Yashoda

The rope was two inches too short. Yashoda had already looped it twice around the small squirming waist and reached for the mortar, and still the ends would not meet. She fetched more cord from the storeroom and tied it on: still short. Around her the household grew quiet, watching this large, capable woman, who ran a dairy of thousands of cows and never lost her temper over spilled milk, turn red-faced and furious at a length of rope that would not close around one small child. She had reason enough to be angry that morning. The milk had boiled over while her back was turned, the curd pot lay smashed on the floor, and the butter she had spent the dawn hours churning, singing softly to herself the whole time the way she always did, half to the butter and half to the boy dozing nearby, had gone to feed the monkeys in the courtyard. When she finally found him he was balanced on an upturned grinding mortar, reaching for a pot hung from the rafters, his fists sticky to the wrist. The moment he saw her face he began to cry, rubbing his eyes with those same buttery knuckles until his whole face streaked with dirt and tears, the very picture of a caught and heartbroken child. So she decided, in the exasperated and entirely ordinary logic of a mother who has had enough for one morning, that she would tie him to the mortar and get on with her chores. And the rope kept coming up short, however much more she added to it. It was only when her arms tired and her irritation finally loosened into something softer that the last length of cord fell easily into place. Devotees have told this story to each other for a thousand years as proof that Krishna made the rope short on purpose, again and again, so that his mother would have to keep touching him, keep close, keep exasperated and tender a little longer. It is this single morning, more than any hymn or philosophy, that earned him the name Damodara: dama, a rope, udara, the belly, the Lord who let himself be bound not by cord but by love that did not know it was worshipping anything.

This was Yashoda's world: not a temple but a cowherd's courtyard in Gokula, on the Yamuna's bank, in the pastoral country the tradition calls Vraj. She was the wife of Nanda, the chief of that settlement of cowherds, a man wealthy in cattle and open-handed with his kinsmen, and by every account she ran his household the way she ran everything, with a full heart and very little patience for nonsense. The night her son was born is remembered as strange even by her own household: labor pains that came on suddenly, a storm outside, and then, in the confusion of it, a servant's certainty that she had delivered a daughter, though what lay in the cradle by morning was unmistakably a boy, dark as a monsoon cloud, who opened his eyes on her as if he already knew her. The Bhagavata Purana tells the story from the other side of that night, of Vasudeva wading the flooded Yamuna with an infant in a basket to smuggle him out of Kamsa's prison in Mathura and exchange him for a newborn girl in Yashoda's own house, so that the tyrant's blade would fall on empty air. Yashoda herself is never shown learning any of this. She simply wakes, spent from labor, to find a son at her breast, and loves him the way any exhausted new mother loves the child who has just arrived, without asking where the ache of childbirth went or why the midwives will not quite meet her eye.

One strand of the tradition, carried in the Puranas and repeated by later poets, reaches further back than that night and says that Yashoda and Nanda had earned this son in an earlier life entirely. In that telling they were once Dhara and her husband Drona, one of the eight Vasus, and rather than ask the Lord for liberation, or for the terrifying privilege of seeing his cosmic form, they asked him for something almost defiantly small: to be born to them as a baby, so that they could feed him, scold him, and worry over his fevers like any parents. It is offered less as settled history than as an explanation the tradition reaches for, because nothing else quite accounts for how a woman could hold the Supreme Being on her hip and see, instead of God, only her hungry son.

Motherhood in that house was not gentle for long. Within Krishna's first year a beautiful woman named Putana slipped into Gokula with poison smeared on her breast and offered to nurse him; he drank her life instead of her venom and left her a demon's corpse sprawled across the fields, and Yashoda's first knowledge of it was the neighbors' screaming and her own frantic search through the wreckage for her child, whom she found gurgling, unharmed, in the wagon-shade where she had left him. Not long after, a whirlwind demon named Trinavarta snatched him bodily into the sky over the courtyard, and she stood screaming his name into a column of dust until it collapsed the demon's own weight and dropped a very much alive Krishna back to earth. A cart overturned near his cradle another day, shattering its pots for no reason anyone could explain until they learned an asura named Shakatasura had tried to crush him from beneath it. None of these stories reached Yashoda as cosmic battles between god and demon. Each one reached her exactly as it would reach any mother: as a heart-stopping afternoon, a child miraculously breathing, a house full of frightened neighbor women burning protective herbs and tying charmed threads around his wrist, and herself unable to sleep that night for listening to him breathe.

Because Kamsa's spies moved through Vraj listening for any child who might be the one prophesied to kill him, even the naming of her son had to happen quietly. The sage Garga, a family priest, came to Nanda's cow-shed in something like secrecy and performed the rites there rather than in the open, giving the elder boy, Rohini's son, the name Balarama, and giving Yashoda's own boy the name Krishna, murmuring to Nanda alone that this child's glory would one day equal Vishnu's own, and asking him to keep the matter to himself. Yashoda is not recorded asking many questions about what the old man meant. She had a household to run and two boys, adopted brothers in every way that mattered, who would soon be crawling into the cow pens and getting themselves covered in dung and ash within the hour.

The most disarming of all the stories about her, the one every Vaishnavi child in Vraj is taught almost as soon as they can talk, happened over a mouthful of dirt. Krishna's playmates ran to Yashoda one afternoon complaining that he had been eating clay again, and she caught him by the arm, more amused than truly angry, and told him to open his mouth so she could see for herself. He opened it. And in that small pink cave she saw, suddenly and without warning, the whole of creation: mountains and oceans, the sun and moon turning in their courses, the winds, the elements, time itself unspooling, and, folded impossibly into the same small mouth, herself, sitting exactly where she was sitting, holding him on her lap. For one unbearable instant she understood exactly who she was feeding butter to every morning. Then his own power, the Puranas say, drew a veil back over her mind, and she found herself simply holding her son again, wiping the corner of his mouth with her sari, scolding him gently for the dirt and telling him not to do it again. Bhakti has always pointed to that instant of forgetting as the deepest mercy in the whole story: that the mother of the universe was allowed to go back to being merely a mother, because a love that requires you to remember you are worshipping God is not, in the end, the love this particular God most wanted from her.

Her love for him was made of exactly such unremarkable stubborn devotion, expressed less often in wonder than in irritation, and nowhere more famously than in the running battle over butter. The neighboring gopis came to her porch nearly every week with the same complaint: that her son had broken into their homes, upended their curd pots, and either eaten the butter or handed fistfuls of it out the window to the monkeys, leaving nothing behind but small muddy footprints and a scandalized household. Krishna's own defense, immortalized centuries later in Surdas's beloved song where the child protests, maiya mori main nahi makhan khayo, mother, I did not eat the butter, was performed with such wide-eyed sincerity, butter still smeared at the corners of his mouth, that Yashoda rarely managed to stay stern for more than a minute or two before the whole scene dissolved, for her, into helpless laughter and a fierce hug. She scolded because a mother is supposed to scold a thief, however small and however divine, but anyone standing close enough could see that what she actually felt, every single time, was closer to delight than to anger.

Even the punishments turned into miracles she never asked for. The morning she finally tied him to the grinding mortar and went back to her chores, Krishna dragged the heavy stone behind him across the courtyard and wedged it between two tall trees growing there, pulling until both trunks cracked and crashed to the ground. Out of the wreckage stepped two shining beings, Nalakuvara and Manigriva, sons of the wealthy yaksha king Kubera, who centuries before had mocked the sage Narada while drunk and been cursed to stand rooted as trees until the day the Lord himself touched them. Yashoda's disciplinary rope had, without her intending it, delivered two proud celestial princes from a curse that had bound them for an age. She is not recorded reflecting much on the theology of it. She was, by every account, mostly relieved that her son had not been crushed under a falling tree.

All of that ended, or seemed to, the day the nobleman Akrura arrived from Mathura with a chariot and an invitation from Kamsa that Krishna and Balarama both understood to be a summons they could not refuse. Yashoda's grief at their leaving is remembered as something closer to physical collapse than ordinary sorrow. She could not finish preparing his food that morning, her hands would not cooperate long enough to pack it; she followed the chariot on foot as far as her feet would carry her, and when it finally rounded a bend and vanished, the tradition says the whole of Vraj seemed to grow quiet with her, the cows refusing to graze, the peacocks going still, even the Yamuna's current seeming to slow. She did not know, could not have known, that this was the beginning of the very last stretch of ordinary domestic life her son would ever live, that he was riding toward Mathura to kill the tyrant who had haunted his infancy and, not long after, toward a kingdom and a destiny she would have no real part of. For years afterward she is remembered less for anything she did than for the raw fact of missing him, sitting with cobwebs gathering in a kitchen she no longer had any reason to cook in.

What the tradition eventually made of all this is a whole current within bhakti called vatsalya bhava, the devotional mood of parental love, in which the devotee approaches God not with folded hands and reverent distance but with a mother's proprietary, unglamorous tenderness: worrying whether he has eaten, whether he is warm enough, whether he has been fighting with the other boys again. The Pushtimarg tradition founded by Vallabhacharya built an entire discipline of worship around this mood, having devotees wake, bathe, dress, feed, and put to sleep the image of the child Krishna through the day exactly as Yashoda once did for the living child, treating each small domestic act as an offering rather than a ritual. Vallabha's own disciple Surdas, the blind poet of Braj, spent much of his life composing verses in her voice or about her, giving Hindi devotion some of its most tender lines: a mother marveling at her son's crawling, worrying over his stumbling first steps, laughing at his tantrums, loving him with no philosophy attached to the loving at all.

It is worth noticing that Nabhadas, setting down her name among the hundreds gathered in the Bhaktamal, all but declines to add anything of his own, saying only that her story is already told so fully and so often, in the Bhagavata, in the Sukh Sagar, in the Vraj Vilas and Prem Sagar, that any further praise of Hari's own mother would be superfluous, an ordinary word reaching for something that was never ordinary. Perhaps that restraint is itself the truest thing anyone has said about her. Yashoda never argued philosophy, never performed austerities that anyone recorded, never claimed to have understood what she was raising. She only fed him, feared for him, scolded him, missed him, and loved him with the whole unphilosophical weight of a mother's heart, and bhakti has never found a higher path than that one. Anyone who has ever loved a child past the point of good sense already knows, in their hands if not in their head, exactly what Yashoda knew: that God, if he comes at all, is more likely to arrive hungry and covered in butter than seated on a throne of light, and that the truest worship anyone can offer him is simply to keep the rope ready and let him decide, in his own time, when it is long enough.