The Rope That Was Always Too Short

One morning Yashoda sat churning curd into butter, singing the songs of her son's games while she worked. The little boy came and pulled at her churning rope. He was hungry, so she put him on her lap and fed him. But the milk she had left on the fire began to boil over, and she put him down and ran to save it.

Krishna was furious at being put down. He bit his lip, picked up a stone, and broke the pot of curd. Then he went into the next room, climbed on a mortar turned upside down, reached the butter hanging from the ceiling, and began handing it out to a monkey.

Yashoda came back to a broken pot and an empty room. She followed the trail of butter and found him sitting on the mortar, looking around guiltily. She picked up a stick. Krishna jumped down and ran, and she ran after him, and the ground shook under the god whom the sages cannot catch in their meditation, and his mother caught him by the arm.

He rubbed his eyes with his butter-smeared hands, crying. Yashoda threw away the stick. "Then I will tie you up," she said, "and you can stay out of trouble for one morning."

She took a rope and wound it around his waist to tie him to the mortar. It was two fingers too short. "Bring me another rope," she called to the women. She knotted another rope onto it. Still two fingers short. She added another, and another, every rope in the house, and every time the rope was two fingers short.

The women of the village came to watch, and laughed. "All the rope in Gokul will not go round that little belly," said one of them. Yashoda stood there with her hair coming loose and the sweat running down her face.

Krishna looked at his tired mother, and he let himself be tied. The next time she wound the rope around him, it was just long enough. From that day he was called Damodara, the one with a rope around his belly.

Yashoda went back to her work. In the yard stood two tall arjuna trees, side by side. Krishna looked at them, and he crawled towards them, dragging the heavy mortar behind him.

The trees were not trees. They were Nalakuvara and Manigriva, the two sons of Kubera, the god of wealth. Drunk and naked, they had once been playing in a river with women when the sage Narada passed, and they had not even covered themselves. Narada had cursed them to stand as trees until the day Krishna touched them.

Krishna crawled between the two trunks. The mortar stuck behind him, and he pulled. With a great crack the two trees came up by the roots and fell. Out of them stepped two shining young men, who bowed to the little boy tied to the mortar, praised him, and went back to their father's city.

The cowherds came running at the noise and found the trees down and the child sitting between them, unhurt, still tied to the mortar, and could not understand what had happened.

Long before the mortar, the women of Gokul had been complaining. They came to Yashoda in a crowd. "Your son lets the calves loose before milking time," they said. "He steals our curd and butter, and what he cannot eat he gives to the monkeys. If the pot is out of reach, he stands on a stool. If it hangs from the ceiling, he piles up mortars and boxes, or his friends climb on each other's shoulders, and he makes a hole in the pot from below and drinks what runs out."

Yashoda only smiled, because when she asked him he said he had done nothing. "They are lying, Mother," he said. "Smell my mouth." And she could never bring herself to punish him.

So the women of Gokul hung their pots of butter higher, in nets of rope from the rafters, and Krishna and his friends climbed higher. The boys made a ladder of their own bodies, the biggest at the bottom and the smallest at the top, and the smallest one was always Krishna.

That is the Dahi Handi. On the day after Janmashtami, in the towns and villages of Maharashtra, a clay pot of curd and butter is hung high above the street on a rope. Teams of young men called Govindas, one for each neighbourhood, build human pyramids, layer upon layer, until a small boy on the top can reach the pot and break it. The crowd throws water over them as they climb, the band plays, and when the pot breaks and the curd runs down over the climbers, the whole street shouts "Govinda ala re!", Govinda has come.