Ch. 2: The Festival of the Hill

The morning of the festival came bright and cool. Before dawn the cowherds were awake, bathing in the Yamuna and putting on fresh clothes. The women braided flowers into their hair and hung bright cloth from the doorways. The cows themselves were washed and brushed until their coats shone, and their horns were painted with gold and red, and garlands of marigold were hung about their necks. The calves, who did not understand what was happening, ran about kicking up their heels and getting in everyone's way, and nobody minded.

The Brahmins came, and the sacred fire was lit at the foot of Govardhan. The hymns were chanted, and the smoke of the offering rose up into the clear sky. Then the food was carried out, all of it, cart after cart and basket after basket, and set before the hill. There were mountains of rice, and lakes of sweet milk, and cakes stacked as high as a boy's head. It seemed as though Vraja had cooked enough to feed a kingdom.

The Brahmins were fed first, and fed well, and given cows and gifts besides, and they blessed the cowherds and their children and their herds. Then the poor were fed, and the travellers on the road, and those who had no family. The dogs had their share, and the birds came down from the trees for theirs. The cows were given heaps of fresh green grass.

Then a wonder happened, one that the people of Vraja told and retold for the rest of their lives.

Upon the summit of Govardhan there appeared a great form, vast and shining, filling the hilltop. It was the hill itself, as it seemed, made living, and it said in a voice like the wind among the rocks, “I am Govardhan.” And it reached out and began to eat the offerings that had been laid before it, all the rice and the milk and the sweets, and it ate with pleasure and blessed the people of Vraja.

The cowherds fell back in awe. And then they saw that Krishna was standing among them, and that he too was bowing to that mighty form along with them, his small hands pressed together.

“Look,” he said to them, his eyes shining. “The hill has shown itself to us, and it has accepted our offering in person. Which of you has ever seen Indra come down to eat what you gave him? This hill is alive, and it is gracious. It can take any shape it wishes. And if anyone who lives in the forest were to slight it, it could do him harm. So let us bow to it, for the good of ourselves and of our cows.”

So all of them bowed down to the great form on the hill, and Krishna bowed with them. Yet some of the old people of Vraja, when they remembered that day afterwards, said that the face of the form on the mountain-top had been the face of Krishna himself, smiling, and that it was Krishna who had eaten the offerings and Krishna who had bowed to himself. Whether that was so, no one could say for certain. But the hill had been honoured, and the offerings had been accepted, and the people's hearts were glad.

When the feasting was done, the procession began. The cowherds yoked their oxen to the carts, and the women climbed into them, singing. The cows were driven ahead, their bells ringing. The young men went with sticks in their hands and flowers in their hair, and the old men walked slowly behind, leaning on their staffs. And with Krishna and Balarama at the head of it, all of Vraja went around Govardhan, keeping the hill always on their right hand, as one walks around a temple.

The path wound among the rocks and under the trees. Where streams crossed it the cows splashed through, and the children shrieked and splashed after them. Peacocks called from the slopes. The gopis sang songs about Krishna as they rode: about how he had stolen butter as a baby and been tied by his mother to a mortar, and how he had danced upon the serpent in the river. Krishna laughed and played his flute in answer. And the long day wore on in joy, until the sun went down red behind the hill and the procession came home again to the village, weary and content.

That night, lying on his mat beside his mother, Krishna watched the stars through the doorway.

“Did the hill like its festival?” Yashoda asked softly, stroking his hair.

“Very much, Mother,” said Krishna. And he smiled, and closed his eyes.

But far above, in the high heavens, in the shining city of the gods, Indra had been waiting for his offering, and it had not come.

Indra is the king of the gods. He rides the white elephant Airavata, and he carries the thunderbolt, and the clouds go where he sends them. He had been honoured by the cowherds of Vraja for as long as there had been cowherds in Vraja, and he had grown used to it. When he learned that the offering meant for him had been given instead to a hill, and that this had been done on the word of a little cowherd boy, his anger rose up like a storm.

“These forest folk,” he said, “these keepers of cattle, have grown proud. They have abandoned the ancient rites on the advice of a talkative child, who thinks himself wise. They are like men who try to cross the ocean of the world in a boat made of leaves. Very well. Let them see what their hill can do for them.”

He did not know, or in his pride he had forgotten, who that child truly was.

Indra summoned the clouds of destruction, the clouds called Samvartaka, which are kept in reserve for the ending of the world, when all things are to be dissolved in water. They came at his call, huge and dark, rolling over the edge of heaven like an army of elephants.

“Go to Vraja,” Indra commanded them. “Pour your rain upon it. Send wind and hail. Drown its pastures, scatter its herds, and destroy the pride of these cowherds and of that boy who leads them. I will follow you myself, on Airavata, with the storm winds at my side.”

And the great clouds bowed, and rumbled, and turned their faces toward the earth.

In Vraja the people slept peacefully, dreaming of the festival. Only the cows, in their pens, began to stir and low uneasily, lifting their heads to the sky. And on the eastern horizon, where the dawn should have been, there was no light at all.