The Demons of Vrindavan

In Mathura, Kamsa knew by now that the child had escaped him, and his fear had become a machinery that could not be switched off. One by one he summoned the demons of his alliance, shape-shifters and monsters of the old night races, and sent them across the river into the cattle country with a single commission: find the boys of Nanda's people and kill the dark one, and the fair one with him. So while Krishna and Balarama grew up herding calves in the loveliest country on earth, that country was quietly stalked, year after year, by everything the tyrant could hire. What follows is the tally of how the hunt went.

The demon Vatsasura came first, and came cleverly: he took the form of a calf and simply walked into the grazing herd, one more soft-eyed animal among hundreds, meaning to drift close to the boys and strike when the sun made them drowsy. But Krishna, walking the herd, noticed the one calf whose eyes were watching the watchers. He nudged Balarama, strolled up to the creature as a herdboy strolls, admiring, unhurried - and seized it by the hind legs and tail, whirled it, and threw it into the top of a kapittha tree, where the dying demon burst out of the calf-shape and brought half the tree's fruit down with him. The boys gathered the fallen fruit and ate it, which is the most Vrindavan ending any battle ever had.

Then Bakasura: a crane, but a crane the size of a hill, standing in the shallows of the Yamuna where the boys brought the herds to drink, white and still and patient as all fishers are. When Krishna came near, the great beak took him - swallowed him whole, to the horror of every boy on the bank. But the crane's throat began to burn, for what it had swallowed heated like the sun's own core, and it gagged the boy back up unswallowed. Then, as it struck at him in fury, Krishna caught the two halves of the enormous beak in his two hands, set his foot on the lower, and split the demon up the middle as a child splits a blade of grass. The herdboys, who a moment before had been weeping, crowded around to marvel, and the story reached Vrindavan's mothers by supper, improved in the telling.

Aghasura was the brother of the crane and of Putana, and he came with a subtler hunger. He was a serpent vast past reckoning, and he laid himself along the path of the herds and opened his mouth, and his open mouth was a cave: the fangs looked like hanging rocks, the tongue like a broad soft path, the gullet like the cool inner dark that boys cannot resist. The herdboys wandered in wonder into the marvelous cavern, calves and all, daring each other deeper. Krishna alone saw what the cave was, and walked in last and knowingly, into the throat of the thing, and there began to grow. He grew until the serpent's gullet was choked with him, until its breath had no road, and the demon's life burst out through the top of its skull. The boys walked back out of the dead marvel blinking, having been devoured and rescued between two moments of their game, most of them never quite understanding that either had happened.

Not every deliverance was Krishna's. By the Yamuna stood the Talavana, a palm forest whose ripe fruit scented the whole district, and no one gathered it, for the grove was held by the demon Dhenuka and his herd, all in the shape of wild asses, savage past any beast's nature. The herdboys, hungry the way boys are hungry, begged the brothers for the fruit, and it was Balarama who walked into the grove first and shook the great palms till the fruit rained. Dhenuka came braying and kicking at him with the strength of a hill; Balarama caught the demon by the hind legs, whirled him, and threw him into the treetops, and did the same to the whole rushing herd, until dead demons and ripe palm fruit hung in the branches together. From that day the Talavana was open, and Vrindavan ate palm fruit freely, and the elder brother had his own song in the village at last.

Pralamba came the most treacherously of all: as a boy. He joined the herdboys' games in the shape of one of them, laughing with the others, waiting his hour. The game that day was carrying - the losers of the race to carry the winners on their shoulders - and Pralamba contrived to carry Balarama, and then bolted, swelling as he ran into his true shape, a giant against the sky with the boy on his shoulders like a sparrow on a cliff. For one moment Balarama, alone in the air on the shoulders of a monster, felt something like fear; then he remembered himself, and his fist came down on the demon's head like the fall of Indra's bolt, and Pralamba broke beneath him and came down like a felled tower. Balarama rode the collapse to the ground and walked back to the game, and the boys resumed it, because the afternoon was not over.

Twice the enemy was no creature at all. Once, while the boys slept and the herds strayed, a forest fire ringed the sleeping camp in the night; and once, in the Munja grasslands, the dry world caught and the flames closed on the herds and herdboys with nowhere left to run. Each time the boys cried out to Krishna, and each time he told them one thing: close your eyes. And they closed their eyes on a world of fire and opened them on a world of cool ash and morning, because in the moment of their not-looking he had drunk the fire as a man drinks from cupped hands. They asked no questions, being children, and he offered no explanations, being their friend. It was perhaps the purest of all the rescues: no combat, no corpse, only shut eyes, perfect trust, and a catastrophe that simply was not there anymore.

Last of the great ones came Keshi, and he came undisguised, which was itself the message: Kamsa's patience was done and subtlety had failed. Keshi was a horse, black as the inside of a storm, vast enough that his gallop shook fruit from the trees, and he came screaming across the pastures to trample the boy openly. Krishna stood in his path. When the demon struck at him with his forelegs, Krishna caught them and threw him a hundred bow-lengths; when the horse came again with his mouth wide to bite, Krishna fed him his left arm, and the arm swelled inside the demon's throat like a mountain growing, and Keshi choked on the one boy he had been sent to devour and burst. The gods rained flowers, and gave Krishna the name that the war councils and battlefields of the epic would use ever after: Keshava, the slayer of Keshi. The herdboy had a warrior's name now. The childhood was ending.

There were others - Vyoma, son of the demon architect, who joined the boys' game of thieves-and-sheep and stole the players themselves, sealing boys away in mountain caves until Krishna caught him mid-theft and ended him at the cave mouths and rolled the stones away. But the tally always summed the same. Everything Kamsa sent came disguised as the familiar - livestock, birds, landscape, playmates, weather - and everything the disguises met was a deliverer disguised more deeply still. In Mathura the tyrant read the reports and understood that the hunt had failed in some way he could not name, and set about building his last trap, the invitation to the bow sacrifice. And in Vrindavan the boys who had walked unknowing through a decade of assassinations grew up loved, unbroken, and unafraid, remembering their whole magical childhood as what, thanks to one of them, it had actually been: games, cattle, rivers, and light.