The warning still rang in Kansa’s ears, flung at him by the girl who had risen laughing out of his own hands into the night sky. The eighth child of his sister Devaki, the one the gods had marked out to be his death, was alive somewhere he could not reach. Fear turned him crueler. He had already loosed his shape-shifting servants across the country, demons who could wear any form they liked, with a standing order to hunt down any infant who might be the one and to keep watch over every birth in the land. The country was wide, and a child can be hidden in it.

Among the demons he had set loose was Putana. She had once been his own nurse, the woman who had held him when he was small, and she could take any shape she pleased. Kansa’s fear had a long reach, and it reached now toward a village of cowherds on the bank of the Yamuna.

The Disguise of Tenderness

It was past midnight when she came. She crossed into Vraja in the shape of a great bird, her wings beating the dark, and as she passed over the sleeping houses she gave a roar like a tiger’s. Then she folded that shape away and stood in the yard as a woman, her breasts heavy with milk, mild to look at, exactly the kind of woman no one in a cowherd village would think to fear.

She found where the child slept and lay down close by, beside the cart, as though she were one more tired woman of the household bedding down for the night. Around her Gokul slept on, every door shut, every lamp burned low. When the last of them had gone under she drew the infant to her and gave him her breast. This was deceit in its softest and most dangerous form, the kind that comes to you wearing tenderness.

The One She Came to Kill Drew Out Her Life

The infant she bent over was the Lord of the worlds wearing a child’s body. He took the breast, and as he drew the milk he drew her life out along with it, her breath and her strength leaving her in one long pull she had no power to break off.

Then the child let out a cry, a terrible sound that tore through the sleeping village. Where he had fed, her breast was torn open, and she went down. She lay stretched in the yard, lifeless, her breath and her senses gone out of her, as though a thunderbolt had come down out of the clear night and crushed her where she lay.

What Gokul Could Not Explain

The cry brought the whole village awake. Nanda, the other cowherds, and Yashoda came running, out of their wits with fear, and found the woman stretched on the ground with her breast torn away and no breath left in her, as if some great weapon had struck her down in the dark. What is this, they said to one another. Who has done it? They stood around her in a ring and could make no sense of it at all.

One by one, still saying wonder, wonder under their breath, they went back to their houses, and no one in Gokul could have told you what had happened there or why. Later, when the others had gone, Nanda came to Yashoda and asked her plainly whether their son was in any danger, because he was badly frightened and could not get to the bottom of it. She told him she had been asleep with the boy and had known nothing until the cry woke her. And Nanda, turning it over with his friends, felt the fear settle in one particular direction, toward Mathura, toward Kansa. It was the first of these things to come to the village. It would not be the last.

Source: Harivamsha (the khila-parva of the Mahabharata), Vishnu Parva, chapters 50 to 51; critical edition (P. L. Vaidya, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune). Told as story, following the original sequence of events.