The Cow at Khatu

When the war was over and the head of Barbarika had seen what it wished to see, it was laid in the earth. The people of Khatu say that it came to rest under their own village, in the dry country of Shekhawati, north-west of where Jaipur stands now. The grass grew over it, and the ages turned, and no one remembered it was there.

Many centuries later a cowherd of Khatu noticed something odd about one of the cows in his care. Every day, when the herd was out grazing, she would leave the others and walk to the same patch of ground. There she would stand quite still, and her milk would run down of its own accord and sink into the earth. In the evening she came home dry.

At first the cowherd thought someone was milking her in secret. Then he followed her, and saw it with his own eyes.

He went to the cow's owner. "Your cow is giving her milk to the ground," he said. "Every day, in the same place. I have watched her for a week."

"Cows do not do that," said the owner.

"This one does. Come and see."

The owner came, and saw it, and went to fetch the village elders. They stood round the patch of earth and argued about what it could mean, and in the end someone fetched a spade.

They had not dug far when the spade stopped against something. They cleared the earth away with their hands, and there, a little below the surface, was a head. Its eyes were open, the people of Khatu say, and it was smiling.

Nobody knew what to do. For some days the head was given into the keeping of a Brahmin of the village, who washed it and worshipped it as well as he knew how.

At that time Khatu was ruled by a Chauhan, Roop Singh, whose wife was Narmada Kanwar. One night a dream came to the palace. The one in the dream said:

"My head has come up out of the ground at Khatu. Build me a temple there, on the place where it was found. From there I will hear everyone who calls on me."

In the morning the dream was told, and the report of the cow and the head was brought to the palace, and the two fitted together. The ruler had the temple built, and the head was set in it on the eleventh day of the bright half of Kartika. That day is still kept at Khatu as Baba Shyam's birthday.

The place where the cow had stood was made into a pond, Shyam Kund. Pilgrims bathe in it before they go up to the temple, and they say its water heals.

The temple has been rebuilt since. In 1720 the diwan Abhay Singh, at the order of the ruler of Marwar, raised the building that stands now, with the head in its sanctum. Over the years the village round it has filled with rest houses and shops selling the saffron flags, the nishan, that pilgrims carry.

Every spring, on the eleventh and twelfth days of the bright half of Phalguna, a few days before Holi, Khatu holds its great fair. People walk the eighteen kilometres from Ringas carrying those flags, many of them barefoot, singing to the one they call Haare ka Sahara, the refuge of those who have lost.