They say the heavens opened the night I was
born. The rain fell in sheets, a downpour of
unforeseen proportions.
I was born at midnight, and my birth was to
turn into one of the most incredible tales of
human history. I was born in a dungeon to
the sister of a king. I was born in a hell hole,
like the child of a criminal, a convict. They
say the guards fell into the deepest of sleep
so I could be transported to safety. As a
child, I found the story of my birth
fascinating. It fed my sense of godhood.
Imagine hearing that the very cosmos itself
conspired to put more than a hundred guards
to sleep at the same time so that one of the
greatest extraditions known in human history
could be carried out. The story does not end
with me being whisked out of those
dungeons; it carries on, talking of how the
raging Yamuna River needed to be crossed
on a stormy night. A river my biological
father simply walked across, carrying me in
his arms, raised above his head even whilst
the waters of the Yamuna rose, dangerously
so, just to be able to touch my toe.
I come from a land whose greatest treasure is
the stories we have. These stories are born
from the wombs of the earth, the rivers that
flow across snow-clad mountains and nearly
barren peaks, fertile fields, barren lands, and
all sorts of terrains, some rich, verdant,
abundant, others stark, deserted, and plain.
The River Yamuna was a goddess who
craved the touch of her God. A god who
found merriment and amusement in being
born again and again in different forms,
different shapes. A god who laughed, even as
he was carried above a man's head,
struggling to cross a raging river, in the
darkest part of the night. A god who decided
that he might as well just dangle his feet a
little lower and dip them in the waters of the
Yamuna in case his so-called father might
drown. The details of how this entire
enterprise was brought about are not the
point. The point is the elements of nature
sensed the God in me and desperately tried to
take me in their embrace.
In some versions of the story, there is further
fantastical detail where a five-headed
mammoth snake, a king cobra, shelters me
with his hood spread out as my father carries
me to safety.
When I first heard these stories, I was still
young, and I let the storytellers weave their
intricate plots. These stories sounded better
than what I had heard from my biological
father when I met him in Mathura.
My father, Vasudeva, was a Vrishni prince
and the true heir of the throne of Mathura.
The Vrishni were an ancient race that
descended from Yayati. The Vrishni traced
their roots to Yadu and were known as the
Yadavas. Yadu was the son of King Yayati,
the son who refused to give up his youth for
his father and was cursed. But I digress; this
is not that story. This is the story of Vasudev
and Devaki. The already married Vasudev
agreed to marry the sister of a king, hoping
to better his place in the world of kings and
queens. Kansa was a usurper who had
defeated Vasudev's father, King Ugrasen,
and proclaimed himself the King of Mathura.
As the son of the defeated King, Vasudev
was left with few options but to look for
alliances that would help him regain his
position in society. King Kansa wanted his
sister to marry Vasudev so that he could keep
any possible future rebellions under control.
Vasudev was of the Yadava clan, a Vrishni
hero, and it would be imprudent and unwise
of Kans to have him killed. So, it made
political sense to make an alliance, and what
could be a stronger connection than a
marriage with his sister.
Unfortunately, the best-laid plans of mice
and men often go awry (a poet will say this
some thousand years later). A roadside
fortune teller with a grudge against the royal
clan decided to shout out just when the bride
and groom were about to be driven back to
the prince's palace by King Kansa himself, a
portent of things to come. The beauty of a
fortune well-told lies in the listener's state of
mind. King Kansa was an intelligent, logical
man on most days. But he had been drinking
in the evening, in the revelry of the marriage
party; he must have got carried away. He
drank a little too much in the night,
overheard a few courtiers talking about the
groom and how the prince had made this
marital alliance to be able to reclaim his
birthright to Mathura when the moment came
and what with one thought leading to
another, King Kansa found himself in an
irritable, annoyed mood which he tried to
hide from his sister Devaki, whom if truth be
told he was not fond of. She had grown up
into an overly religious young girl and had
developed a habit of moralizing over the
silliest things.
The fortune teller predicted a future where
the sister's eighth child would grow up to kill
King Kansa, and as these dark words hit his
ears, something inside the King snapped. He
ordered his guards to chain the newly
wedded pair and proclaimed all the unborn
children of his sister traitors to the royal
kingdom of Mathura.
And so, the words of a random fortune teller
altered the destiny of three people. My
mother, my father, and my uncle Kansa. I
speak myopically when I say three people. It
also affected Baba, Ma, Radha, and me and
maybe future generations to come. This was
not the first time such a thing occurred. We
hear tales of Lord Rama abandoning his wife
Sita on hearing a washerman cast doubt on
her virtue. Men have always been led astray
by idle chatter. It has happened before; it
happens now; it will happen again. We don't
learn. We don't change.
Baba was a friend of my father's from when
they were little boys, still unlettered in the
ways of our world. As they grew up, he
Stolen story; please report.
became my biological father's go-to person.
Baba was the one person who my father
could trust implicitly. So, when I was
smuggled out from the dungeons of Kans's
palace, my father decided that he would take
me to Baba, knowing Baba would watch out
for me and love me like a son. But before all
that, how did they manage to do the
impossible.
When my biological parents, Prince Vasudev
and Princess Devaki, were taken prisoners
and sent to the Mathura Prison cells, the
guards were a little uncertain and unsure of
how exactly they were supposed to treat the
King's sister who had done no wrong. Prince
Vasudev was a Vrishni Hero, and quite a few
guards belonged to the Vrishni community.
They found it unnerving to treat the man they
looked up to like a petty criminal. However,
as the days went by, the erratic behaviour of
King Kans ensured that most of the guards
felt sympathetic towards Devaki and
Vasudev. Days turned into months, months
into years. Six times my mother conceived,
six times she miscarried. Vasudev, my
father, had married Lady Rohini before he
set his eyes on my mother, Devaki. Upon
hearing of her husband's imprisonment, Lady
Rohini had been begging King Kansa to
allow her to meet Vasudev. Her pleas fell on
deaf ears. Finally, however, the head of the
prison guards, who was a Vrishni decided to
help the devasted grieving woman. He asked
her to come an hour before midnight, and he
would ensure a meeting with Vasudev. It so
happened that the meeting that occurred
ended up being of a conjugal nature. The on-
duty guards had decided to take a smoke
break, maybe out of respect or boredom, we
do not know. But that one visit resulted in
the birth of my stepbrother nine months later.
My mother, Devaki, too conceived once
again. She remained despondent, depressed,
in a state of constant fear, sure that this time
too, she might not be blessed with a child.
Either way, she felt no happiness, no sense of
excitement that most mothers naturally feel
when they are to bring forth a new being into
this world. The headiness that comes from
having the power to create another entity was
lost to Devaki, who was living the worst
nightmare imaginable. If she had the baby, it
would be murdered without having
experienced the joys of life. She thought of
the baby as 'it'; she dared not even
contemplate gender. She couldn't bear to
think that far into the future.
I was born on the eighth night of the Krishna
Paksh in the month of Bhadrapada. Till I
arrived, no one was entirely sure whether I
would survive the birth or live to see the
morning. But my father Vasudev had many
loyal followers among the guards. They had
been plotting for many days, deliberating on
the best possible way to take the true heir to
the throne of Mathura to safety. The same
chief of guards who played such an
instrumental part in the birth of my brother
Balram helped the ex-Prince carry his son
out of the prison cell to his friend and aide,
Nand, the head of the Gopa tribe. Even as
Devki, the mother who carried me in her,
who was living in the prison cells of a palace
where her brother was King, lay on the
raised stone slab of the cell, a frail shell of
woman, exhausted from the pain of
childbirth, heartbroken at the thought of what
was to come she lay on the stone slab, drifted
into the oblivion of unconsciousness.
Questions were later asked of my father,
Vasudev, why he brought forth children who
may never have seen the world. What kind of
base, insensitivity compelled him to
procreate within those prison walls? A mere
expression of his manhood? What was the
great Vrishni hero Vasudev thinking? I
know. He was a warrior, a prince, craving
revenge. He wanted to be able to ensure that
if there were a chance the doom of King
Kans was to occur by the hands of his
progeny, Vasudev would ensure he had as
many as a man and a woman together could.
Vasudev believed in prophecies, omens,
Karma, as did most people in those times.
Most people still do. They may pretend to
believe in logic, in science, in what they can
see, hear, or touch, but there are moments
where they will stumble, falter, fall, and hold
on to whichever idea will help them pick
themselves up move on. This is the nature of
men and women, it has always been so, and
so it will always remain.
Kans had ordered the chief of guards to
inform him as soon as the impending birth
took place. However, the prison guards were
instructed by the chief to wait till morning if
the delivery of the child happened at night. It
would give the mother a few moments with
her newborn and who could dare grudge the
poor distraught soul that. And so, when I
decided to arrive late in the night, no guard
rushed to inform the King.
They should have. I was born in the fourth
term of the constellation of Rohini; the stars
foretold that I would be dangerous for my
maternal uncle. My uncle ended up dying by
my hand.
Vasudev, my father, carried me out of those
dungeons, the prison walls that had held my
parents captive, helped by the chief of
guards. The chief of guards had handed an
extract of Ashwagandha to the cook who
prepared the nightly kadha for on-duty
guards. The guards were supposed to take the
drink to ensure they stayed awake, alert, but
the Ashwagandha concoction put them in a
state of deep slumber.
Divinity does not work in mysterious ways.
It simply finds a being who can and will
help. The rest is just creativity. The creativity
of the narrators, the storytellers who will
make the tale fascinating by little
embellishments of words, with hyperboles.
Vasudev had decided that the safest place to
keep me would be with Baba, his friend in
Nandgaon. A few days earlier, a message
had already been sent through a man loyal to
the same chief of guards.
My father wanted to take me to Baba,
himself, maybe some deep-seated need to
have some more time with his son in his
arms did not allow him to hand me over to
some trusted soldier.
And so, on that dark, stormy night, my father
took me to Nandgaon, a village some forty-
five kilometres outside of Mathura. The
journey would take more than 9 hours by
foot, and Vasudev needed to be back before
morning, so he borrowed a horse and rode as
fast as he could until he reached the Yamuna.
However, the horse was terrified of entering
the raging river. So, my father Vasudev
decided to cross it himself on foot and
walked an hour more before he reached
where Baba was waiting for him with a
bundle that looked suspiciously like a
swaddled baby.
Babies were exchanged. Words were said.
Tears flowed. Sometimes, for the greater
good, sacrifices are made. One of the most
extraordinary sacrifices in human history
was made that night, near a tiny village to the
west of the Great Yamuna River. It was Baba
who made that sacrifice.
