rises, holds a while, and comes apart again, each thing by its own turning? A being takes one shape and then another, high and low, driven by what it has done. Our own work is our teacher and our master; there is no other. So a man does best to honor the work that actually carries him, and to worship what actually feeds him. Borrow another household’s altar and you come away with empty hands.”

“And where do our cows graze, Baba? We hold no kingdom, no cities, no long ridged fields. We have always been people of the wild; the forests and the hills are our home.”

“On the hill of Govardhana.”

“So the cows eat that hill’s grass, drink from its springs, rest in its shade. We are vaishyas, Baba, and of the four callings open to us, farming, trade, cattle, and lending at interest, our people have only ever kept cattle. Then the right to our worship belongs to the cows, to the brahmins, and to Giriraj himself. Worship these three. Give them everything that has been gathered here for Indra.”

The elders looked at one another. The words had come from a child, but they were straight, and they went to the root of the custom.

Someone said, “The lala is right.” Someone said, “There is danger in changing an old rite.”

Nanda Baba was silent a long while. Then what happened every time happened again. The careful old man in him melted, and he took his son’s word.

It was settled. This year the worship would belong to the cows, to the brahmins, and to Giriraj Govardhana.

All the milk of Braj was gathered in one place. Kheer, halwa, sweet cakes and fried breads, down to the plain boiled pulses, dish after dish was made. The brahmins who knew the Vedas fed the sacred fires and recited the blessings, and were given grain and gifts by the armful. And no one forgot what Kanha had said. Food was carried, each to his measure, to the chandalas, to the fallen, even to the village dogs, and fresh green grass was set before the cows. Then everything was taken to an open slope of Govardhana and offered to Giriraj. The smell of incense spread on the air, and the cowbells did not stop ringing.

Dressed in their best, sandal paste on their skin, the cowherds and the gopis climbed onto their bullock carts, and with the cows walking ahead they began to circle Giriraj, keeping the hill to their right, singing the songs of Kanha’s lilas.

And Kanha himself, to settle faith in the cowherds, raised a second body upon Giriraj, vast as the mountain, and saying “I am the hill, I am Giriraj,” took the whole offering into it. The great heaps of food set out before it vanished in a breath. Then he stood among the cowherds and bowed with them to that mountain-shape of his own. “Look,” he said, “Giriraj has shown himself, and shown us his grace. A god like this takes any form he pleases, and he destroys the forest people who slight him. For our own good, and our cattle’s, we bow to him.”

The children were delighted. The cowherds were delighted. The cows grazed on, content, swishing their tails.

But in one mind, far above, a fire had begun to smolder.

Indra sat on his throne in heaven and watched all of it. The same Indra who counted himself lord of the three worlds, whose hand never trembled on the thunderbolt when the greatest asuras stood before him, now shook with rage at one small village of cowherds.

“Such pride in these forest herdsmen! This is the drunkenness of wealth, nothing more. They have thrown me over, a god, and put their trust in Krishna, a mere mortal, a boy who talks and talks and knows nothing. On the word of one prattling child these cowherds have insulted the king of the gods.”

Nothing makes pride writhe the way being overlooked does; no blow cuts as deep. Indra could not bear the sting of it. He called up the clouds of the world’s dissolution, the host named Samvartaka, that are loosed only when an age ends and the waters come to drown the earth. He struck off their chains and, full of fury, gave the command.

“Go. Grind these cowherds’ pride into the dust. Kill their cattle where they stand. I will follow on Airavata, with the mighty Maruts at my side, and finish Nanda’s Braj.”

The clouds massed, black and heavy, from one edge of the sky to the other. In the middle of the day the sky went dark as night.

The rain came, and it fell as it had never fallen in any year. Every drop was thick as a pillar and struck the back like a stone. Lightning tore across the sky on every side, the clouds cracked as they collided, and a violent gale drove great hailstones down. The wind bent the trees double. Within a little while there was no telling high ground from low in all of Braj; on every side lay one unbroken sheet of water.

The cowherds went numb with fear. Every animal shivered and shook. Children clung to their mothers and cried. The cows stood out in the open, drenched, trembling with cold, lowing, and their lowing kept drowning in the roar of the storm. When they saw the animals dropping senseless under the hail, the last of the cowherds’ and the gopis’ courage gave way.

Clutching their children to their chests, heads covered, shaking, they came running to Kanha.

“Krishna! Beloved Krishna! You alone are the master of all Gokula, you alone its protector. Lover of your own! Save the cows, and save us, from Indra’s anger. Only you can.”

Kanha looked a moment at those wet, shaking faces. They were calling him as their own lala, with no thought of any lord of the three worlds, and that cry, perhaps, was dearer to him than any other. He knew at once whose work the storm was. Indra, his worship broken, was sending the deluge down out of its season to destroy them. He would answer it, and in the answering he would empty the gods of the delusion that they ran the world, for a proud one is quieted only when he is brought low. Braj had come to his shelter and called him its own. He would protect what was his. That was his vow, and it had never once been broken.

He smiled, softly. “Do not be afraid. Come with me, all of you.”

They came to the hill of Govardhana. Kanha walked to its base and stood there. Behind him all of Braj pressed close, breath ragged, water on every eyelash.

He looked once at the mountain, the way a man murmurs something to a very old friend. Then he slid one hand, the same small hand that only yesterday had gone digging in the butter pot, under the root of the hill.

The fingers found the stone’s cold, wet underside. The palm spread flat. And the hand began to rise.

First a finger’s width. Then the span of a hand. Braj watched the root of Govardhana lift free of the earth as easily as a child pulls a mushroom up out of wet ground. The cows rose with it and went on grazing; the springs rose and went on running. A whole mountain, with all its trees and caves and springs and grazing cattle, stood steady in the air.

Under it was the single hand of a boy of seven.

And on that hand there was no weight at all. Each hammering drop burst on the stone roof far above and rolled its thunder down through the rock. The boy stood; the elbow never bent by a hair; the fingers lay open on the stone exactly as they had settled; and on his face was the same faint butter-thief smile, as though he had done nothing more than raise an umbrella against the rain, the way a small child at play tips a monsoon mushroom over his own head.

“Mother, Father, all you people of Braj, come. Every one of you, bring your cows and your goods and settle in easily under the hollow of this hill. And do not once let the thought in that the mountain might slip from my hand. There is no fear here, none of the storm, none of the rain. I have already seen to it.”

The villagers stood dumbstruck. But the fear ran too deep to leave room for wonder. With their herds, their women, their children and their old, their goods loaded onto carts, one by one they moved in under the mountain.

The mountain hung overhead, and beneath it a wide dry courtyard had opened. Above, the wall of water kept falling; below, not one drop came through. Inside, the cowherds settled in with their cows, their wives, their children and their carts, and the boom of the rain outside reached them like a far-off sea.

Kanha stood with the mountain on his hand, the same faint smile on his face.

One day passed. A second. A third.

He did not tire, his breath did not break, he did not shift so much as one step from where he stood. The mountain stayed as it was; the boy stayed as he was. And the people of Braj, sitting under it, forgot their own hunger and thirst and never thought of rest, so fixed were their eyes on that small face, the face of the same lala who went from house to house begging butter. On the first day they watched him in fear. By the third, in love. Someone said it under his breath: here this little child of seven, and there the great Giriraj, seven days on one hand. The mothers rose again and again and moved toward that hand, and stopped, and came back and sat, their laps opening of themselves and folding shut again.

Indra watched from above. His rain was spending its whole strength, and below there was a hand that would not move by a hair. His purpose came to nothing, and his swagger drained slowly out of him.

Seven days passed this way.

At last it broke on Indra that this was no ordinary child. Astonished, emptied of his pride, beaten at the thing he had set out to do, he called back his clouds.

The rain stopped. The sky cleared, and the sun stood up over a drowned world. Kanha, still holding the hill, turned to the cowherds. “The storm is over, and the rivers have nearly run themselves empty. Take your women and children and your cattle, and go out now, free of all fear.”

They took up their goods and their herds and came out, one by one, the women and the children and the old, their carts loaded, everything as it had been. And then, with every creature watching, Kanha set the mountain down as gently as he had raised it, back into its own place, the way you lay a sleeping child onto its bed.

Their faces had stayed dry through all of it, and they had changed. The lala whose pranks they used to laugh at had held their whole world on his hand for seven days. The people of Braj came at him in a rush of love, arms open. The gopis sprinkled him with curd and unbroken rice and poured their blessings over him, and Yashoda and Rohini and Nanda and Balarama caught him up and held him and blessed him. High above, the gods let fall showers of flowers, conches and kettledrums sounded across the sky, and Tumburu and the other gandharva singers sang him.

A little later Indra came himself, quietly, alone, slipping past every eye. The same Indra who seven days before had thundered the order for a deluge now stood before Kanha, ashamed to the bone, and laid his crown, bright as the sun, at the boy’s feet.

“Forgive me, Lord. Drunk on my own splendor and blind to what you are, I sinned against you. I did not know you.”

Kanha raised him to his feet. On his face was the same soft smile, without a single line of anger in it, and when he spoke it was in a voice deep as the rain clouds, and he was laughing. “Indra, you were drunk on the pride of your splendor. I broke your worship as a kindness to you, so that you would keep me in mind from now on. The man I mean to bless, I first bring down from his high seat, for as long as wealth and power blind a man he takes no notice of me. Go back now to your Amaravati. Keep your throne and do your work, and let pride never take you again.”

Surabhi, the mother of the cows, had come down from Goloka with her calves, and now she came to Kanha’s side. This boy, she said, was the true lord of the cows and the brahmins and the gods and all pious souls, and at Brahma’s word she would have him for her king. She bathed him in streams of her own milk. And Indra, urged on by Aditi and the mothers of the gods, filled Airavata’s trunk with the clear water of the heavenly Ganga and poured it over him. There, the master of the cows and protector of the cowherds was given a name: Govinda, the cows’ own lord. Above, the gods rained down flowers, Narada and Tumburu and the other gandharvas sang his glory, and the apsaras danced for pure joy.

And the world answered. The cows let their milk run until it wet the earth. The rivers ran sweet, with milk and honey; the trees dripped honey; grain stood up in fields no plough had touched; and the bare rock of the hills showed gems on its surface. Even the wild animals of the forest, savage by their nature, Rajan, let go of their old enmity and stood at peace. Then Indra, with Kanha’s leave, rose back to heaven with the gods, and behind them the whole sky opened. Sunlight came down on a washed Govardhana, the springs ran again, and in the wet grass the cows lowered their heads and grazed, as though nothing at all had happened.

Parikshit was quiet a long time. Then he asked, “Munivar, the villagers never even knew whose hand stood over their heads. They ran to him only as their own lala. And still they were saved.”

Shukadeva smiled gently. “Rajan, Indra’s knowing came only after seven days of deluge and a mountain lifted on one hand. The cowherds of Braj had no such knowing at all. They had one cry: Krishna, you are our protector, only you can save us now. And this is the Lord’s own vow, that whoever comes to his shelter even once and says, I am yours, he makes fearless before every creature alive. The mountain comes afterward, Rajan. First he takes hold of the cry.”

The king asked nothing more about the seven days moving toward him. He looked out at the Ganga and sat a long while in the quiet, his mind resting on that one cry. Another day had gone.