Krishna at Sandipani's Ashram

Kamsa was dead on the sand of his own arena, and old Ugrasena sat on the throne of Mathura again. And now something had to be done that no one had thought about during the years of hiding: the two cowherd boys were princes, and princes must be educated. Krishna and Balarama had grown up among cattle and gopis, rich in everything except schooling. So the brothers were invested with the sacred thread, and sent, as boys of good family were sent, to live with a guru: the sage Sandipani, a master of the Vedas and of every science, who kept his school in the city of Avanti far to the south.

The deliverer of Mathura packed a student's bundle and walked away from the city he had freed, to go and be a boy again.

At Sandipani's ashram the brothers lived as every student lived. They rose before light, tended the sacred fires, begged the household's food, grazed the teacher's cattle, and fetched water and firewood, princes and cowherds and Brahmins' sons all mixed together under one discipline. Among the students Krishna found a thin, gentle Brahmin boy named Sudama, poor as a sparrow and rich in devotion, and the two became inseparable, the kind of friends that boyhood makes and nothing afterward can unmake.

Once, sent to gather firewood, Krishna and Sudama were caught in the forest by a storm that turned day to night, and wandered lost till morning, soaked and freezing, each refusing to leave the other. Sandipani found them at dawn still standing in the drowned forest with their bundles of wet wood, and blessed them through his tears. Years later, when a threadbare Sudama came to golden Dwaraka ashamed of his poverty, it was that night Krishna would remind him of first.

Then the teaching began, and the teacher discovered what had come to his school. Whatever Sandipani spoke once, Krishna held forever. The Vedas with their limbs, the sciences of statecraft and logic, the dhanurveda with its weapons and their secrets, music, medicine, the sixty-four arts: the brothers took them as the sea takes rivers, a day for each art, sixty-four days for the whole of human knowledge. Sandipani had spent his life teaching the sons of kings, and he understood, with the humility of a true teacher, that he was not filling these two vessels; he was unsealing them. Learning was flowing back out of his students faster than his lifetime had poured it in.

When it was over, the sage was almost afraid to name a fee. It was Krishna who insisted: no student of that house would leave without paying the guru-dakshina. "Ask," he said. "Ask anything."

Sandipani went and spoke with his wife, and came back with an old sorrow in his face. "Other men would ask for gold," he said. "I have a grief instead. We had a son. Years ago, at Prabhasa by the sea, he went into the water and the ocean took him, and we never burned his body or heard his fate. My wife has wept for him every day since. If anything is truly possible to you, my students - and I have begun to believe that it is - bring our son back."

It was an impossible fee, and the teacher half knew it, and asked anyway, as grief does. The brothers bowed. "We will bring him," Krishna said, as simply as if he had been asked to fetch water.

Krishna and Balarama mounted a chariot and drove to Prabhasa, where the land ends, and walked into the edge of the surf, and Krishna called the Ocean to answer for the boy. The sea rose up before them in bodily form, hands joined, for it knew what stood on its beach. "Lord, I did not take him," the Ocean said. "There is a daitya named Panchajana who lives in my depths in the body of a great conch shell. It was he who seized the child."

Krishna went down into the sea. Through the green dark he found the demon, vast in his shining spiral shell, and fought him there beneath the weight of all that water, and killed him. But when he tore the shell open the boy was not inside; the demon had long since given his captive on to a deeper keeper. So Krishna took from the body the great conch itself, cleaned by the sea, pale as the moon, and kept it. He named it Panchajanya, after the demon who had lived in it. It was the conch whose blast, blown on a morning at Kurukshetra beside Arjuna's chariot, would one day tell two armies that the reckoning of the age had begun. Death's servant had held it; from now on it would announce him.

Then the brothers drove south past the rim of the living world, to Samyamani, the city of Yama, lord of death, where the dead are sorted and sentence is kept. At the gates Krishna set Panchajanya to his lips and blew, and the sound went through the halls of death like light through a cracked door, and the dead lifted their heads.

Yama came out and saw who was standing at his gate, and the judge of all beings joined his hands. "What shall I do for you?" he asked. "Return my teacher's son," said Krishna. "His term with you is over, because I am asking." And Yama, who refuses every mother and every king, bowed to the order of things standing before him, and brought out the boy, alive and unaged, the sea water hardly dry on him though years had drowned past in the world above.

The brothers set the boy in their chariot and drove back up into the sunlight, to Avanti, to the ashram, and gave him into his mother's arms. "Your dakshina, teacher," Krishna said. "Ask again if it is not enough."

Sandipani stood with his wife and his returned son and wept over his two students, and gave them the only blessing that had any room left in it: that their fame would never die, and that the knowledge they had taken in sixty-four days would bless all the worlds. Then Krishna and Balarama bowed to their teacher, walked out of the school gate as they had walked in, on foot, carrying nothing, and went home to Mathura - two young men who had learned everything, and paid for it with a raid on death.