The man who tried hardest to escape his death was the first to hear it named. His name was Kansa, king in Mathura, and the voice that named it belonged to a guest he had just honored. Narada, the sage who wanders between the worlds, had come down through the gardens outside the city, and Kansa went out to meet him, seated him on a golden stool, washed his feet, and gave him every courtesy the scriptures ask of a host. The sage repaid him with the truth. High on the summit of Meru, he said, in the councils of the gods, one thing had been settled. Your youngest sister Devaki, the one who lives here in your own city, will bear eight children, and the eighth of them will be your death.

Fear kills the tenderness in a man before it kills anything else. Kansa laughed. In front of his servants he threw his head back and mocked the sage, saying the gods made sport of Narada and fed him nonsense, that no power in heaven could frighten a king who could shake the earth with his two bare arms. But the laughter was a lid over a fire, and the fire did not go out. That same day he sent word to his demon allies, Keshi and Pralamba, Dhenuka and Arishta, Putana and Kaliya, to range the world in whatever shapes pleased them and destroy anyone who stood against him. And he turned on the one enemy within reach. Devaki and her husband Vasudeva were placed under close guard, shut into the inner rooms of the palace and watched day and night, and Kansa gave the order he would never be able to take back: every child his sister bore was to be taken the moment it drew breath.

A Mother Broken Six Times

What followed is hard to hold in words. Devaki conceived, and a son was born, and Kansa’s people took him from her and dashed him against a stone. Then a second son, and the stone again. Then a third. One after another, six infants were born in that guarded room, and one after another they were killed the same way, in front of the mother who had carried them.

These six were no ordinary children, though no one watching could have known it. Long before, they had been the sons of the demon Kalanemi, and an old curse had already written their end: they would be born from Devaki’s body and die at the hand of her own brother. What looked like nothing more than a tyrant’s cruelty was also a sentence long overdue, coming quietly due. That knowledge was hidden from Devaki. She was left with the grief, and with the thing that made the grief unbearable, that the hands carrying her children off to the stone were the hands of the brother she had grown up beside.

Then came the seventh, and with it the first move in a longer design. This child was a portion of the Lord himself, his own elder power, and he was not meant to die in that room. The goddess Nidra, who is Sleep, and who works at Vishnu’s word, drew the unborn child out of Devaki’s womb and carried it across the river to Vraja, into the womb of Rohini, Vasudeva’s other wife, who lived among the cowherds there. Rohini, asleep, felt it as a loss, a flow of blood, a miscarriage seen in a dream, and woke frightened to find her body changed. Then Nidra spoke to her in the dark and told her the truth: the child had been moved from Devaki to her, and because he had been drawn across from one mother to another, the world would know him as Sankarshana, the one drawn away. He would grow up strong and moon-bright in Vraja, the boy later called Balarama. In Mathura the word was let out that Devaki, worn thin by fear, had lost the seventh child before its time.

The Eighth Night

After that, Kansa watched the eighth conception the way a man watches a lit fuse. This was the one the sage had named. What he could not watch was the second birth being made ready at the same time. Away in Vraja, Yashoda, the wife of Nanda the cowherd, conceived as well, and the child forming in her was Nidra herself, come down to earth by a portion of Vishnu’s own power to play her part in what was coming.

They came on the same night, in the eighth month, at the exact turn of midnight, under the star Abhijit, in the hour named Vijaya, on the night the old texts call Jayanti. Devaki gave birth to Vishnu, and far off in Vraja Yashoda gave birth to a daughter, in the same dark hour. And the world answered. The seas rose and shook, the deep pillars of the earth trembled, fires that had gone cold woke and burned again, a clean wind moved through and carried the dust away, and the lights of the sky came out sharp and bright. Drums that no hand had touched sounded in the heavens, Indra let flowers fall from the upper air, and the sages and the singers of the gods chanted the newborn’s glory. For one long moment the whole of things stood still in joy.

But the child Devaki held was not shaped like a child. He had come into that guarded room with four arms, the mark of Srivatsa bright on his chest, every sign of the divine written on a newborn’s body, and the sight of him went through Vasudeva like cold water. He had already buried six sons. He bent over this one and begged him. Draw this form back in, my lord, he said. Look like a child, only a child. I have lost six of your brothers to Kansa’s fear and I cannot lose another. The child heard him. The four arms folded away into two, the glory dimmed to an infant’s softness, and in a newborn’s voice he called Vasudeva father and told him what to do. Carry me tonight to the house of Nanda the cowherd. A daughter has been born there in this same hour. Lay me beside her mother and bring the girl back here.

The Children Exchanged

Vasudeva did as he was told. He gathered the newborn against his chest and went out through the dark to the house where Yashoda lay. She had come through her own birth only hours before and had dropped into the dead sleep of exhaustion, and she never stirred. He set his son down beside her, in the warm place where her daughter had been.

Then he lifted the sleeping girl, an infant for an infant, and carried her back the way he had come. He laid her in Devaki’s arms in the guarded room and stood there with his work done and his pulse still loud in his ears, waiting for what the morning would bring.

The Goddess Rises

Vasudeva himself sent word to Kansa that the eighth child had come, and that it was a girl. Kansa did not wait. He came fast, demanded the newborn, and would hear nothing. Devaki held the child out and pleaded for her, a daughter, only a daughter, what threat could she ever be, let her live. The women of the house wept around her. Fear does not listen. Kansa took the girl up with contempt, gripped her by the legs, and swung her against the stone.

The stone did not break her. She slipped from his hands and rose, and the human child was gone. What stood in the air above him was four-armed and dark as a storm cloud, her body throwing light like lightning, her eyes like the rising sun, crowned and hung with the flowers and garlands of heaven, ringed by a host of goblins, laughing a laugh that rolled through the black night like something breaking loose. This was Nidra, come and gone from Yashoda’s arms, the power the world would one day worship on the heights of the Vindhya, the one still to cut down the demons Shumbha and Nishumbha and take her offerings on the ninth night of the waning moon. She looked down at the king who had just flung her at a rock.

Kansa, she said, you have thrown me down for your own ruin. On the day your death comes for you, when your enemy is on you at last, I will open your body with my own hands and drink your blood while it is still warm. Then she went up her own way into the sky, her followers closing around her, and was gone into the country of the gods.

The ground seemed to move under Kansa’s feet. He had killed six children, the seventh had slipped away from him, and still the thing he feared was loose in the world, breathing somewhere out beyond his walls, and he had not stopped it. What came over him then, for a moment, was shame. He turned to his sister with his head low. I have done everything a man can do to outrun my death, he told her, and I have killed your children for it, and my death has only come at me from another side. I could not beat what was set down for me. It is Time that kills, sister, Time that moves all of this, and men like me are only its tools. He touched her feet the way a son would and asked her not to hate him. And Devaki, her face wet, forgave him. You are not the one to blame, she said. Death was the hand; you were the instrument it used. This is the work of Time, and no one living undoes the work of Time. Rise, brother. Rise.

He rose, and whatever had softened in him closed over again as he walked back to his own rooms, baffled, his heart still burning. And while it was still dark, Vasudeva sent Nanda home. Take Yashoda and go to Vraja before the night is out, he said, and raise the two boys well, the one Rohini bore me and the one just born in your house, and guard them from Kansa and from every danger a child can meet. Nanda, glad and unknowing, set the infant on a litter carried on men’s shoulders and went out along the road that runs beside the Yamuna, toward the cowherd village under Mount Govardhana, carrying across the river the child the whole story had been waiting for.

Source: Harivamsha (the khila-parva of the Mahabharata), Vishnu Parva, chapters 46 to 50; critical edition (P. L. Vaidya, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune). Told as story, following the original sequence of events.