Bhagavatam · The Deliverance of Yamalarjuna

Parikshit gazed a long while at the Ganga that morning, then turned to the sage. “Bhagavan, yesterday you told me how Yashoda tied Shyamasundar to the grinding mortar, and how the one whom no rope can hold let himself be held. I have only a few days left now, and I keep wondering: does the story go on past that rope? Where did that child go, dragging that mortar?”

A faint smile swam up in Shukadeva’s eyes, as it did every time the talk turned to Kanha. “Rajan, a cord ran from that mortar all the way back to a curse a hundred divine years old. Listen.”

That day Yashoda, having tied Kanha to the mortar, went back to the work of the house. She was tired, and her mind kept straying elsewhere. She had left the child in the courtyard, thinking that he was tied now and would go nowhere.

Lala sat for a while, staring at the mortar. Then, slowly, he got up.

The mortar was heavy, and he was this small. But for one before whom mountains weigh light, what is a mortar of wood? He began to drag it, and the grinding of the dragged mortar scored a long furrow across the courtyard earth as it went.

The fun he was having showed plainly on his face. He crossed the courtyard, then made for the garden behind the house, the mortar tumbling along behind him.

In the garden stood two tall arjuna trees, twins, which is why people called them Yamalarjuna. Risen from the same patch of ground, so close that their barks touched.

Between the two there was just space enough for a small child to slip through, and no room at all for the mortar.

Kanha squeezed into that narrow gap. The mortar, coming along behind, turned sideways and jammed between the two trunks.

He gave one jerk.

Under the ground, the roots of both trees shuddered.

A second jerk.

The roots cracked.

A third jerk.

With a terrible roar both trees tore up from the root and came crashing to the earth, and their trunks, their boughs, their smallest branches, and every single leaf trembled.

And out of those fallen trunks rose two lights.

Two perfected beings, blazing like fire, so radiant that the quarters of the sky gleamed with their beauty. Palms joined, the two of them fell at Kanha’s little feet.

“Prabhu! At last you have freed us from this bondage.”

Little Kanha watched them for a while, then softly smiled.

Who were these two?

Nalakubara and Manigriva. On one side, the two sons of Kubera, the lord of treasures; on the other, beings counted among the attendants of Bhagavan Rudra.

It happened long ago. The pride of this double fortune had climbed into both brothers’ heads. One day, in a lovely grove on Kailasa, on the bank of the Mandakini, they drank Varuni wine and went wild with it, their eyes rolling in the intoxication. A crowd of women sang and played around them, and they began to sport in the Ganga’s waters, among the blooming lotuses, with those young women, like a pair of elephants at play in the water with their mates.

Down that same path came the devarshi Narada.

The moment they saw the sage, the apsaras shrank back and snatched up their garments.

The two princes stood exactly as they were, unbothered. Blinded by shrimada, soaked in wine, they had no sense left of their own nakedness and no shame left to feel.

Narada looked at them. When he spoke, compassion carried his voice, without one grain of anger in it, for grace toward these two was all he intended.

“Of every vanity a man can carry,” he said, “the pride of wealth eats the reason fastest. Pride of birth or of learning can blind him too, but riches blind him quickest, because they never travel alone. Women, drink, and the dice come in close behind. A man swollen with wealth starts to believe his own body is proof against age and death, and from that one delusion every cruelty follows. He will spill the blood of other creatures to pamper a thing that ends as ash, and never once ask whose the body was to begin with. The truest medicine for such blindness is poverty. A man with nothing left to guard looks at every other creature and sees himself in it. The foot that has felt the thorn will not wish the thorn on anyone. Yours have never bled. Your fortune has climbed so high that shame itself has walked out of you. So take the shape of the dullness that made you this. Stand as trees, rooted where you are, bare to every eye, and learn the stillness you would not learn as men.”

That very instant the two brothers stood turned into two arjuna trees behind Nanda Baba’s courtyard.

But the sage’s heart was tender under the severity. Even as the words left him he left the two brothers a thread to hold, so that self-knowledge would stay awake in them through the long tree-sleep, their remembrance fixed on Shri Hari, and they would never fall again the way they had fallen. When a hundred years of the devas had run their course, he said, the two would come into the presence of Lord Vasudeva himself, and there, waking a supreme love at his feet, they would rise and return to their own world. Then Narada walked on toward the hermitage of the sage Narayana.

Then a hundred divine years went by. And that day arrived.

Kanha freed them with no mantra and no rite. He had not come to that spot by chance either. Narada was dear to him, and he had walked the mortar all the way to the twin trees to make the sage’s word come true. One pull, and a bondage of a hundred divine years snapped.

Nalakubara and Manigriva bowed again and again to that tiny form.

“Prabhu, we have recognized you. You are the primordial Person, the master of all yoga, and this whole universe, the seen and the unseen alike, is a form of you. You are the one controller seated inside every creature that breathes, ruler of its senses, its mind, and its very sense of I. You are Time itself, the imperishable Lord, and you have come and stood here in the body of a child for the rescue of the whole creation, ours along with it. That our eyes could fall on you at all, we owe to the grace of the sage Narada. Grant us only this: let our speech sing your virtues, our ears stay lost in your kathas, our hands do your seva, our heads bow toward your world, our eyes seek out your saints, and our mind live always at your feet.”

“I knew already,” said Kanha, in his lisping child’s speech, “how the kind sage folded a grace inside that curse, the day your fortune blinded you. Once a heart has truly turned to me, no bondage holds it any longer, the way no darkness holds against the sun. Go now, given over to me, each of you to your own home. You have known me for what I am, and the undivided bhakti you longed for is already lit in you.”

The two bowed their heads once more, walked around Bhagavan in reverence, and set off toward the north, on the road to their own world.

At that very moment, hearing the crash of the falling trees, Yashoda came running.

The sight before her nailed her feet to the ground. Both huge trees lay felled, and between them, tied to the mortar, her Lala sat playing in the dirt as though nothing at all had happened.

For one moment her breath stopped.

“Kanhaiya!”

She lunged forward and swept the child into her arms. With shaking hands she felt his forehead, his arms, his legs. Any hurt anywhere, any scratch?

Nothing had happened to Lala. Even in falling, those trees had left not one hair of his out of place.

She did not even think to loosen the knot at the mortar. She only held him.

The people of Gokul came at a run, Nanda Baba among them, every one of them braced for a fallen thunderbolt. They found two great trees down and nothing anywhere to explain it. No storm had blown, no lightning had struck, no axe had left a mark. Only the boy, sitting between the trunks with the mortar still roped to him.

The little ones who had been playing nearby spoke up. It was this one, they said, pointing at Kanha. He came in dragging the mortar, and when it wedged sideways between the trees he pulled, and the trees came down, and two shining men rose out of them and walked away toward the north. The grown men would not believe a word of it. How could a child who could barely stand pull down two trees that ten of them together could not have shifted? Yet a few of them remembered Putana, and the whirlwind Trnavarta, and how this same child had walked unharmed out of both, and they fell quiet, no longer sure of anything.

Nanda Baba looked at his son tied to the mortar in the wreck of the garden, and he laughed, and bent down, and worked the knot loose with his own hands. Whatever the truth of it, his Lala was whole. That was all he could see, and all he wished to see. He had found the boy safe, and it filled him past the brim.

And that was exactly what Shyamasundar wanted. A mother’s lap, a father’s finger, the dust of Gokul. Every other splendor sat pale beside these.