The Sea God and the Wives at the Fire

Nanda the herd-king was a devout man, and on the great fast day of Ekadashi he kept every observance to the letter, and then, in his zeal to break the fast at the exactly proper moment, went down to bathe in the Yamuna before dawn - too far before dawn. The dark watches of the night belong to other jurisdictions; that is old law. And as the good man stood chest-deep in the black water saying his prayers ahead of schedule, a servant of Varuna, god of the waters, rose beneath him and took him, as a constable takes a trespasser, down through the river's floor to the courts of the sea.

Dawn came up on Nanda's clothes folded on the bank and no Nanda. His companions raised the alarm, and Vrindavan poured down to the river in terror, crying that a crocodile had taken their chief or the river itself had claimed him. In the middle of the panic the two brothers arrived, and Krishna looked once at the water and knew the truth of it as he knew all truths, by owning them. He told the weeping herdsmen to be calm and wait, and then walked into the Yamuna and under it, a boy going to fetch his father as though the halls of the ocean were the next pasture over.

What Nanda's frightened eyes had been seeing was splendor: the mother-of-pearl courts of Varuna, lord of the western quarter, hung with currents instead of curtains. And then the splendor rose from its throne, for Varuna had discovered what his officer had brought in. The god of the waters came down and prostrated himself before the barefoot boy who had just walked in through the sea. "Lord," said Varuna, "my servant was a fool who saw only a man in the water at a forbidden hour, and did not see whose father he had seized. But I cannot call it misfortune, for his blunder has brought you into my house, and my house is fulfilled. Take your father, and my worship with him."

Nanda came up out of the river into the morning and into the arms of all Vrindavan, dizzy with having been a prisoner and a guest of a god inside one night, and telling it all, again and again: the courts, the throne, and Varuna on his face before their own boy. The herdsmen listened and looked sidelong at Krishna, and there began among them - the tradition marks it from this very tale - a new kind of wondering. They had seen him kill demons; strength they could name. But the sea god's forehead in the dust before a cowherd's son was another order of fact, and the elders of Vrindavan, without a word to each other, began quietly to suspect what they were living beside. Krishna, meanwhile, was asking what there was to eat.

The second mercy begins, like the first, with hunger and ceremony. Herding far from home, Krishna's companions came to him famished, and Krishna pointed them toward smoke on the horizon: brahmins of the settled lands were conducting a long fire sacrifice, and the boys should go and beg food of them, using his name and Balarama's. The boys went trustingly. The sacrificers heard the request - hungry children, at the door of a rite whose whole purpose was the feeding of heaven - and refused them without a word, because the rice was consecrated, the hour was wrong, and the petitioners were cowherds who could not have cited a single verse. The boys walked back empty-handed, ashamed as only hungry children can be ashamed.

Then Krishna, unoffended, sent them back with a different instruction: this time, ask the wives. The women of those same brahmins were at the cooking fires behind the sacrifice, and they had heard everything of Krishna that ever traveled on the wind, and had loved him for years on hearsay alone. When the boys said his name, the wives did not confer, did not consult their husbands, and did not weigh the consecration of the rice. They loaded the whole feast - the four kinds of food, the best of the sacrifice - into vessels and carried it out of the compound in a procession of their own, past their protesting husbands, to the meadow where the dark boy sat waiting under a tree with his friends. They served the meal with their own hands and stood filled with the sight of him, and some of them, the tradition says, could never afterward be persuaded that they had not, at that lunch, attended the only sacrifice that ever mattered.

The husbands, left at their smoking altars with their perfected ritual and their empty pots, came slowly to understand what had happened to them. The Lord to whom every oblation they had ever poured was ultimately addressed had sat hungry within walking distance and asked them for rice, and they had refused - and their wives, unlettered in everything but love, had gone straight past the entire apparatus of religion and fed God with their own hands. "Cursed is our learning," the tradition has them say, "cursed our expertise in the rites, if these women outran us to the meaning of it all." It is the gentlest of all the epic's teachings on ritual and love, for nothing in it is destroyed - the sacrifice continues, the rules stand, no one is punished. The experts simply discover, looking down the road their wives took, that the entire science they mastered was a map of a country the women had walked into barefoot; and the two small tales close on the same quiet note, with the officers of heaven and the keepers of the fires both learning, in one boyhood, whom the water and the rice had belonged to all along.