Krishna, p.3
Krishna, page 3
Outside it is raining walls of water. Darting from shelter to shelter, Vasudeva scurries through the deserted streets. He comes past the last homes to the river risen beyond the motionless city. He stops there, full of terror and weighed down with a burden he can hardly bear. Drenched, he stands shivering in the momentous night.
Suddenly, a serpent’s immense hood thrusts itself out of the raging water, a refulgent jewel at its throat. An awning with a hundred emerald segments shields Vasudeva from the solid torrents of the sky. Still, Krishna’s father hesitates on the bank of the Yamuna.
The river, which paused earlier at the Avatara’s birth, is now in spate, seething with whirlpools. His lantern in one hand, basket on the other arm, Vasudeva vacillates. The wind and the rain howl around him like spirits of darkness.
A voice speaks from the lightning-gashed night, “The river is a Goddess, Vasudeva, she will protect you.”
But he still wavers. Then he sees another figure, full of light, rise out of the river: a shimmering female form. She walks on the current as if she trod on solid ground, and comes to him. He folds his palms to the apparition.
The river goddess takes his hand and now he shivers with the bliss of that touch, which leads him to the waters’ edge. Clutching her barely material fingers, he sets foot after her into the hurtling flow. As she takes him on he finds the torrent is only around his ankles. In roaring midstream, the Yamuna hardly covers his knees.
On the other bank, by lamplight, Vasudeva sees the camp of the gypsy cowherds, Nanda and his people. Yasodha is asleep after her own labour to bring the infant Maya into the world. The wandering gopas have come with the taxes Kamsa levies from them. They are also here by fate.
As Vasudeva comes up to them he sees Maya has cast her illusion over the gypsies. They are all asleep, eyes open: figures in a picture into which Krishna’s father steals. Moving in a trance he lays his son down in Yasodha’s bed. Never knowing why, he picks up Yasodha’s perfect baby girl, and turns back to the river swollen at the birth of God into the world.
Shielded again by the serpent’s hood, the Devi takes him back across the Yamuna. She leaves him on the bank with a blessing, placing a fluid palm on his head when he kneels before her.
He sleepwalks back to Devaki through the empty streets of Mathura. Kamsa’s guards are still asleep. Devaki has scarcely known what happened; she is also bemused by it all, also in the dream. Vasudeva sets the child down in his wife’s bed and, exhausted, lies down beside her.
The baby cries at being set down. The night’s miasma lifts and the world wakes up. The guards rush in to find the king’s cousin has given birth again. Word flies to Kamsa in his insecure palace, but he is already up and preparing to visit Devaki. A dream told him she had given birth again tonight.
“The princess Devaki has delivered a baby girl, my lord!” cries the guard’s boy to his sovereign.
“The asariri said her eighth child would be a son. Is there no mistake?”
“We have seen her, my lord.”
“Perhaps the voice was wrong, after all,” mutters Kamsa, clutching at sweet hope. But then, “Come! The child must not live, it is the eighth.”
Devaki is trying to feed the baby, and Vasudeva is asleep, when the feline Kamsa stalks in and snatches her little one out of his cousin’s arms.
For once this is more than Devaki can bear. She wrests the child back, crying, “She is a girl, Kamsa!”
But Kamsa lashes out with a kick and she falls in a heap. Vasudeva’s protest is drowned by the king’s thin roar. Kamsa snatches up the child and strides out, while she howls at the violence.
Swinging her by her little legs, he dashes her head against a rock in the yard, cutting off her scream.
But that child rises at once!
She is vast. Her streaming hair covers the sky and blazes with stars. The people, Devaki and Vasudeva fall down in worship. Kamsa cowers, whimpering, from the eight-armed vision.
The demon of Mathura is sure his death has come. But the lovely Devi only says to him in a dreadful voice, “Fool, he who has killed you before and will kill you again, has been born. And he lives.”
With a look that roots him, she rises into heaven. Kamsa of Mathura has years of anguish to live through, before his death comes to free him.
The king limps back to his palace. He locks himself in his royal apartment and doesn’t emerge for an hour. Then he staggers out, drunk.
“How foolish the girl was to tell me Devaki’s son is alive! Fetch my generals.”
When those soldiers come, roused from nightmare slumber, he orders his army to kill every newborn child in his kingdom.
“Leave not one alive, if you value your families and your lives.”
The tramp of killers’ boots on wet witness cobblestones, the midnight knock on the door, and murder stalks the streets of Mathura where Krishna was born, blue and wonderful, a few hours ago. He, of course, is safe across the Yamuna, but a tribute of a thousand babies’ blood flows with storm-water through the city’s gutters—as the blood of his birth.
The screams of the murdered, and more piteous, those of the mothers from whose arms the mites are wrenched, knife through a shocked dawn. Then, silence: the shallow, ominous silence of hell come to claim Kamsa’s city.
At dawn, as the river flows tainted with innocent crimson, Kamsa decides he will hold a banquet to celebrate his triumph over God.
Across the joyful and sad Yamuna, Yasodha wakes at dawn and finds she has had a son dark as a blue lotus. He smiles at her; she is lost in his black eyes from the first moment.
SIX
Purusha Neha abhikramanaaso asti...
ulled by Krishna’s voice, entranced by his smile, his eyes, Arjuna began to float away upon his river of light that sprang between two ages.
Krishna now crooned to the warrior, touching his mind; softly, he chanted as much to himself as to his disciple, and at times he sang his wisdom: as if in prayer.
He sang in exorcism, “Along the infinite way no effort, even the smallest, is in vain or lost, and no obstacle prevails. This is the wisdom of yoga. Arjuna, be free from the fruits of your deeds, and from sloth as well.
“I am with you; make no anxious difference between success and failure. Act in perfect purity and calm. Even-mindedness is yoga, detachment is yoga, skill is yoga.
“For one who is determined, his understanding is single and lucid. But the thoughts of the undiscerning are many-branched, endless and endlessly confused.”
Krishna laid an arm around Arjuna’s shoulders. The sun had risen above the horizon; all around them the colours of the battlefield glowed.
The Avatara’s river flowed through Arjuna, and he was part of its shining tide. His body was a miracle, its chakras made pure, pervaded by Krishna’s song, mutating within the song’s great rhythms.
Prakriti
The next morning, a paralysis of grief lies over Mathura. The king has forbidden any public mourning, on pain of death. Kamsa, too, is numbed by all the murdering of the night. His soul shrinks from him.
If a part of him doesn’t for a moment believe in the monstrous self-deception that has snatched a thousand babies from their mothers, he does not want to hear its frenzied whispering any more or he will go mad.
He convinces himself, and his sycophantic court, that the carnage has saved his life and their positions of privilege; that whichever infant his killer-to-be was, it is now dead, and danger past.
The king is bland and cheerful, and uncommonly hospitable to his guests at his banquet.
He does not hear his people, the shattered common folk of Mathura, speaking quietly among themselves even as they mourn, about the salvation that is at hand. He doesn’t hear the wonderful rumours begun by those who saw the vision of the Devi spring up from the stone against which Kamsa dashed her: the awesome Devi, who proclaimed his doom to the demon, “He who is all the Gods is born.”
Later the same morning, Vasudeva crosses the Yamuna again, now in a ferry coracle, time frozen for him once more. He finds Nanda’s wagon. Nanda, who has no inkling of the events of the previous night, welcomes his friend joyfully.
“We have a fabulous blue son, Vasudeva.”
“You’ve fathered a son at your age!” laughs Vasudeva, strange light-headedness upon him. “But you have already paid Kamsa his taxes. What if there is another storm tonight? You shouldn’t expose your baby to the elements. I think you should return to Gokula.”
Nanda is a little puzzled at this advice. But he knows something of Vasudeva’s circumstances. He has often wondered that the Yadava is not entirely deranged after everything he has endured. But Vasudeva plucks at the cowherd’s sleeve.
“Nanda, I have a favour to ask you.”
“Today, ask anything, my friend,” cries Nanda.
“I, too, have a small son hardly a year old, by Rohini. I beg you, adopt him and raise him as your own.”
“He shall be a fine brother to my boy,” says Nanda without hesitation.
“Won’t you come in and see my son, Vasudeva?” Nanda says, the joy of the Lotus’ birth upon him again. Though he does not know, and neither does his wife yet, that their son is Vishnu incarnate.
Vasudeva climbs after the cowherd chieftain into Nanda’s covered cart, where Yasodha sings softly to her dark baby, Devaki’s son. Vasudeva sees the glow within the cart, the aura that streams from the child and enfolds Yasodha.
Nanda may have noticed the light as well, but he is too excited to pay it any mind. He only sees the baby with the shining black eyes and dark skin, surely bluish, who for him fills not just his cart but the world with light.
“Vasudeva, come near and bless my baby,” calls Yasodha.
But Vasudeva is sad. He sits down, instead, and tells them how, last night in Mathura, Kamsa murdered his daughter. He doesn’t mention that she was the tiny Goddess, or from where he had fetched her; nor how she rose when Kamsa dashed her against the stone, and what she said.
He does not speak of the night’s massacre of infants. Very softly, Vasudeva says, “As for your son, it is I who should seek his blessing.”
Nanda laughs. “Yes, a child’s blessing is a great thing. And my son is such a pure baby, isn’t he?” No pity for Vasudeva can dim Nanda’s delight.
“Yes, such a marvellous child,” agrees Vasudeva on his way out, after a lingering look at the infant in Yasodha’s arms. Yasodha stares after him pityingly, thinking the poor man’s fortitude has finally broken down, and sorrow unhinged him.
But then, as Vasudeva leaves the cart, and Nanda goes with him to make preparations to depart for Gokula, Yasodha forgets both of them as she turns back to her child. At once, she is lost in the wonder of him.
Vasudeva comes back to Devaki in her prison. She is consoled that her baby lives; if not near her, at least he lives. Vasudeva finds that he, too, can share her consolation. And it is their son’s blessing to them, if they do not yet know it.
SEVEN
Purusha Budhhyo yukto, Partha...
rjuna was a portal to unborn generations, as Krishna’s resonant Gita spilled through him, each word a being alive: a bright host of masters!
They reached beyond him with fingers of wisdom. They reached into veiled times, down the mysterious labyrinths of another history, setting on fire the hearts of strange and visionary heroes, who would walk a very different world and make war again.
In his perfect passivity, while Krishna exhorted him to immaculate action, Arjuna became the Blue God’s unwitting ally in an older war. He stood in a legendary universe and, listening absorbed, gave his astral body to become Krishna’s subtle prophet.
It melted, melted down Arjuna’s soul. A nuclear fire, it spread through the arteries of the earth, quick as devotion, swift as love. His charioteer held his soul in the huge mesmerism of his song, and breathed renewal into the Pandava—for a thousand generations of warriors.
“The wise, who have yoked their intelligence, are freed from the bonds of birth,” said Krishna. “They reach Brahman, the sorrowless state.
“Arjuna, your mind is confused by all you have read and all you have heard. Your heart is bewildered. But when true insight dawns on you, your intelligence will see beyond bookish Vedic learning, and your spirit will be profound and unshakeable.”
Ready to float away, Arjuna was restrained only by Krishna’s immense love. Listening to the wisdom of his sarathy, the luminous being the Pandava had become, quivered in mystic emotion.
Prakriti
She is fair as a summer cloud, and ravishing. She has all the cowherd men turning to stare as, long braids wrapped in jasmine garlands, anklets tinkling, flared hips swaying wide below her wasp’s waist, carrying like Lakshmi a lotus in her hand, she comes, with an innocent look in her eyes, asking the way to Yasodha’s house.
It was not unusual for folk of every uncommon hue to arrive from distant parts, looking to catch a glimpse of Nanda’s son as he lay in his cot sucking his big toe.
At first, it had only been gypsy cowherds who came in wild groups. They had heard of the child’s unusual beauty and they knew from ancient prophecies that blue was the colour of the incarnations of the dwapara yuga.
But quickly more mysterious strangers found their way to Gokula: rishis with matted jata came from faraway forests, and solemn mountains.
In those earliest days, if any of Nanda’s gopas felt the arrival of these holy ones was exceptional, no one made much of it. Not even when exotic birds, never seen in these parts before, infested the trees of Gokula in song-brimming swarms, especially around Nanda’s house. Or when rare beasts walked boldly into Yasodha’s yard; she could have sworn that a golden deer peered in at the window as she was changing her son’s swaddling one day.
And what a fuss they all made of him, the little blue one, especially his kinsfolk, the cowherds.
“What a lovely face he has!”
“How handsome he is!”
“Such black eyes!”
“Look at the way he sucks his toe, as other children do their thumbs!”
They named him Krishna—Dark One—and he smiled back at them, his eyes shining, his face bursting with mischief.
She, Putana, has assumed such a beautiful guise with her sorcery that she enchants even Yasodha.
“Oh, what a beautiful boy, Yasodha. Let me look after him for you.”
And she claims they are distant cousins, though she is more a cousin of the spirit of the monster in Mathura. But Krishna seems to take to her at once. He goes readily to her, smiling and gurgling.
Yasodha does need some spare time to cook, wash clothes, and make butter, curd and ghee. So she doesn’t investigate Putana’s antecedents and is happy to offer her a place to live, to look after Krishna part of the time and to help with the housework.
Putana ingratiates herself. She lives with Nanda and Yasodha for a month as a friendly, self-effacing helpmate. And of them all Krishna quickly grows the most attached to her.
Soon, Yasodha is also full of admiration for her ‘cousin’; most of all, because unlike the other spirited wenches of the village, Putana is poised and reserved, and unmoved by the advances made to her by some of the cowherds. She even begins to go off inside the house as soon as she sees any young gopa coming along with a hopeful gleam in his eye.
A rare woman, thinks Yasodha, good at her work; and more important, Krishna adores her. No one has seen what Putana becomes at night.
Of course Krishna adores her. Only he knows, in his impenetrable way, why she is in Gokula. And one night of a full moon, past midnight, Putana steals from her bed, picks Krishna up, and carries him into her room.
Undoing her blouse, she bares breasts turned weirdly dark now, at dead of night, like her face and her hands. When suckled those black nipples yield milk laced with the deadly poison of her virulent body. Countless babies she has murdered by feeding them.
And one rakshasa lover died, thrashing in agony in a moon-soaked forest glade, as he spent his warm seed inside her.
Tonight, little Krishna eagerly takes the proffered nipple, hard with her evil excitement. He grasps it with a tiny blue thumb and forefinger, and guides it between toothless gums. He shuts his long eyes and, sighing, begins to feed.
Putana is relieved he hasn’t made a sound at her midnight offering. She, too, shuts her eyes and settles back, waiting for the poison to work.
Krishna drinks thirstily at Putana’s breast. And she has the strangest sensation of suckling not an infant, but a being whose dimensions she cannot begin to fathom.
Krishna feeds. Swiftly, he sucks all the milk and all the poison out of her. She finds his feeding so overpowering that suddenly Putana is afraid. As he drinks, she feels all her buried malignancy being sucked up into her body, her consciousness.
She experiences the fear of the countless infants she has murdered and devoured; terror assails her, karmic and inescapable. His fire licks through her, burning the sins of a hundred feral lives in a few searing moments, while she begins to scream in the agony of his purification.
She struggles to detach the awful child from her breast. But Krishna has not finished feeding. He drinks on, and try as she will to wrench him away, she can’t get him off.
He drinks on, when the milk and poison run dry, and blood begins to flow. He drinks on while Putana’s lovely body begins to metamorphose and she changes back into her true form: scaled, clawed and old as sin. He feeds calmly on at her life, without once opening his eyes, or heeding her ululating screams.
Nanda, Yasodha and, quickly, the rest of Gokula come running from their beds to find Putana dead on the floor, blood at her shrivelled breast, blood at her mouth.
Krishna still lies on her lap; he smiles at them, and gurgles with the satisfaction of his feed. The dead rakshasi’s expression is contented, beautiful again.
A moment before life left her ravaged body to enter into his mystery, Krishna opened his eyes and gazed back at her. Then, she knew the true reason for her being with him and, all her evil exorcised, Putana was saved.
Suddenly, a serpent’s immense hood thrusts itself out of the raging water, a refulgent jewel at its throat. An awning with a hundred emerald segments shields Vasudeva from the solid torrents of the sky. Still, Krishna’s father hesitates on the bank of the Yamuna.
The river, which paused earlier at the Avatara’s birth, is now in spate, seething with whirlpools. His lantern in one hand, basket on the other arm, Vasudeva vacillates. The wind and the rain howl around him like spirits of darkness.
A voice speaks from the lightning-gashed night, “The river is a Goddess, Vasudeva, she will protect you.”
But he still wavers. Then he sees another figure, full of light, rise out of the river: a shimmering female form. She walks on the current as if she trod on solid ground, and comes to him. He folds his palms to the apparition.
The river goddess takes his hand and now he shivers with the bliss of that touch, which leads him to the waters’ edge. Clutching her barely material fingers, he sets foot after her into the hurtling flow. As she takes him on he finds the torrent is only around his ankles. In roaring midstream, the Yamuna hardly covers his knees.
On the other bank, by lamplight, Vasudeva sees the camp of the gypsy cowherds, Nanda and his people. Yasodha is asleep after her own labour to bring the infant Maya into the world. The wandering gopas have come with the taxes Kamsa levies from them. They are also here by fate.
As Vasudeva comes up to them he sees Maya has cast her illusion over the gypsies. They are all asleep, eyes open: figures in a picture into which Krishna’s father steals. Moving in a trance he lays his son down in Yasodha’s bed. Never knowing why, he picks up Yasodha’s perfect baby girl, and turns back to the river swollen at the birth of God into the world.
Shielded again by the serpent’s hood, the Devi takes him back across the Yamuna. She leaves him on the bank with a blessing, placing a fluid palm on his head when he kneels before her.
He sleepwalks back to Devaki through the empty streets of Mathura. Kamsa’s guards are still asleep. Devaki has scarcely known what happened; she is also bemused by it all, also in the dream. Vasudeva sets the child down in his wife’s bed and, exhausted, lies down beside her.
The baby cries at being set down. The night’s miasma lifts and the world wakes up. The guards rush in to find the king’s cousin has given birth again. Word flies to Kamsa in his insecure palace, but he is already up and preparing to visit Devaki. A dream told him she had given birth again tonight.
“The princess Devaki has delivered a baby girl, my lord!” cries the guard’s boy to his sovereign.
“The asariri said her eighth child would be a son. Is there no mistake?”
“We have seen her, my lord.”
“Perhaps the voice was wrong, after all,” mutters Kamsa, clutching at sweet hope. But then, “Come! The child must not live, it is the eighth.”
Devaki is trying to feed the baby, and Vasudeva is asleep, when the feline Kamsa stalks in and snatches her little one out of his cousin’s arms.
For once this is more than Devaki can bear. She wrests the child back, crying, “She is a girl, Kamsa!”
But Kamsa lashes out with a kick and she falls in a heap. Vasudeva’s protest is drowned by the king’s thin roar. Kamsa snatches up the child and strides out, while she howls at the violence.
Swinging her by her little legs, he dashes her head against a rock in the yard, cutting off her scream.
But that child rises at once!
She is vast. Her streaming hair covers the sky and blazes with stars. The people, Devaki and Vasudeva fall down in worship. Kamsa cowers, whimpering, from the eight-armed vision.
The demon of Mathura is sure his death has come. But the lovely Devi only says to him in a dreadful voice, “Fool, he who has killed you before and will kill you again, has been born. And he lives.”
With a look that roots him, she rises into heaven. Kamsa of Mathura has years of anguish to live through, before his death comes to free him.
The king limps back to his palace. He locks himself in his royal apartment and doesn’t emerge for an hour. Then he staggers out, drunk.
“How foolish the girl was to tell me Devaki’s son is alive! Fetch my generals.”
When those soldiers come, roused from nightmare slumber, he orders his army to kill every newborn child in his kingdom.
“Leave not one alive, if you value your families and your lives.”
The tramp of killers’ boots on wet witness cobblestones, the midnight knock on the door, and murder stalks the streets of Mathura where Krishna was born, blue and wonderful, a few hours ago. He, of course, is safe across the Yamuna, but a tribute of a thousand babies’ blood flows with storm-water through the city’s gutters—as the blood of his birth.
The screams of the murdered, and more piteous, those of the mothers from whose arms the mites are wrenched, knife through a shocked dawn. Then, silence: the shallow, ominous silence of hell come to claim Kamsa’s city.
At dawn, as the river flows tainted with innocent crimson, Kamsa decides he will hold a banquet to celebrate his triumph over God.
Across the joyful and sad Yamuna, Yasodha wakes at dawn and finds she has had a son dark as a blue lotus. He smiles at her; she is lost in his black eyes from the first moment.
SIX
Purusha Neha abhikramanaaso asti...
ulled by Krishna’s voice, entranced by his smile, his eyes, Arjuna began to float away upon his river of light that sprang between two ages.
Krishna now crooned to the warrior, touching his mind; softly, he chanted as much to himself as to his disciple, and at times he sang his wisdom: as if in prayer.
He sang in exorcism, “Along the infinite way no effort, even the smallest, is in vain or lost, and no obstacle prevails. This is the wisdom of yoga. Arjuna, be free from the fruits of your deeds, and from sloth as well.
“I am with you; make no anxious difference between success and failure. Act in perfect purity and calm. Even-mindedness is yoga, detachment is yoga, skill is yoga.
“For one who is determined, his understanding is single and lucid. But the thoughts of the undiscerning are many-branched, endless and endlessly confused.”
Krishna laid an arm around Arjuna’s shoulders. The sun had risen above the horizon; all around them the colours of the battlefield glowed.
The Avatara’s river flowed through Arjuna, and he was part of its shining tide. His body was a miracle, its chakras made pure, pervaded by Krishna’s song, mutating within the song’s great rhythms.
Prakriti
The next morning, a paralysis of grief lies over Mathura. The king has forbidden any public mourning, on pain of death. Kamsa, too, is numbed by all the murdering of the night. His soul shrinks from him.
If a part of him doesn’t for a moment believe in the monstrous self-deception that has snatched a thousand babies from their mothers, he does not want to hear its frenzied whispering any more or he will go mad.
He convinces himself, and his sycophantic court, that the carnage has saved his life and their positions of privilege; that whichever infant his killer-to-be was, it is now dead, and danger past.
The king is bland and cheerful, and uncommonly hospitable to his guests at his banquet.
He does not hear his people, the shattered common folk of Mathura, speaking quietly among themselves even as they mourn, about the salvation that is at hand. He doesn’t hear the wonderful rumours begun by those who saw the vision of the Devi spring up from the stone against which Kamsa dashed her: the awesome Devi, who proclaimed his doom to the demon, “He who is all the Gods is born.”
Later the same morning, Vasudeva crosses the Yamuna again, now in a ferry coracle, time frozen for him once more. He finds Nanda’s wagon. Nanda, who has no inkling of the events of the previous night, welcomes his friend joyfully.
“We have a fabulous blue son, Vasudeva.”
“You’ve fathered a son at your age!” laughs Vasudeva, strange light-headedness upon him. “But you have already paid Kamsa his taxes. What if there is another storm tonight? You shouldn’t expose your baby to the elements. I think you should return to Gokula.”
Nanda is a little puzzled at this advice. But he knows something of Vasudeva’s circumstances. He has often wondered that the Yadava is not entirely deranged after everything he has endured. But Vasudeva plucks at the cowherd’s sleeve.
“Nanda, I have a favour to ask you.”
“Today, ask anything, my friend,” cries Nanda.
“I, too, have a small son hardly a year old, by Rohini. I beg you, adopt him and raise him as your own.”
“He shall be a fine brother to my boy,” says Nanda without hesitation.
“Won’t you come in and see my son, Vasudeva?” Nanda says, the joy of the Lotus’ birth upon him again. Though he does not know, and neither does his wife yet, that their son is Vishnu incarnate.
Vasudeva climbs after the cowherd chieftain into Nanda’s covered cart, where Yasodha sings softly to her dark baby, Devaki’s son. Vasudeva sees the glow within the cart, the aura that streams from the child and enfolds Yasodha.
Nanda may have noticed the light as well, but he is too excited to pay it any mind. He only sees the baby with the shining black eyes and dark skin, surely bluish, who for him fills not just his cart but the world with light.
“Vasudeva, come near and bless my baby,” calls Yasodha.
But Vasudeva is sad. He sits down, instead, and tells them how, last night in Mathura, Kamsa murdered his daughter. He doesn’t mention that she was the tiny Goddess, or from where he had fetched her; nor how she rose when Kamsa dashed her against the stone, and what she said.
He does not speak of the night’s massacre of infants. Very softly, Vasudeva says, “As for your son, it is I who should seek his blessing.”
Nanda laughs. “Yes, a child’s blessing is a great thing. And my son is such a pure baby, isn’t he?” No pity for Vasudeva can dim Nanda’s delight.
“Yes, such a marvellous child,” agrees Vasudeva on his way out, after a lingering look at the infant in Yasodha’s arms. Yasodha stares after him pityingly, thinking the poor man’s fortitude has finally broken down, and sorrow unhinged him.
But then, as Vasudeva leaves the cart, and Nanda goes with him to make preparations to depart for Gokula, Yasodha forgets both of them as she turns back to her child. At once, she is lost in the wonder of him.
Vasudeva comes back to Devaki in her prison. She is consoled that her baby lives; if not near her, at least he lives. Vasudeva finds that he, too, can share her consolation. And it is their son’s blessing to them, if they do not yet know it.
SEVEN
Purusha Budhhyo yukto, Partha...
rjuna was a portal to unborn generations, as Krishna’s resonant Gita spilled through him, each word a being alive: a bright host of masters!
They reached beyond him with fingers of wisdom. They reached into veiled times, down the mysterious labyrinths of another history, setting on fire the hearts of strange and visionary heroes, who would walk a very different world and make war again.
In his perfect passivity, while Krishna exhorted him to immaculate action, Arjuna became the Blue God’s unwitting ally in an older war. He stood in a legendary universe and, listening absorbed, gave his astral body to become Krishna’s subtle prophet.
It melted, melted down Arjuna’s soul. A nuclear fire, it spread through the arteries of the earth, quick as devotion, swift as love. His charioteer held his soul in the huge mesmerism of his song, and breathed renewal into the Pandava—for a thousand generations of warriors.
“The wise, who have yoked their intelligence, are freed from the bonds of birth,” said Krishna. “They reach Brahman, the sorrowless state.
“Arjuna, your mind is confused by all you have read and all you have heard. Your heart is bewildered. But when true insight dawns on you, your intelligence will see beyond bookish Vedic learning, and your spirit will be profound and unshakeable.”
Ready to float away, Arjuna was restrained only by Krishna’s immense love. Listening to the wisdom of his sarathy, the luminous being the Pandava had become, quivered in mystic emotion.
Prakriti
She is fair as a summer cloud, and ravishing. She has all the cowherd men turning to stare as, long braids wrapped in jasmine garlands, anklets tinkling, flared hips swaying wide below her wasp’s waist, carrying like Lakshmi a lotus in her hand, she comes, with an innocent look in her eyes, asking the way to Yasodha’s house.
It was not unusual for folk of every uncommon hue to arrive from distant parts, looking to catch a glimpse of Nanda’s son as he lay in his cot sucking his big toe.
At first, it had only been gypsy cowherds who came in wild groups. They had heard of the child’s unusual beauty and they knew from ancient prophecies that blue was the colour of the incarnations of the dwapara yuga.
But quickly more mysterious strangers found their way to Gokula: rishis with matted jata came from faraway forests, and solemn mountains.
In those earliest days, if any of Nanda’s gopas felt the arrival of these holy ones was exceptional, no one made much of it. Not even when exotic birds, never seen in these parts before, infested the trees of Gokula in song-brimming swarms, especially around Nanda’s house. Or when rare beasts walked boldly into Yasodha’s yard; she could have sworn that a golden deer peered in at the window as she was changing her son’s swaddling one day.
And what a fuss they all made of him, the little blue one, especially his kinsfolk, the cowherds.
“What a lovely face he has!”
“How handsome he is!”
“Such black eyes!”
“Look at the way he sucks his toe, as other children do their thumbs!”
They named him Krishna—Dark One—and he smiled back at them, his eyes shining, his face bursting with mischief.
She, Putana, has assumed such a beautiful guise with her sorcery that she enchants even Yasodha.
“Oh, what a beautiful boy, Yasodha. Let me look after him for you.”
And she claims they are distant cousins, though she is more a cousin of the spirit of the monster in Mathura. But Krishna seems to take to her at once. He goes readily to her, smiling and gurgling.
Yasodha does need some spare time to cook, wash clothes, and make butter, curd and ghee. So she doesn’t investigate Putana’s antecedents and is happy to offer her a place to live, to look after Krishna part of the time and to help with the housework.
Putana ingratiates herself. She lives with Nanda and Yasodha for a month as a friendly, self-effacing helpmate. And of them all Krishna quickly grows the most attached to her.
Soon, Yasodha is also full of admiration for her ‘cousin’; most of all, because unlike the other spirited wenches of the village, Putana is poised and reserved, and unmoved by the advances made to her by some of the cowherds. She even begins to go off inside the house as soon as she sees any young gopa coming along with a hopeful gleam in his eye.
A rare woman, thinks Yasodha, good at her work; and more important, Krishna adores her. No one has seen what Putana becomes at night.
Of course Krishna adores her. Only he knows, in his impenetrable way, why she is in Gokula. And one night of a full moon, past midnight, Putana steals from her bed, picks Krishna up, and carries him into her room.
Undoing her blouse, she bares breasts turned weirdly dark now, at dead of night, like her face and her hands. When suckled those black nipples yield milk laced with the deadly poison of her virulent body. Countless babies she has murdered by feeding them.
And one rakshasa lover died, thrashing in agony in a moon-soaked forest glade, as he spent his warm seed inside her.
Tonight, little Krishna eagerly takes the proffered nipple, hard with her evil excitement. He grasps it with a tiny blue thumb and forefinger, and guides it between toothless gums. He shuts his long eyes and, sighing, begins to feed.
Putana is relieved he hasn’t made a sound at her midnight offering. She, too, shuts her eyes and settles back, waiting for the poison to work.
Krishna drinks thirstily at Putana’s breast. And she has the strangest sensation of suckling not an infant, but a being whose dimensions she cannot begin to fathom.
Krishna feeds. Swiftly, he sucks all the milk and all the poison out of her. She finds his feeding so overpowering that suddenly Putana is afraid. As he drinks, she feels all her buried malignancy being sucked up into her body, her consciousness.
She experiences the fear of the countless infants she has murdered and devoured; terror assails her, karmic and inescapable. His fire licks through her, burning the sins of a hundred feral lives in a few searing moments, while she begins to scream in the agony of his purification.
She struggles to detach the awful child from her breast. But Krishna has not finished feeding. He drinks on, and try as she will to wrench him away, she can’t get him off.
He drinks on, when the milk and poison run dry, and blood begins to flow. He drinks on while Putana’s lovely body begins to metamorphose and she changes back into her true form: scaled, clawed and old as sin. He feeds calmly on at her life, without once opening his eyes, or heeding her ululating screams.
Nanda, Yasodha and, quickly, the rest of Gokula come running from their beds to find Putana dead on the floor, blood at her shrivelled breast, blood at her mouth.
Krishna still lies on her lap; he smiles at them, and gurgles with the satisfaction of his feed. The dead rakshasi’s expression is contented, beautiful again.
A moment before life left her ravaged body to enter into his mystery, Krishna opened his eyes and gazed back at her. Then, she knew the true reason for her being with him and, all her evil exorcised, Putana was saved.
