Bhagavatam · The Birth of Krishna

Evening was settling over the bank of the Ganga. Parikshit joined his hands. “Bhagavan, yesterday you told me of the boy Prahlada, who felt no fear even inside the fire. But one question has stayed with me since. When the Lord comes down to this earth, why never into a palace, never into the middle of a festival? You say he is the Lord himself. Then why was his birth set in a prison, among chains and guards?”

A smile drifted through Shukadeva’s eyes, as if the question had soaked him through. “Rajan, the age itself had gone dark. A hundred thrones were held by demons wearing the faces of kings, and the earth, worn thin under their weight, had gone to the gods in tears and begged to be freed of them. The Lord gave his word that he would come and lift her load. And when the time came, he did not look for a palace. Where the dark is thickest, that is exactly where he slips down, quiet, past every watching eye. Listen to what happened in Mathura that night.”

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Mathura’s king was Kansa, the son of Ugrasena. He had thrown his own father into a cell, the old lord of the Yadus and the Bhojas and the Andhakas locked away while the son ruled the land of the Surasenas in his place.

Kansa had a cousin he loved, Devaki, the daughter of his uncle Devaka. He had arranged her marriage himself, with real delight, to his dearest friend, Vasudeva, the son of Shura. When the wedding rites were done, Devaka, who could not bear to send his daughter off with empty hands, gave with her a dowry fit to make the whole city stare: four hundred elephants hung with gold, fifteen thousand horses, eighteen hundred chariots, and two hundred maidservants in their finest ornaments. Conch and clarion and clay drum sounded all at once, and the wedding train set off in a river of sound. Kansa himself took the reins of the bridal chariot to carry his sister home, a hundred gold-plated chariots rolling at his back, his chest full of the day.

The chariot was halfway down the road when a voice broke out of the sky.

“Kansa, you fool. This sister you are carrying so tenderly, the eighth child of her body will be your death.”

The reins went slack in his hands. For one breath everything in him stopped. Then the cold turned over, and something hot began to move beneath it.

He caught Devaki by the hair, sword out, and dragged her from the seat to kill her where she stood.

Vasudeva caught his arm.

“Brother, wait. You are the pride of the Bhojas, a name that heroes praise. Will you cut down a woman, your own cousin, on the very day of her wedding? And think a moment. Death is fixed to every creature the hour it is born, whether it comes today or a hundred years from now. When the body falls, the one inside it only steps across into another, the way a walking man lifts one foot once the other has taken the ground. She has done nothing. Do no harm to the helpless, brother. The harm a man sends into the world comes back in the end to find him.”

“Her children will kill me.”

“Then take the children and let her live. I give you my word. Every child she bears, I will carry to you with my own hands.”

Kansa checked himself. A sister’s blood was a stain no water would lift, one that would walk at his back for the rest of his life. The children could be dealt with later, and more quietly.

He lowered the sword. “Very well. Every child, into my hands.” And with that he grew calm and drove them the rest of the way home.

When Devaki’s first son was born, Vasudeva kept his word and carried the newborn to Kansa. They named the boy Kirtiman. The plain honesty of the act stopped Kansa where he stood. “Keep the boy,” he said. “It was the eighth that was promised me. That is the one I will be watching for.” Vasudeva took his son back with a quiet word of thanks, and did not for a moment believe the danger had passed.

Within days the sage Narada came to Mathura of his own accord, and what he set before Kansa moved the ground under him. The cowherds of Vraja with Nanda at their head, and their wives, and Vasudeva with all his Yadava kin, and Devaki with the women of the house, and the friends and kinsmen of both families, were for the most part gods who had taken birth in human skin. The whole clan had come down to lift the earth’s burden and to make an end of the demons who pressed on her. And out of Devaki’s own body, Narada told him, Vishnu himself would come, born to be Kansa’s death. Something old and buried turned over at that. In an age long gone Kansa had been the demon Kalanemi, and it was Vishnu’s own hand that had cut him down. His fear went all the way to the root. Now he saw his death in every unborn child. He clamped Devaki and Vasudeva in iron and threw them into the Mathura prison, sent for the boy Kirtiman he had spared, and dashed him against the ground.

The next child went the same way, and the next, one after another, until six of Devaki’s sons had died in Kansa’s hands. Then came the seventh, a ray of the Lord’s own being, the one the devotees call Ananta, Shesha, the endless serpent on whom the worlds are laid. This one the Lord would not let fall. By the divine power Yogamaya, the unborn child was lifted one night out of Devaki and carried into the womb of Rohini, another of Vasudeva’s wives, who had gone to live among the cowherds of Gokul for fear of Kansa. Mathura heard only that Devaki had lost the child before its time. That boy would be born far away in Gokul and grow into Balarama, whom men would also call Sankarshana, the drawn-across one, for he had been drawn out of one womb into another. But that is a story for another day.

Now the time of the eighth drew near.

Something had changed in Vasudeva. The Lord had entered his mind with all his glory, and the guards found they could not hold their eyes on him; he seemed lit from within, hard as the noon sun to look upon. From him, by a single look, that glory passed to Devaki, the way a teacher sets a whole image living in the mind of his student, and Devaki conceived. Shut in that cell like a flame sealed inside a jar, she began to shine. Kansa saw it. Every morning he came to look in on his sister, and now her face carried a light it had never held before, and dread climbed in him. Hari has gone into her womb, he told himself, like a lion slipping into a cave, and he has come for my life. He set soldiers at every door and hung heavy locks on every gate, and morning after morning he stood and stared at the growing curve of her body, unable to decide what to do.

It was the eighth night of the dark fortnight. Rain had come down hard all evening, and then, near midnight, it thinned and drew back, and the world went still, as if it were listening. The planets and stars settled into their gentlest places, and the moon’s mansion of Rohini rose in the east. The monsoon was not finished, and yet the sky cleared as though it were autumn, until the heavens over Mathura stood crowded with unclouded stars. The rivers ran suddenly clear, ponds opened their lotuses in the dark, and a cool wind came off the Yamuna carrying a sweetness that belonged to no season. In the houses of the Brahmins the sacred fires, long smothered under Kansa’s rule, lifted into flame on their own. Far overhead, past all hearing, kettledrums sounded in the sky; Gandharvas and Kinnaras sang, the women of heaven danced, and the gods let fall a soft rain of flowers while the clouds rumbled low and gentle, like a sea a long way off.

In that locked cell, inside that strange hush, Devaki gave birth to her eighth child.

The moment he was born, the infant showed his true shape. Four arms, and in the hands a conch, a discus, a mace, and a lotus. On his breast the curl of hair they call Srivatsa; at his throat the Kaustubha gem; a crown and jeweled earrings kindling with a light that had no source; silk the color of turmeric wound about him, and his own body dark and lustrous as a cloud swollen with rain. The whole cell filled with a soft radiance, and for a moment even the sound of the rain fell away somewhere behind it.

Vasudeva looked on his own son and knew him for the Supreme Person, and his fear let go of him. In the joy of that moment, chained though he was, he made a gift in his heart: ten thousand cows to the Brahmins, to bless the day the Lord had come. Then he bent his head over his joined hands and praised the child. Devaki too, her long terror thawing into a smile, praised the son she had borne.

Then a fear of another kind touched Devaki. “Lord,” she said, “Kansa’s men will come. Do not let them find you in this blazing four-armed form. Draw it in. Be an ordinary child for me.” And the child answered her, and his answer reached back across lifetimes. Twice before, he told them, these two had been his mother and his father, and twice they had won him through long years of longing and hard austerity; the last time he had come to them as Vamana, the dwarf who measured out the worlds in three strides. He had let them see this form tonight for one reason only, so that they would know him past all doubting. Now he would do as Devaki asked.

Before the light drew in, the Lord spoke once more to Vasudeva. “Father, carry me tonight to Gokul, to the house of Nanda. A daughter has been born there this same night to Yashoda. Lay me down in her place, and bring the girl back here.” Vasudeva bowed his head. Then the four arms folded into two, the radiance gathered itself inward, and there in their laps lay a small crying infant, lashes wet, fists clenched.

But how was he to carry the child anywhere? He himself sat chained hand and foot.

At that instant the irons on his wrists and ankles fell open and dropped away. The heavy locks swung back without a sound, and the great doors, barred with steel and chain, hung loose on their hinges. The guards’ eyelids grew heavy, and where they stood they sank into sleep, with no mantra spoken over them and no spell cast. Yogamaya had passed through the prison, and every gate gave way before the child the way darkness gives way when the sun comes up.

Vasudeva laid the infant in a winnowing basket lined with soft cloth, lifted it onto his head, and stepped out into the dark. The rain had come on again, and above him the great serpent Shesha spread his hoods like a canopy and held off the falling water.

The Yamuna lay across the road, swollen with the monsoon, roaring, her surface torn open with whirlpools. Indra was still sending the rain down in bursts to keep them hidden. Vasudeva paused a moment at the water’s edge, then set his foot into the flood. The river knew whom she carried. Her waters sank and drew apart and made a road between them, rising no higher than his waist as he waded, the way the sea itself had opened long ago to let Rama pass. He crossed with the basket steady on his head.

He reached Gokul. Nanda’s house stood open, the whole household sunk in the deep sleep Yogamaya had laid over it, worn out besides from a long day of celebration. Yashoda lay in that sleep with her newborn girl beside her. Vasudeva set his own son down gently at her side and lifted the little girl into his arms. Yashoda never stirred. So heavy was her sleep, and so spent was she from the birth, that by morning she could not have said whether the child she bore had been a daughter or a son.

Vasudeva turned back. The Yamuna closed behind him and settled into her bed. In the prison he laid the girl beside Devaki; the irons drew themselves shut around his wrists again, the doors closed, and the guards woke as though nothing at all had happened.

Then the baby girl began to cry.

A guard heard her, and the word ran to Kansa. “Maharaj, the eighth child of Devaki is born.”

Kansa came up out of sleep. At midnight, soaked through, sword in hand, he stumbled to the cell on unsteady feet.

Devaki clutched the infant to her, weeping like the most helpless woman alive, and begged him, her voice coming apart. “Brother, this one is only a girl. It was a son you feared. She is a daughter of your own house, one you would give away one day as a bride. You have taken so many from me. Leave me this last one, I beg you.”

No pity moved in him. He tore the child from Devaki’s arms, caught her by the feet, and swung her down against the stone floor to break her.

She slipped from his grip in the very swing and shot up, out of his reach, into the air. There her shape changed. A goddess stood in the sky, eight-armed, a weapon burning in every hand: bow and arrow, trident and sword, shield, conch, and mace. Yogamaya. Siddhas and Gandharvas and the serpent-folk hymned her where she hung.

From the sky the goddess spoke. “What do you gain by killing me, fool? The one whose hands hold your death is already born, somewhere far from here. You cannot cut your fate down by murdering the helpless.” And she was gone, like lightning, scattered across the land into a hundred shrines under a hundred names.

Kansa did not move. Then something in him gave way. He reached down and struck the irons from Devaki and Vasudeva with his own hands, and the fierce king wept. “Sister. Brother. I killed your children the way an animal eats its own young. I threw away pity, I threw away my own blood, and there is no hell deep enough for what I have done. Forgive me. The good are kind even to the wicked.” He went down at their feet, his face wet.

Devaki forgave him her sons and let her anger go. Vasudeva said, gently, that grief and hatred grow from a single root, a man’s belief that he is only this body of his, and the clutching sense of mine and not-mine that follows from it. Kansa walked back to his palace that night a shaken man.

But by morning the fear had crept back in. He called his counselors together and laid before them everything the goddess had said. His demon advisers only laughed at the gods. Kill every newborn in the land, they told him, in every town and every cowherd camp. And since Vishnu draws his strength from holy men and their rites, put the Brahmins to the sword too, with their cows and their sacrifices, and you tear the god up by the roots. The counsel fitted the fear, and Kansa took it.

Around him stood the demons he had always leaned on, Putana and Baka and Aghasura and the rest, shape-shifters who could wear whatever form they pleased. He loosed them across the country to hound the innocent and the good, and set himself to hunting the one enemy he could not see.

And over in Gokul, Yashoda slept on with her new son at her side, knowing nothing of any of it, never once guessing what she held against her heart. In a cowherd’s courtyard, a king’s own child, the master of all that is, lay sleeping in a milkmaid’s arms, wrapped in the smell of milk.

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Shukadeva was quiet a while. The waves of the Ganga touched the sand of the bank and slid back.

“Do you see, Rajan,” he said. “The one whose single will keeps creation turning rode out to safety in a winnowing basket, on his own father’s head. The chains fell open on their own. The Yamuna drew back and laid down a road. The barred doors stood aside for a newborn. The Lord arrives on the tide of love, Rajan, and every wall leans open of its own accord.”

Parikshit said softly, “Bhagavan, then this prison I have feared until now, this ring of seven days closing around me, perhaps it too is no wall.”

Shukadeva did not answer, only smiled. Somewhere far off a papiha called, and the last light of evening went on trembling over the water.