The Slaying of Kamsa

Years before, in Mathura, a voice from the sky had spoken to King Kamsa as he drove his sister Devaki to her new husband's house on her wedding day. The eighth child of this woman, the voice said, would be Kamsa's death. Kamsa was a tyrant who had already deposed and imprisoned his own father, the gentle King Ugrasena, and seized the throne of the Yadavas. Fear made him crueler still. He threw Devaki and her husband Vasudeva into a dungeon and killed each child she bore as it came, one after another, to cheat the prophecy.

But the eighth child was Krishna, and on the night of his birth the prison doors fell open, the guards slept, and Vasudeva carried the infant across the flooded Yamuna to the cowherd village of Gokula, exchanging him for the newborn daughter of Nanda and Yashoda. Krishna grew up among the cowherds of Vrindavan as a herdsman's son, and his brother Balarama with him, while Kamsa raged in Mathura, sending demon after demon to find and kill the hidden child. Every one of them died at the boy's hands.

In Mathura, Kamsa could no longer pretend. His assassins did not return. The whole countryside whispered of two cowherd boys in Vrindavan who killed serpents and demons as other children killed flies, who lifted hills and tamed monsters. The sage Narada, who enjoyed setting fated things in motion, came and told Kamsa plainly what he half knew already: the eighth child had escaped, the substitute daughter had been a trick, and the boy he feared was alive and growing strong across the river. Kamsa resolved to stop sending demons to the boy. He would bring the boy to him instead, onto his own ground, into his own arena, where the power of a king could be brought to bear.

Kamsa proclaimed a great festival in Mathura, a sacrifice of the bow, and invited all the Yadavas and the cowherds of the countryside to attend. He sent his trusted minister Akrura to Vrindavan to bring Nanda's people, and above all the two brothers, Krishna and Balarama, to the city. It was a trap dressed as a celebration. Kamsa had laid his plans in layers. He stationed a mad war-elephant named Kuvalayapida at the arena gate to trample the boys as they entered. He readied his two champion wrestlers, Chanura and Mushtika, men of monstrous size who had never lost a match, to challenge the cowherds and break them in the ring before the whole city.

Akrura, though he served Kamsa, was a devotee of Krishna in his heart, and the errand filled him with secret joy. As he drove his chariot toward Vrindavan he could hardly believe his fortune - that he, of all men, had been sent to fetch the Lord. When he reached the village and saw the dark cowherd boy with the marks of divinity on him, he fell from his chariot in reverence. Krishna and Balarama greeted him warmly, understood the trap behind the invitation perfectly well, and agreed to come. The time had arrived. The brothers would walk into Mathura with their eyes open.

Krishna and Balarama came into the city like two young lions into a strange wood, curious and unafraid. The people of Mathura crowded the streets and rooftops to see the famous cowherd boys, and the women of the city lost their hearts at the sight of them. On the way the brothers met Kamsa's washerman, an arrogant servant who insulted them and refused them festival garments; Krishna struck him down and the boys dressed themselves in fine cloth. They met a hunchbacked servant girl, Trivakra, carrying sandal paste for the king; Krishna straightened her crooked back with a touch and made her beautiful, for he repaid kindness wherever he found it, even in the house of his enemy.

In the sacrificial hall stood Kamsa's great bow, an enormous weapon of state, guarded and meant to be the centerpiece of the festival, a thing no ordinary man could even lift. Krishna walked up to it, took it in one hand, bent it, and snapped it in two with a sound like a thunderclap that rolled across the whole city. The guards rushed him and he beat them back with the broken halves of the bow. It was a message, and Kamsa, hearing the crack of his own bow from his palace, understood it. The boy had announced himself.

The next morning the brothers came to the arena. At the gate, as Kamsa had arranged, the great elephant Kuvalayapida was driven at them by its keepers, goaded into madness, trunk swinging, meant to crush them in the entrance before they ever reached the ring. Krishna faced it. He provoked the beast, dodged its charge, seized it by the trunk and the tail, and after a furious struggle threw it down and tore out its tusks. The brothers walked into the arena carrying the bloody tusks of Kamsa's elephant over their shoulders, and the crowd saw them come, smeared with dust and the elephant's blood, beautiful and terrible, two boys who had just destroyed the first of the king's weapons in plain sight.

Now Kamsa called his champions. Chanura challenged Krishna; Mushtika challenged Balarama. It was a grotesque contest by any law of fair play - seasoned giant wrestlers set against two youths - and the people of Mathura cried out against it, that this was no match but a murder arranged for the king's pleasure. But the brothers stepped into the ring willingly. Krishna grappled with Chanura, whirled him, and dashed him to the ground so that the breath and life went out of him together. Balarama crushed Mushtika with his fists. The other wrestlers who came forward were scattered and broken. The arena that Kamsa had built as a killing-floor for the boys had become the killing-floor of his own champions.

Kamsa, watching his elephant dead, his bow broken, his unbeaten wrestlers slain, lost his nerve and his temper at once. He shouted for the cowherds to be driven out, for Nanda to be seized, for Vasudeva and old Ugrasena to be killed, for the festival to be ended. It was the screaming of a man who feels the prophecy closing on him. Krishna did not wait. He sprang from the wrestling floor up onto the high royal dais where Kamsa sat, seized the tyrant by the hair, struck the crown from his head, and threw him down from the platform into the arena below. Then he leapt after him, and there, on the ground he had stained with so much innocent blood, Kamsa died at the hands of the eighth child he had spent a lifetime trying to kill. The prophecy in the chariot, all those years before, was fulfilled to the word.

Krishna did not take the throne. He went instead to the dungeon and freed his true parents, Vasudeva and Devaki, who had borne so much loss for his sake, and bowed to them as a son. Then he brought out old Ugrasena, Kamsa's own father, whom the tyrant had deposed and imprisoned, and set the rightful king back on the throne of Mathura. He restored the order his enemy had overturned, returned a stolen crown to the head it belonged on, and asked nothing for himself. The reign of fear was over. Mathura, which had lived under a man who murdered children to save his own skin, woke to find itself ruled again by a just king, delivered by a cowherd boy the powerful had been too proud to fear in time.