Yashoda's Second Farewell

Nine years had not been enough for Vrindavan to forget the sound of Akrura's chariot wheels on packed earth, the morning Kamsa's summons came dressed as an invitation and Krishna and Balarama climbed into it because their father Nanda had no power to refuse a king (akrura). Yashoda had run behind the wheels until her breath gave out, calling a name that would not turn around, and the boy who came home in memory after that morning was always nine years old, always sunburned and laughing, always guilty of exactly one more stolen pot of butter than she had caught him for (boy_god_of_vrindavan).

He never came back to Vrindavan. Word reached the cowherd camp instead - Kamsa dead, a wrestling match won, a city rising from the sea called Dwaraka, wars fought against kings whose names meant nothing to a woman who measured time by calving seasons. Yashoda kept his memory the only way she knew how: she still set aside the sweetest butter each season, though there was no longer any small thief to steal it, and she still scolded the empty doorway some mornings from habit before she caught herself.

It was Nanda who brought the news that ended nineteen years of that habit. "The astronomers say the sun will darken over Kurukshetra," he told her, settling stiffly beside the cookfire, older now, his beard grayer than the year Akrura's chariot had come. "Every clan of Bharata is gathering there for the eclipse rites - the Kurus, the Yadavas, kings from every corner of the earth. Krishna will be there. Balarama too."

Yashoda's hands stilled over the churning-rope she still kept, out of habit, though there had been no reason to keep it for nine years.

"Then we are going," she said, before he had finished the sentence he meant to offer her. "I have waited long enough to be invited."

The road to Kurukshetra was longer than any journey Vrindavan's cowherds had made, and when Nanda's camp finally rose on the holy field of Syamantapanchaka - hide tents and grazing herds pitched beside a plain already crowded with the silk pavilions of a hundred kings - Yashoda understood for the first time, in her body and not merely by report, how far her butter-thief had traveled from her lap.

Chariots of gold stood beside her own ox-carts. Warriors she had never met bowed to men she had once scolded for tracking mud into her kitchen. Somewhere among the banners of Dwaraka, Panchala, Kuru and a dozen lesser kingdoms, her son was an emperor's ally, spoken of in the same breath as gods.

She did not go looking for him among the pavilions. She sat instead at the edge of the cowherd camp, where the smell of dung-fires and curd was familiar enough to steady her, and waited the way she had always waited, certain that if he remembered anything of Vrindavan he would remember which fires were hers.

He came before the eclipse itself had fully darkened the sky, on foot, without guards, still recognizable in his stride from thirty paces though the cowherd boy's build had filled into a warrior's. Balarama walked beside him, and both brothers were laughing about something before they had even reached the tents, the way they had always walked into her kitchen laughing about something.

"Mother," Krishna said, and the word landed in Yashoda's chest exactly where it had always landed, undiminished by nineteen years or a single one of his conquests.

She did not rise for him the way courtiers rose for kings. She reached up instead, as she had reached up for a child too small to bend down to her, and pulled him by the arm until he knelt in the dust of a cowherd camp with an emperor's retinue watching, because some postures a mother does not surrender to a son's greatness.

Up close, under the darkening sky, Yashoda searched his face for the boy and found, to her relief, that he had not entirely hidden himself inside the man. The same eyes. The same trace of a smile that had once meant a lie about stolen butter was forming.

"You still have the mark," she said, touching a small scar near his hairline she had bandaged herself the year he fell from the yamala-arjuna trees.

"I kept it on purpose," Krishna said. "It is the only proof I have that Vrindavan happened."

"Vrindavan happened," Yashoda said, and her voice broke on the second word in a way nineteen years of composure had not managed to prevent. "I have kept your share of every season's first butter since the morning you left. It has gone bad every year. I make it again anyway."

Krishna took both her hands. "Then you have been feeding a butter-thief who was never really gone," he said. "I have eaten it every year, mother, whether the plate reached me or not. Distance does not close a mother's kitchen to the son she keeps a place at."

Nanda, standing near enough to hear, found he could not speak past the thickness in his own throat, and did not try.

"They tell me you rule an empire's fate now," Yashoda said. "That kings ask your counsel before they go to war."

"They do," Krishna said. "And none of it has taught me anything my mother's kitchen did not teach me first - that love is owed before it is earned, and fed before it is asked for."

It was Nanda who found Vasudeva first, among the Yadava elders come to make offerings at the eclipse, and the two old men - one a cowherd chief, one a Yadava prince - sat together on a spread hide as easily as if thirty years had not separated the child they shared. Neither needed to explain to the other what it meant to have raised, or lost, the same son at different distances. They spoke instead of small things, the price of good milking cows, the health of aging knees, two fathers content that between them they had managed, however strangely, to raise one boy correctly.

It was harder, and simpler, when Devaki came to Yashoda's fire.

The two women had never stood face to face before - a birth-mother who had held her son only for the danger-soaked hour before Vasudeva carried him away, and a heart-mother who had raised him for the eleven safe years that followed and never once been told, until his fourth year, that he was not entirely hers to keep. Every story ever told of Krishna's childhood set these two women, unspoken, against each other: one who had given him life and lost him at once, one who had received him as a stranger's child and loved him past the point of return.

There was no quarrel between them. Devaki bowed first, which Yashoda had not expected of an empress. "You gave him what my prison could not," Devaki said. "Safety. Butter. A mother's hand at every fall. I do not resent it. I bless it."

Yashoda raised her up and held her the way she had once held a frightened girl she had never met but somehow always understood. "You gave him life at the cost of six others," Yashoda said. "I only kept what you could not carry. We were never rivals, sister. We were the same devotion, arriving through two different doors."

The eclipse passed, the crowds began breaking camp, and Yashoda understood, watching Nanda fold their tents with hands that moved slower than they once had, that this gathering would not repeat itself. Kurukshetra's roads were long, Vrindavan's cattle needed tending, and an emperor's calendar belonged to kingdoms now, not to a cowherd camp's grazing seasons.

"You will not come back to Vrindavan," Yashoda said to Krishna, not as a question.

"No," Krishna said, and did not soften it with a false promise, because he had never once lied to her, not even as a child caught with butter on his hands. "There is too much left to finish, mother, and none of it can be finished from Vrindavan."

"Then this is the last time," Yashoda said.

"For these eyes to see this face, yes," Krishna said. "Never for anything else." He pressed her hands the way he had at their first meeting on this field, days before. "You gave a god his first taste of being loved for himself rather than for what he could do. That gift does not end when the visiting does."

Devaki, standing near enough to have heard the whole exchange, reached for Yashoda's hand without being asked, two mothers united now in a grief neither would name aloud in front of the son they shared.

Yashoda watched the Dwaraka chariots depart across a field still marked with the ash of eclipse-fires, and did not run behind the wheels this time, though every instinct in her nine-years-younger self would have. She had learned, across nineteen years and one impossible reunion, that love's claim on a life outlasts blood, outlasts glory, outlasts even the number of times fate allows two people to stand in the same field again.

"Once more was enough," she told Nanda, as they turned the ox-carts back toward Vrindavan. "I did not think it would be, but it was."