Ch. 3: The Storm and the Lifted Mountain
The storm came down upon Vraja like the sky falling.
First the wind. It rose out of nowhere, howling through the lanes, tearing the festival cloth from the doorways and the thatch from the roofs. Trees that had stood for a hundred years bent and groaned and cracked. Dust and leaves and broken branches whirled through the air, and the people woke and ran out of their houses and could not see one another in the darkness.
Then the thunder. It did not roll and fade as ordinary thunder does. It crashed and crashed again without pause, so close that the ground shook beneath their feet, and the lightning came with it, flash upon flash, so that the whole world seemed to leap white out of the dark and fall back into it again.
And then the rain.
It did not fall in drops. It fell in columns, thick as the pillars of a palace, as though the clouds had been torn open and were pouring out the oceans they held. It fell with a roar that drowned every other sound. It beat the crops flat in the fields. It turned the lanes of the village into rivers, and the rivers into torrents. Hailstones came with it, big as a child's fist, striking the cattle and bruising the men who ran to help them. Within an hour the low places were flooded. Within two, the water was rising toward the doorsteps. And still it came, and still the darkness held, and there was no sign of morning.
The cows bellowed in terror. The calves cried. Mothers held their babies close under whatever shelter they could find, and the babies wailed. Old men who had seen sixty seasons of rain stood in the downpour with their mouths open, for they had never seen anything like this. There was nowhere to run. The whole of Vraja, from the river to the hills, was being drowned.
“It is Indra,” the people cried to one another. “Indra is angry because we did not make his offering. He will destroy us all.”
And not knowing what else to do, they ran, every one of them, men and women and children, driving the shivering cattle before them, through the flooded lanes to the house of Nanda. They came to Krishna.
They found him standing in his father's courtyard with the rain streaming down his face, calm as if it were a summer evening. Balarama stood beside him. Yashoda clutched at his arm.
“Krishna,” the cowherds cried, “Krishna, save us! You are our master, our protector. You love the cows and the cows love you. Save Vraja from the wrath of Indra!”
Krishna looked at them, at their wet and frightened faces, at the cows pressed trembling together, at the children crying in their mothers' arms. His heart was moved, for they had trusted him and put all their hope in him. Then he looked up at the black sky, where the clouds of the ending of the world were piled one on another, and he understood what Indra had done.
“This is Indra's doing,” he said quietly, as if to himself. “He is angry because his sacrifice was given up. He thinks himself the lord of the world, and this pride has made him forget himself. I will humble that pride. But I will not let my people suffer for it. They have taken refuge in me, and they are my own family. I have vowed to protect those who come to me.”
Then he turned to the cowherds and spoke in a voice that rang clear through the roar of the storm.
“Do not be afraid,” said Krishna. “Come with me to Govardhan. All of you. Bring the cows and the calves, bring your children and your old ones, bring whatever you need. The hill that you honoured yesterday will shelter you today.”
They did not understand, but they followed him. Through the wind and the hail and the lashing rain, wading through water that rose to their knees, the whole of Vraja went with Krishna to the foot of Govardhan. The lightning showed them the hill, black and streaming, with waterfalls pouring down every gully.
Krishna walked up to it. He was a boy of seven, no taller than a cowherd's staff. He put out one hand, and took hold of the hill.
And he lifted it.
With one hand, his left hand, as easily as a child picks up a mushroom from the forest floor, Krishna lifted the hill of Govardhan from the earth. Its roots came up out of the ground. The rocks and trees and streams went up with it. The whole great mass of it rose into the air, and it rose, and it rose, until Krishna held it high above his head, balanced on the tip of his little finger, like a great umbrella spread above the sky.
The people of Vraja stood frozen in the rain and stared.
Beneath the hill there was now a vast hollow space, dry and sheltered, where the hill had been. Krishna's voice came to them, warm and teasing, as if they were children who had forgotten their manners.
“Mother, Father, all of you, come in under the hill, and bring the cows. Don‘t be afraid that it will fall from my hand. And don’t be afraid of the wind and the rain. I have made a shelter for you. Come, come in, and bring everything you have.”
So they came. The cows went in first, lowing, with the calves pressed at their sides. Then came the carts, piled with pots and grain and bedding. Then the women with the babies, and the old ones helped by the young, and the men driving the last of the stragglers. Nanda went in, with tears on his face. Yashoda went in, and could not stop looking back over her shoulder at her son, standing there in the storm with a mountain in his hand. Balarama went in last, and smiled at his brother as he passed.
Under the hill it was dry. The rain thundered on the top of Govardhan and ran off its sides in sheets, but not a drop reached the people beneath. The wind howled around the edges, but inside it was still. The cows shook the water from their coats and lay down. The children stopped crying and gazed up at the roof of rock and earth and roots above them, which hung there in the air as quietly as a cloud.
And at the edge of it, holding it all up, stood Krishna, small and dark and smiling, with his flute tucked in his sash and the rain running off his peacock feather.
Outside, the clouds of destruction poured down their waters and saw that it was no use. Indra, riding on Airavata above the storm, looked down through the dark and saw the hill lifted into the air and the whole of Vraja safe beneath it. And for the first time, the king of the gods felt a cold doubt enter his heart.