The rainy season was near, and Vrindavan did what it did every year: it threw itself into the worship of Indra. The older cowherds were gathering the offerings with real joy, and when Krishna asked what all the excitement was for, one of the elders explained it to him the way it had been explained for generations. Indra is king of the gods and master of the clouds, he said. He commands the rain that swells the grain and greens the grass. He draws the water up from the earth on the rays of the sun and pours it back down again for every living thing, and his thunder is the lion-roar of the sky. From father to son, further back than anyone could remember, the cowherds had honored him through the rains, because good rain meant heavy udders and full carts, and all of it, they believed, flowed from Indra’s favor.

Krishna heard him out, then asked a question that sounded simple and turned out to be anything but. Why Indra, he said. We are herdsmen. We do not plow fields or keep shops. Our whole living comes from the cattle, and the cattle live off this mountain. Govardhana’s slopes are where our cows graze, its forests give us wood and fruit, its streams give us our water. A farmer’s god is the furrow he plows, a brahmin’s is the fire and the mantra, a merchant’s is his trade. Each of us should honor the thing that actually feeds us. The man who takes his bread from one hand and gives his worship to another invites grief in this world and the next.

And look at what truly holds us up, he went on. The forests shelter the fields, the mountains hold up the forests, and when trouble comes it is the mountains that take us in. Govardhana is our refuge. It feeds us every single day, without being asked and without being thanked. If worship is owed to anyone, it is owed to the one who does the sustaining. So this year, he told them, let the offering meant for Indra go to the mountain, and let us honor the cows along with it.

The worship of the mountain

The argument landed. The cowherds told him he was right, and that year the whole great store of food raised for Indra was carried up to Govardhana instead. They poured out rivers of milk, lakes of curd and butter, hills of steaming rice. The cows were decked in garlands and crowns of peacock feathers and led slowly around the mountain. Then something happened that no one had bargained for. A vast form rose upon the mountain and reached out and took the offering with its own hands, and the form was Krishna. He had put on the shape of Govardhana by his own power, and he ate the feast laid before the hill and declared himself content. Worship the mountain from this day, the great shape told them, and I will keep you and your herds safe. The offering they thought they were laying before Govardhana had gone, the whole time, to the boy standing among them.

Up in heaven, Indra took it as an insult and could not let it go. A whole village of cowherds, at the word of one boy, had brushed the king of the gods aside and handed his festival to a hill. His pride bled. He did what power tends to do the moment it feels small: he decided to punish. He summoned the Samvartaka clouds, the black storm that drowns the world when an age ends, and turned them loose on Vrindavan.

The sky broke open

Indra mounted Airavata, his great white elephant, and drove the clouds down himself. They massed over Vrindavan like a thousand elephants crowding shoulder to shoulder, until there was no sky left, only a black ceiling of water, and then the ceiling gave way. Some of the rain fell in ropes as thick as a man’s arm, some in columns like elephant trunks, and the wind that carried it was edged with ice. Lightning walked the clouds. The rivers rose and tore their own trees loose. The sun and the moon went out, and the stars with them, and people looked up into an ocean standing in the sky with no floor and no far shore. The water began to climb. Calves were nearly swept off their feet, the cows stood stiff and bawling with the rain sheeting off their flanks, and the cowherds said to one another that the world was ending, that the whole earth would soon be one sheet of water. They left their houses and ran to Krishna. Save us, they cried. We gave up Indra’s worship because you asked us to, and now this doom has come down on our heads.

Krishna was not shaken. Do not be afraid, he told them. This storm is the tantrum of a wounded pride, and the thing to meet it with is patience.

A canopy for seven days

He had known this was coming, and he had already decided what to do. To keep the rain off the cattle and the people, he would lift the whole mountain and turn it into a roof. He walked up to Govardhana, set his hand beneath it, and raised it. The boulders on its shoulders shook and the trees along its ridges swayed, and then the entire mountain came free of the ground and rose, and he balanced it on the tip of one finger as lightly as a child holds up an umbrella. Overhead, celestial voices cried out that Govardhana had grown wings and taken to the sky. He called all of Vrindavan in under it, houses and carts and cattle and people, and told them to come without fear, for he had raised them a hall five kos long and one across, wide enough to hold all three worlds, let alone one village of cowherds. They came with their wagons and their pots, the herds were led inside in neat rows, and outside the doom kept falling.

One day, two days, seven days the storm kept on, and for all seven the boy stood without moving and without tiring, the mountain resting on his finger as though it had no weight at all. He stood at its foot like a pillar of stone and held it the way you might hold a door open for a guest. Beneath it the people were dry and safe and astonished. The child they had chased down the lanes and fed butter to and scolded for his mischief was standing over them now with a mountain for a roof.

Indra watched from above as his seven days of doom broke over the mountain and came to nothing, and as the boy beneath it neither tired nor flinched. His fury had nowhere left to go. He understood at last that this was no ordinary cowherd, and he called the clouds off. The rain thinned and stopped, the black ceiling pulled apart, and the sun climbed back into a washed and open sky. Krishna set Govardhana down in the exact place it had stood, and the cows and the people walked back out the way they had come and went home. Then Indra came down himself on Airavata and found the boy sitting at the foot of the hill in a cowherd’s plain clothes. The king of the gods was ashamed. He bowed his head, asked pardon for the storm he had sent, and admitted that neither gods nor demons could have withstood that rain, and that the boy had held it off by a power all his own. You have become the keeper and lord of the cows, Indra told him, so from now on the world will know you by a new name, Govinda. Then he climbed back to heaven.

That bowing of the proudest power in creation before a child was the real heart of this whole lila. True power is the kind that holds things up. It takes the weight, it makes a shelter of itself for whatever is small and frightened, and it asks for nothing in return.

Source: Harivamsha (the khila-parva of the Mahabharata), Vishnu Parva, chapters 60 to 63; critical edition (P. L. Vaidya, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune). Told as story, following the original sequence of events.