Balarama and the Yamuna

Balarama had not seen Vraja in years, not since the two brothers had left as youths for Mathura and, after Mathura, for the new city rising on the western sea. Dwaraka had walls of white stone and streets planned by an architect's hand, and it had given him a court and a queen and the business of a kingdom, but none of it had loosened the old pull of the pastures where he had first learned to walk on legs no steadier than a calf's.

When at last he turned his chariot back toward the Yamuna's near bank, word ran ahead of him through the cowherd settlements faster than the wheels could carry him. Nanda came out with the elders to meet him on the road, and Yashoda wept over him as though he were still the boy who had once uprooted a pair of trees at play, and the gopas who had herded cattle at his side were middle-aged now, their arms thick with a strength earned in fields rather than battles.

He stayed two months, and the months ran together into a single unbroken festival. The gopis, older too but no less fond, garlanded him at every gathering and reminded him, laughing, of forgotten mischiefs from his boyhood. The old songs were sung again around the evening fires, the ones that named him and his brother without needing to say which deeds belonged to which name, since the cowherds had raised them as one pair, indivisible in memory as they had so often been indivisible in play. Balarama drank the season down like a man given back something he had feared he had spent for good, and if his brother's throne and his brother's cares waited at the far end of the Yamuna, for the length of that homecoming he did not let himself think of them.

On one of the last evenings of the festival, Balarama sat with the gopas on the bank of the Yamuna as the sky went the color of a ripe mango and the cattle came lowing home along the dust road. Someone had brought out the varuni, the wine he loved past all his brother's mild disapproval, and he drank as freely as the evening allowed, until his eyes had the loose bright shine that the cowherds had learned to read as a sign that the night's stories would grow taller.

The heat of the day and the heat of the wine together made him want the river, and rather than walk the short way down to its edge as any other man might, he called to it as he would call to a servant slow in answering. "Yamuna," he said, raising his voice over the settling herds, "come here, so that I may bathe without troubling myself to walk to you."

The river did not come. It went on in its course exactly as it had gone for longer than memory kept account, indifferent to the demand of a drunken god playing at impatience, its current bending toward the sea on business older than the cowherd settlements on its banks. The gopas around him laughed under their breath, careful not to be seen laughing, and waited to see what a slighted Balarama would do.

He called a second time, and a third, each summons sharper than the last, and each time the Yamuna's waters kept their own appointed distance, flowing past him with the same unhurried patience a river gives to every man who has ever stood on its bank and mistaken thirst for authority. Balarama's face darkened. He got to his feet, unsteady with wine but not with purpose, and reached for the plough that never left his side even in his hours of ease.

The plough was Balarama's weapon as the discus was his brother's, and it did not look like a weapon at all until he used it as one. He walked to the bank, waded in to where the current ran strongest, and drove the curved iron blade down into the riverbed as a farmer drives it into stubborn soil at the start of a season, not to till the earth this time but to take hold of the river itself.

Then he pulled. The Yamuna, hooked on the plough's blade the way a course of soil is hooked and turned, felt the pull as no river had ever been made to feel a pull before, and it gave. Its waters, which had refused a spoken summons, could not refuse the plough's grip; the whole body of the river began to follow the blade, torn from the channel it had kept since before the cowherds' grandfathers had grazed cattle on its banks, curling toward Balarama in a new course carved by main strength rather than by the slow work of a thousand years of current finding its own way.

Out of the disturbed water the river's own goddess rose, visible as a woman in the churn and spray, her composure gone, her voice pitched with a fear no mortal flood ever carries. She had lived long enough among gods to know when protest was foolish. "Lord," she said, "forgive me. I did not come when you called because I did not know that my delay would earn this violence - I meant no insult, only the habit of a course I have kept since the world was younger than either of us. Do not tear me from my bed. Command me and I will come; only let me keep the shape I have always had."

Balarama held the plough steady a moment longer, letting her feel the whole weight of what he could do before he chose not to finish doing it, and the gopas on the bank, sobered now, watched a river beg a man for its life.

Balarama was not a god who held anger past its use. Satisfied that the river had learned what carelessness toward him cost, and perhaps already a little ashamed of the wine that had put the demand in his mouth in the first place, he eased his grip on the plough and let the Yamuna's waters find their new balance. "Go," he said, "keep the course I have opened for you here, and be quicker, next time, to answer a call." The goddess, released, did not fully return to her old bed. Where the blade had dragged her, the river stayed, bent into a new channel that ran nearer the cowherd settlements than her ancient course had run, and the mark of that single furrow remained written across the land long after the evening that made it.

The groves of Vrindavan, the same trees under which the boy Krishna had once played and hidden and stolen butter from the gopis' pots, found themselves closer to water than they had ever been before, and they drank from the new channel the plough had carved as though the land itself had been waiting, without knowing it, for exactly this gift. The cowherds who had watched in fear told the story afterward not as a warning against Balarama but as a wonder about him, the way a community tells stories about a flood that frightened it and then, in passing, enriched its fields.

In later years, when travelers asked why the Yamuna bent so sharply near Vrindavan, breaking from the straighter course a river might otherwise have kept, the cowherds had a ready answer, half proud and half still amazed: that a plough had done it, that a river goddess had once begged a farmer-god for her life, and that the bend was less a scar than a signature, the one visible mark strength leaves when it forgives what it has conquered.

The Harivamsa tells this story among others that give Balarama his own particular divinity, distinct from and yet never quite separate from his brother's. Where Krishna's power turns on the axis of the whole world - discus and conch, the wheel of time, the destruction and preservation of kingdoms - Balarama's power stays close to the ground he loves: the plough that breaks soil, the strength that moves rivers, the wine that loosens rather than sharpens him. He is the god farmers have always recognized as their own, not because his deeds are smaller but because they answer a smaller, nearer kind of need - water where the fields are thirsty, a channel cut where a channel is wanted, a river bent, in the end, toward abundance rather than ruin.

There is comedy in the story, and the tradition does not ask its listeners to pretend otherwise - a drunken god summoning a river like an impatient guest calling for wine, and getting for his trouble a spectacle he had not quite meant to make. But underneath the comedy sits something the cowherds understood without needing it explained: that even Balarama's excesses served the land in the end, that his anger, unlike anger in lesser hands, could not help but leave something growing behind it.

When the two months of festival finally closed and Balarama made ready to return to Dwaraka, the cowherds who saw him off spoke of the bent river more than of anything else that homecoming had held, and the story traveled with him and outlived him, told wherever the Yamuna's course near Vrindavan was pointed out to a stranger. Two brothers, the stories agreed, had grown from the same pastures: one who wielded a discus that turned on the fate of the whole world, and one who wielded a plough that turned, more modestly and no less surely, on the fate of a single river and the fields that drank from it.