Brahma Steals the Calves

Word of the marvels of Vrindavan traveled upward as well as outward, and it reached at last the highest audit in creation. Brahma, the maker of worlds, looked down at a cowherd boy who had been swallowed by a serpent whose mouth was a cave and had walked out having unmade it, and the Creator felt a thing creators are not supposed to feel: doubt. Could this small barefoot person truly be That - the ground of Brahma's own being, playing at lunch among calves? Or was it some lesser wonder, inflated by village telling? Brahma decided, as auditors do, to test the accounts. He would remove something and watch the response.

His moment came on a riverbank at midday. The herdboys had sat down in a great ring to eat, their thousands of calves grazing loose beyond, and the calves wandered out of sight, and Krishna rose, lunch in hand, to go and gather them so the boys would not lose their meal. While he was gone, Brahma gently gathered the calves up and hid them, asleep, in a cave of his own keeping. And when Krishna returned to a lunch-ring suddenly empty - for Brahma had circled back and taken the boys too, every sleeping one of them, into the same hiding - the Creator settled himself to watch what almighty distress would look like.

It looked like nothing at all. Krishna stood a moment in the empty meadow, understood at once whose hand had passed over it, and smiled - and then gave the Creator his answer, and the answer was not a search and not a summons. Krishna simply became what was missing. He himself took the form of every stolen boy and every stolen calf: so many boys, each with his own face, his own voice, his own flute and stick and half-eaten lunch; so many calves, each with its own markings, its own gait, its own way of nuzzling. And in the falling afternoon the whole company - all of it him - walked home to Vrindavan as on any other day, and dispersed calf by calf and boy by boy to its byres and doorways and mothers.

And then Krishna kept it up for a year. For one full turning of seasons the mothers of Vrindavan raised sons who were secretly God, and never knew - except that they knew something. Each mother found her boy somehow dearer than before, sweeter to hold, impossible to scold; each cow ran lowing to her calf with a tenderness the herdsmen had never seen in cattle. The village swam in a causeless love it did not examine, because love does not audit itself. All Vrindavan was one being wearing a thousand small disguises, being kissed goodnight in a thousand doorways, and the year passed in a happiness that no one could account for and no one wished to.

One being alone kept an unfooled eye. Balarama noticed that the cows loved this year's calves past nature, and that his own heart leaned toward the herdboys with the pull he felt toward exactly one person. He watched, and puzzled, and at last took his brother aside. "These boys are not the boys," he said. "These calves are not the calves. The whole meadow tastes of you. What has happened here?" And Krishna told him, laughing, the whole of it: the Creator's little test, the sleepers in the cave, the year of standing in for the stolen. The two brothers kept the secret between them, the way they kept everything.

For Brahma, whose days are ages, only a moment had passed when he came back to see how the experiment was faring. What he found broke his instruments. There in the meadow were the boys and calves he had stolen - grazing, laughing, having lunch - while in his cave the boys and calves he had stolen still slept where he had hidden them. Two complete Vrindavans, both verified, both real, confronted the one mind in the universe charged with keeping the inventory of the real. Brahma checked his cave; he checked the meadow; he checked his own vast memory, and for the first time since the beginning of things, the Creator could not tell what he had made from what he had not.

Then Krishna gave him the audit he had actually come for. Before Brahma's eyes every boy and every calf in the meadow became, for one unbearable moment, Himself: each small herdboy a four-armed form of midnight blue, conch and discus and mace and lotus, each calf likewise, thousands upon thousands of complete infinities standing in the grass, each one being worshipped by ranks of gods, each one containing the worlds - and Brahma's own throne and Brahma's own person somewhere inside every single one of them. The Creator of the fourteen worlds sat down from his swan, in the grass of a cattle meadow, before a boy.

The vision closed like a hand, and there was only the meadow again, and one dark boy with a lunch of curd rice, looking at him kindly. Brahma came down from his mount and stretched himself on the ground, and his four faces sang the surrender that the tradition still keeps: forgive me, unfathomable one; I measured you with my little measure and the measure has broken; blessed beyond gods are these cowherds, whose son you consent to be; let me be born, if I am born again, as grass in this meadow, that their feet may touch me. Then he restored the sleeping boys and calves to the riverbank - who woke mid-sentence, mid-lunch, having missed a year in the space of a mouthful - and went back to his high place a corrected being. And the boys picked up their meal exactly where it had paused, and finished lunch with their friend, who had all the time in the world.