The bow had broken the day before. Its snap had rolled across Mathura like thunder, and Kansa had not slept since. The next morning his people climbed into the galleries of the great amphitheater he had raised for the bow-sacrifice, some curious, some frightened, a few of them quietly hoping. Kansa came in dressed head to foot in white, white robes, a white turban, a white fan of yak-tail moving at either shoulder, and as he took the highest seat the crowd sent up shouts for his victory. He answered none of them. Behind the calm face he was counting, over and over, the ways this uneven contest was meant to fall to him, and behind the counting sat a colder thing. Narada had warned him years ago how he would die. He had killed six of Devaki’s newborn sons to stop it, and still the bow had snapped in a boy’s hands. Today was a gamble, and he knew it.

He had set his traps with care. At the gate of the arena stood Kuvalayapida, a rut-maddened war-elephant that had broken other elephants in its time, its temples streaming, its eyes glassy with rut, its temper turned against every man who came near. Kansa’s hope was simple: the two brothers would be trampled at the threshold and never reach the sand inside. And if by some chance they did reach it, two men were waiting for them there, Chanura and Mushtika, the champion wrestlers of his court, before whom hardened fighters had gone pale. Summoned the evening before and promised every honor, they had boasted that the cowherd boys were already dead, already walking ghosts, the moment they stepped onto the sand.

The Elephant at the Gate

The moment Krishna and Balarama reached the gate, the mahout drove the elephant straight at them. Krishna only laughed. A man who hoped to kill him with an elephant, he said, was in a great hurry to reach the house of Yama.

Then he went in against the beast as though the whole thing were a game invented for his amusement. He leaped and slapped his arms, and his shout came back off the walls like a lion’s. He let the great trunk come down against his chest, slipped in under it, wove between the tusks and then between the legs, and stirred the elephant into a blind fury the way a high wind stirs the sea. When it was maddened past all sense he caught its tail, and Balarama took hold of the tail as well and hauled the animal backward across the sand the way Garuda drags a serpent off a rock.

Then Krishna set a foot on its lower lip, took hold with both hands, and tore out its tusks. With those same tusks he struck the elephant dead, and its mahout with it. Blood ran from the broken temples as the huge body went down. Kansa had posted a guard of men behind the elephant to finish whatever it left standing, and the brothers caught up a fallen beam from the gateway and scattered them. Then they walked into the arena, Krishna carrying the tusks, both of them streaked with the animal’s blood and rut. Every watcher in the galleries saw a different thing come through that gate. To some it was a hero, to some it was death itself, to some a god; to the wrestlers a challenge, to the women a beauty, and to Kansa on his high seat, the shape of his own approaching end.

The Wrestling Match

The matches were called. Krishna stood out to face Chanura, a giant bred to the ring in the country of Karusha, and Balarama took Mushtika. From the galleries it looked like no contest at all, seasoned mountains of men on one side, two boys just off the pastures of Vraja on the other. A murmur of grief moved through the crowd. Some said aloud what many were thinking, that it was a shame to send children in against killers like these.

Krishna answered them from the sand. A fight had its rules, he said, and he would keep every one of them, and the man in front of him had disgraced the wrestler’s craft, breaking the necks of opponents who had already yielded. Then the two of them closed, and it became a thing terrible to watch, hold answering hold, each throw met and turned. It ran long. The ground shook under them, the galleries swayed, and the great jewel worked itself loose from Kansa’s crown and fell. At last Krishna threw Chanura down, drove a knee into his chest, and brought a fist down on the man’s head, and the life went out of him where he lay. Beside them Balarama struck Mushtika a single blow to the skull, a blow like a thunderclap, and the great wrestler dropped dead onto the sand. Both champions lay in the dust of the arena, and the whole crowd sat stunned and silent, as if what they had just watched could not have happened.

An End Dragged from the Dais

This was the moment the whole show had been built to reach, and it had gone wrong in front of everyone. Kansa came up out of his seat. His elephant was dead, his champions were dead, his whole strength had been wiped out while he watched. Sweat ran down his face and washed the painted lines from his brow, and his color went to the red of a setting sun. He threw up a hand to silence the trumpets, and then he began to shout orders: drive these cowherds out of my sight, chain Nanda, deal with Vasudeva as no elder should be dealt with, and take every cow and every coin the cowherds own.

Krishna heard his father Vasudeva named for punishment, saw old Nanda threatened and Devaki fainting in the stands, and something in him turned. Before anyone on the floor could move he crossed to the high dais in a single leap, so fast that only the men seated closest to Kansa saw him come. Kansa, already given over to what was coming, saw only a god dropping out of the sky. Krishna’s arms closed like iron bars, caught him by the hair, and the diamond crown went tumbling from his head. The strength ran out of Kansa in an instant. He could not so much as lift his eyes to Krishna’s face. His earrings were gone, his necklace torn away, and Krishna hauled him down off the platform and out across the arena floor, dragging him by the hair until his body plowed a furrow in the sand. Somewhere in that dragging the tyrant died. Krishna flung the body a little way off and left it there.

He was not slain in open battle, and no arrow had touched him. Dragged by the hair through the dust, Kansa was shut out from the heaven that warriors are promised, and where Krishna’s hands had gripped him the marks of nails were found pressed into his flesh. The Kansa whose name mothers had used for years to frighten their children lay in the dirt of his own arena, and no one moved to help him.

Restraint After Victory

What Krishna did after the killing mattered as much as the killing itself. He took nothing from the victory for himself. The throne of Mathura was his for the asking, and he said plainly, swearing it before the whole assembly, that he had not come for a crown and wanted nothing more than to go back to the cattle and the open country he had come from. He set Kansa’s aged father Ugrasena back on the throne with his own hands. Kansa had deposed the old king and kept him in chains for years; Krishna crowned him again and made him king of Mathura.

Then he went to the prison where Devaki and Vasudeva had been held since before he was born. He broke their chains. He bent and touched his father’s feet, and bowed his head to his mother, and for the first time Devaki held the son she had never once nursed, the eighth after six she had lost. Her body answered as a mother’s body does, years too late, and the tears that came now were tears of release after all the years of grief. The shadow was gone from Mathura. One danger still stood outside its walls, and everyone in that family knew the name. Jarasandha, king of Magadha, Kansa’s father-in-law, was not a man to let his daughters’ widowhood go unanswered.

Source: Harivamsha (the khila-parva of the Mahabharata), Vishnu Parva, chapters 73 to 78; critical edition (P. L. Vaidya, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune). Told as story, following the original sequence of events.