Bhagavatam · Putana

The Ganga flowed slow that morning, as if it too had paused to listen. Parikshit looked at the sage Shukadeva and said, “Bhagavan, you have just told me of Kansa’s fear. One thing has lodged inside me. All my life I have heard that whoever comes to kill the Lord meets his punishment. But has there ever been one who came by deceit, carrying poison, and whom the Lord took as his own even so?”

Shukadeva smiled. His voice dropped low, as if he were about to touch something very tender. “Rajan, there was one. A rakshasi. She came to kill a child, and she received the place that belongs to mothers. Listen.”

Kansa summoned a rakshasi. Her name was Putana.

She was no ordinary demoness. Changing form came easily to her, and in whatever shape she appeared, she looked so beautiful that whoever saw her stood transfixed. But her breast was filled with poison. Any child who drank her milk gave up its life that very hour.

Kansa told her, “Town, village, or cowherd settlement, wherever you find a small child, seek it out. Give each one your milk, and kill them one by one.”

Putana agreed. The work was nothing new to her. She had left the cradles of house after house standing empty.

Shukadeva paused on one truth here. A thing like her finds a door only where a door has been left open. In a house where people go about their work and never once let the names of Vishnu be spoken, never let his stories be told at evening, a gap opens in the very air, and it is through that gap that she walks in. Where his name is kept alive on the tongue, she circles and circles and finds no crack to enter.

She changed her form.

A young woman stood there, in gold ornaments, in a silk sari. A bindi on her forehead, bangles on her wrists, mogra flowers in her hair whose fragrance carried far.

She came down by the sky-path near Nanda Baba’s Gokul, then walked into the village on foot. The dust beneath her feet was still warm from the cows’ homecoming.

The women of Gokul stopped short at the sight of her. Who was this new woman, so beautiful? As she came walking with a lotus in her hand, the gopis felt as if Lakshmi herself were on her way to see her husband.

For the children, Putana was death in another shape. Searching here and there for little ones, she wandered, as if by chance, straight into Nanda Baba’s house.

Inside, in the cradle, lay Krishna, only days old, his eyes closed. But those eyes were anything but shut. The Lord, the soul of all that moves and all that does not, knew in that instant that this was Putana, the killer of children, and just as a heap of ash hides the blaze of the fire within it, he drew his fierce radiance inward and closed his eyes.

Rohini was there too, Vasudeva’s second wife, Balarama’s mother, and Yashoda as well. Both saw the beautiful woman come into the house. Everything on the outside of her was a mother’s, soft and fond and unhurried, and inside that softness sat a heart with an edge, so that the whole of her was a sword slipped into a lovely sheath. Her splendor left the two mothers so dazed that no word of warning would come to them; they only stood and watched.

Putana lifted Krishna into her lap. She had gathered up her own death and settled it against her, the way a man crossing a dark floor will pick up a sleeping snake and carry it in his arms, sure in his mind that it is a coil of rope.

Her breast held that dreadful poison no one could survive. That poison-filled breast she gave, fearless, into Krishna’s mouth.

Krishna set his tiny lips to her breast and began to drink.

Putana’s intent was to feed this child poison and kill him.

Krishna did something else altogether. He took anger for his companion, and pressing her breasts hard with both hands, he began, along with the milk, to drink out her life, slowly.

Every vital knot of Putana’s being began to tear apart. She cried out, “Let go, let go, enough, stop!” Again and again she thrashed her arms and legs, weeping. Her eyes rolled back, and her whole body ran with sweat.

Her form began to crack. The young woman’s face fell away, and from within it her true body rose to the surface.

A colossal rakshasi, her body like a mountain, her hair like a forest, long fangs in her mouth, limbs gone rigid.

The force of her scream was so terrible that the earth with its mountains and the heavens with their planets rocked under it. The seven underworlds and all the directions rang. Many people dropped to the ground, fearing a thunderbolt.

She tried to flee. But Krishna clung to her chest and would come loose for nothing. She strained with a thousand efforts; he did not shift.

Running, stumbling, she reached a cowshed on the edge of Vraj, and there she crashed down, the way Vritrasura fell when Indra’s thunderbolt struck him.

Her body was so vast that in falling it flattened the trees for six kos around, and those who saw it said no such wonder had ever been seen. Her mouth was crowded with fangs long and terrible as the beam of a plow. Her nostrils gaped like two caves in a hillside, her breasts lay like a pair of boulders shaken loose from a cliff, her eyes sank deep as wells gone over with weeds, her hips heaped up like sandbanks, her arms and thighs and feet sprawled like broken earthen dams, her belly stretched wide as a drained pond, and her coppery hair spread loose on every side. That scream had already split the ears and hearts and heads of the people of Vraj, and the sight of the body finished what the sound had begun.

And Krishna? He was still at that same breast, drinking, smiling, as if nothing had happened at all.

Only when he had drunk the very last of her life did he lift his mouth away, with that same sweet smile.

The villagers came running, out of breath.

“What happened?” “What is this horror?” “Where is our lala?”

And they saw: on the chest of that mountain of a rakshasi, a tiny child was playing, fearless, laughing, looking this way and that, as if seated in someone’s lap.

Yashoda and Rohini ran ahead of everyone. They snatched the child up, crushed him to their breasts as if they would never let him go again, and only then did their breath return. Then the gopis set to guarding the boy from every side. They passed a cow’s tail over him, bathed him with cow’s urine, dusted him with the earth the cows had walked on, and marked twelve places on his small body with cowdung, speaking a name of the Lord at each one. They called the Lord down onto him limb by limb, one name to keep his feet, another his knees, his thighs, his belly, his heart, his throat, his arms, his head. They named over him every night-walking, child-stealing thing there is, the Dakinis and Yatudhanis, the Bhutas and Pretas and Pishachas, Kotara and Revati and Jyeshtha, and Putana too, so that all of them, hearing the names of Vishnu, would lose their nerve and scatter. When the litany was done, Yashoda gave the boy her own breast, the breast of a mother who loved him, and rocked him until he slept.

It was only now that Nanda and the men of Vraj came up the road from Mathura. Nanda had been away in the city, and he came home carrying a weight in his chest, for Vasudeva had spoken to him there of strange dangers waiting on the road, and Nanda had turned the warning over and over and put himself in Shri Hari’s keeping. When the men reached the edge of Vraj and saw the mountain of a corpse lying across the flattened trees, they stopped where they stood. Then they said to one another that Vasudeva must carry the sight of a seer in him, for the very calamity he had named had come and gone. They took axes to the body, cut it into pieces, carried the pieces far off, laid them on a heap of wood, and set them alight.

But as that body burned, the smoke that rose from it carried a fragrance like agarwood, and it spread far on the wind.

Why?

Because in that whole affair one thing had happened on which no one’s eye had fallen.

Putana had come carrying poison; that is true. But she had also given milk from her own breast, exactly as a mother does.

And Krishna treated her the way one treats a mother. He drank the milk of her breast, and while he drank his small feet rested on her body, the feet that Brahma and Shiva carry in their hearts and bow to. The instant his mouth drew the last of her life out of her, the sin went out with it, burned away under his touch.

And when a mother has held Shri Hari to her breast, her farewell is a mother’s farewell. That fragrance of agarwood was giving its own testimony.

The katha calls it the destiny of the pure. She rose to Vaikuntha, to the very place kept for Devaki and for Yashoda, for every mother and every cow of Vraj whose milk he took with love. And of those mothers the katha says one thing more, that having once given their milk to him and held him as their own, they are done with birth and never come back to it. She had raised her breast to kill a child. She left the world counted among his mothers.

The katha lets the size of that settle before it asks the next thing. If she, who came with a child’s death folded inside her, was carried across, what must be waiting for the one who brings him what is dearest and lays it in his hands out of love?

Her intent was sin, but beneath that intent lay one small true thing: she had nursed him. Krishna took hold of that one small thing.

The poison, the intent to murder, that hideous rakshasi form: all of it he passed over unseen.

And Nanda took up his son. The boy had gone to the very edge of death and come back, and his father held him close and breathed in the smell of his head, and a gladness rose in him that there was no holding.