The Yadu clan of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas now stood at its full strength in the city of Dwarka, and among its people lived Vasudeva, Krishna’s father. A hard test was coming for this prosperous house, the kind that is fought entirely with suspicion, and before it was over a question would be raised about Krishna’s own character.

Among these Yadavas was a man named Satrajit, devoted to the worship of the Sun. One morning he went down to the shore of the ocean to make his worship, and the Sun, who counted Satrajit a friend, came before him in a body of pure light. From his own neck the Sun lifted a jewel unlike any other, the Syamantaka, and placed it in Satrajit’s hands. Satrajit carried it home, and the whole city came out and followed him, certain the Sun himself was moving through their streets. He gave the jewel to his brother Prasena. In the halls of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas that single stone poured out heaps of gold day after day, brought the rains in their proper season, and kept sickness far from the people. Wealth like that draws eyes, and this jewel began to draw a great many.

The Jewel Krishna Wanted

Krishna had wanted the Syamantaka for himself, and he had never hidden it. He wished to have the stone from Prasena, and the whole Yadava house knew as much. Yet wanting it was as far as he ever went. He could have taken the jewel by force, and not a soul could have stopped him, and still he refused to lay a hand on it or to come by it through any trick. So the Syamantaka stayed with Prasena, and Krishna’s wish for it stayed out in the open where everyone had seen it. Remember that. Everything that goes wrong next grows straight out of it.

A Hunt, a Lion, and a Bear

One day Prasena buckled the jewel at his throat and rode out to hunt. Deep in the forest a lion brought him down and killed him, then carried the shining stone away in its jaws. The lion did not keep it long. Jambavan, the king of the bears, fell upon the lion and killed it, picked up the glittering stone, and took it home to his cave, where he hung it over his small child’s cradle for the cub to play with. Every part of this happened far inside the forest, where no human eye watched any of it.

To everyone outside the forest, the facts looked simple and damning. Prasena had ridden out wearing the jewel, and Prasena had not come home. When word of his death reached the city, the Vrishnis and the Andhakas looked at one another and thought of a single man. They all knew Krishna had wanted the Syamantaka. Now the one who had wanted it was the obvious link between a dead prince and a missing gem, and the whispering began: that someone as great as Krishna had gotten Prasena killed for the sake of a stone and quietly kept it. There is no shield against a rumor like that.

In the Cave, Day After Day

Krishna understood exactly the trap he was in. Force can shut a mouth. It cannot reach into a mind and lift out a suspicion once the suspicion has taken root. So he made up his mind in a single sentence. He would go and bring the jewel back himself. He set out for the same stretch of forest where Prasena had ridden to hunt, and with his men behind him he followed the trail, working through the Riksha hills and the long slopes of the Vindhyas until the search wore him down. At last he came on Prasena and his horse, both dead, with no jewel anywhere near them. A little way off lay the lion, killed by something stronger than itself. A bear’s paw prints ran away from the kill, and Krishna followed them to the mouth of a cave.

Inside, a woman was singing. A nurse sat with Jambavan’s little child, swinging the bright jewel above the cradle to keep the baby from crying. “Hush now,” she was telling him. “The lion killed Prasena, and Jambavan killed the lion. There is nothing left to cry over. The Syamantaka is yours.” In those few words Krishna had the whole chain of it. He set Balarama and the rest of the Yadavas to wait at the mouth of the cave. Then, in a form and voice of great beauty, holding his bow Sharnga, he went in without a sound, pressed his way deep into the dark, and stood at last before the bear.

What followed, no one had expected. Krishna and Jambavan closed with each other, and the wrestling did not stop. It ran on for twenty-one days and twenty-one nights, the two of them locked in the dark of the cave, neither one willing to fall. Outside, the days went by with no word of Krishna and no sign of him. In the end Balarama and the Yadavas gave him up for dead, turned back to Dwarka, and carried home the news that Krishna had been killed.

Jambavan, the king of the bears, was used to winning. No creature that had ever faced him in that cave had walked out of it again. Krishna wore him down all the same. When he could fight no longer, he yielded, and he honored the one who had beaten him. He placed the Syamantaka in Krishna’s hands, and he gave him his most beloved daughter, Jambavati, to wed. Krishna bowed to the old king of the bears, took the jewel and the girl, and walked back out into the light, toward Dwarka.

The Name Washed Clean

Krishna came home to Dwarka carrying the very thing he was supposed to have killed for. He called the Yadavas into open assembly, and there, in front of all of them, he set the Syamantaka down and handed it back to Satrajit. He named no thief and he raised no voice. The stone said everything for him. The charge that had hung on his name through all those days simply loosened and fell, and his name was clean again.

Satrajit had been one of the doubters, and the sight of the returned jewel shamed the doubt clean out of him. To make it right he gave Krishna his daughter Satyabhama, the most excellent of all his daughters, as a wife, and her sisters were given along with her. The Syamantaka stayed where it now belonged, in Satrajit’s own keeping.

This was the first of many times you will watch Krishna meet a charge by going straight after the truth of it. He had the strength to crush the whispering. He chose to walk into the forest and settle the matter with facts, following the trail to its end and bringing the jewel back for every eye to see, until the accusation came apart on its own. He left no room in any of it for rage. The stage of the Yadava line now stands fully set, and the story turns toward the largest question standing behind all of it: who was every bit of this for, and why did Krishna come down to this earth at all?

Source: Harivamsha (the khila-parva of the Mahabharata), Harivamsha Parva, chapters 23 to 29; critical edition (P. L. Vaidya, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune). Told as story, following the original sequence of events.