Yashoda and Krishna

By Seema Seth

Oblivious of invincible Krsna’s biological parentage, Yasoda, his foster mother brings him up as her own child, tolerating his various pranks and marvelling at his numerous mystics, until the day, the truth about his actual lineage opens up to an interminable woe, which has no easy solution in near future.
Bound by a duty to release his real parents Vasudeva and Devaki out of jail, and subsequently free them from the clutches of the tyrant king of Mathura, Kansa, Krsna accepts Yasoda’s decision to send him back to his original parents. But it isn’t as easy as it appears to be? Krsna doesn’t forgive her easily for severing her relationship of so many years and forcing him to accept two stark strangers as his parents instead.
With time, he finally accepts their intrusion while continuing to live under the shadow of his inimitable foster parents, Yasoda and Nanda. From being the Lord of marvels, he graduates to become the king of Mathura. This is his story, the story of a Godman, who is born to rid the universe of its sinners by any means, thereupon using magic, celestial powers and weapons as per the circumstances. And he does so with excellence while finally accomplishing his mission.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Jul 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543705140

Seema Seth

Seema Seth is a renowned writer and lives in Mumbai and juggles between acting, a gold medallist career in athletics and writing. She had been recognised as one of the finest women writers in the English language by a research book in 2009 for her debut novel El Dorado. She could be contacted at [e-mail].

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Copyright © 2019 by Seema Seth.

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Contents

Acknowledgement

When Yasoda apprised Krsna of his true lineage

Prologue

Lord Krsna’s birth…as narrated by Lord himself…

Foreword by the Author

PART I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

PART II

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Acknowledgement

Thank you Blanche S for copyediting my book, Vishnu Das (ISKCON), Lyla G for your valuable review and Abhijeet Patole (JJ School of Fine Arts) for the cover design.

When Yasoda apprised

Krsna of his true lineage

Krsna’s ears deafen to his mother’s words, the impact is so severe, and his mind jams for a moment as if the whole universe has come to a halt. He doesn’t want to believe his mother. And why should he? How can someone else be his birth mother? He reminisces, having been breastfed by her, spoon served his first morsel, hand-held his first walk and the numerous spankings for stealing butter, getting overnight care by this woman in sickness, and that too, at the cost of her sleep, ear pulled for flirting with the gopis and getting her blessings before his numerous combats with the asuras, Kaliya and much more. His reasoning fails to support him further. ‘She is not my biological mother? What is this woman trying to imply?’ He pulls out his hair in marked frustration.

I don’t want Devaki, I don’t want any throne, and I don’t want to become a king. I am happy here, to stay next to you, sleep on your lap, and I don’t care if you are my foster mother. Feeling the pain of a hundred poking barbed wires, he buries his head into her lap in profound pain. Then he breaks down into uncontrollable sobs. And further supporting his grief, numerous bolts start to break out in the sky thunderously in precedence to the pending rainfall.

As they both sit there, drenched in rainwater, overwhelmed by their common and the latest angst, they lose count of time and almost freeze there, getting numbed by a common pain; the pain of separation.

"You are not a normal man, but someone blessed with miraculous powers, worthy of a king. You are the reincarnation of Lord Vishnu¹, so do not get emotional, start your preparations for the impending journey my son", she doles out the truth with a heavy heart while getting up on her feet.

Krsna gets up after her and then hugs her tightly. I love you. Please don’t send me away from you, he starts begging to her further, looking into her teary eyes; He doesn’t want anyone except for her.

But destiny is a devil’s advocate. I have fostered even Balarama, he has hardly been able to recover from the recent shock, Yasoda further apprises him of Balarama’s truth as well.

And after that shocking revelation, he doesn’t have the heart to stay there any longer, therefore, without more argument, he starts to pace towards the cart at the parking. Jumping into it at once, he speaks firmly, Bye Ma, I am going to be with Devaki now onwards along with Balarama.

Son! Yasoda comes running after him.

No, stay away from me, liar, beleaguered by the pain of reality, he warns her to maintain a judicious distance from him and then pulls up the oxen to kick start the journey.

Prologue

India, being a land of diverse religions, boasts of myriad gods that fill up the mantelpieces of its wide gallery of 330 million. This large figure makes it difficult for a person to decide on the most suitable one. Hence, the only option that seems appropriate at this time is to follow one’s family tradition and an ancestral god over others.

Apropos, when my mother got married, she got along a small idol of Gurunanak². Then her temple started to fill up with varied gods implied by her in-laws, namely, Ram and Sita, Ganesha and Laxmi, Vaishno Mata, Shiva, Krsna and many more.

But the list didn’t impress me much and I grew up as an atheist initially, absolutely disbelieving that the god can have any role to play in my life. Practical reasoning and logic reduced the theory of its existence to a mere fallacy.

Then one day, I happened to take a peek into my dad’s library and discovered a lot of mythological books there. They were as interesting as were enlightening. This aroused my curiosity to dwell deep into their mysteries and know more about them.

I read a few of them with interest, and the Krsna Avatar fascinated me the most. I ended up reading all the sequels and fell in love with Lord Krsna.

Lord Krsna or Krsna is one of the supreme deities of the Hindus. And unlike other gods, his life story is much more interesting. And I am retelling the story in my own words, creating this mythological fabric, knitted with various threads of the Lord’s interesting sagas.

Born to King Vasudeva and his wife Devaki in a prison in Mathura in UP, North India on a windy and monsoonal night, he was fostered away to a different set of parents, Nanda and Yasoda in Gokula also called Braj, Brij or Brajbhumi, as soon as he was born, so that he could be saved from his tyrant uncle, King Kansa.

And right from the time he was in the cradle, he started to exhibit his sorcery and spun tales of his bravado that ranged from killing many demons to winning over a poisonous serpent Kaliya and uprooting the Giriraj or the Govardhan hill. His other remarkable heroic tales include reincarnating a dead man, Madhumangala, son of his guru, Sandipani Muni while he was still in Gurukul³, saving the modesty of Draupadi, his best friend and killing Kansa, the tyrant king of Mathura. Further, with an incomputable intelligence, he rendered navigation to Pandavas in the historical war of Mahabharata in his adulthood.

His personal life was varied and colourful and he was quite a ladies’ man. Alternating between his first love Radha and his wedded wife Rukmini, he loved both equally. Meera Bai, another follower, also finds an important description in the story as his unparalleled devotee.

The right-angled love story of the foursome has left a permanent mark in folklore, inking him as the only indulgent God in the Indian history.

And among the tales, which are one too many, I picked up pieces, which highlight his relationship with Yasoda, his foster mother, and who remains more revered in history than his natural mother Devaki, while becoming legendary and also setting a benchmark for other foster mothers to follow. And this fact dwarfs the rest of his tales.

Krsna was a naughty child, and Yasoda always fell in trouble because of him. Nevertheless, she brought him up with love, laughter and pain, overwhelming the misconception that a foster mother cannot bring up another’s child with the same love that she brings up her own child with, thereby becoming an integral part of all his leelaye⁴, joys and sorrows.

In the words of Sage Narada, when he witnessed her tying Krsna to a grinding stone as a punishment one fine day, he thought to himself, What penance has she undertaken to be bestowed with the powers to punish the Supreme? Because, here is the Supreme, who is the beginning, the end, and also the middle, and who is receiving punishment from a mortal.

This is a story that reflects Yasoda’s unconditional love for Krsna, her endurance, patience, sorrow and her sacrifices. Moreover, her profound love for her foster son gave her two opportunities to mother him, and in two different lifetimes. While in their first life, as she was on her death bed, and regretted not having witnessed even one of his marriages, she was promised by the latter that she would be able to do so in their next birth.

True to his words, he was reborn as Venkateshwara, and she as Vakula Devi, and then he finally gave his mother the privilege of witnessing his kalyanam⁵ to Princess Padmavati, daughter of King Akasa and Queen Dharinidevi, also called Alamelunmange, and worshipped as Goddess Lakshmi, the goddess of riches.

Since it was not possible to cover all of his tales, I have only mentioned the most important and interesting ones which have conspicuously projected his relationship with Yasoda. Besides, I have added a lot of dramatic twists and imaginations to the story just to make it more engaging.

While trying my level best to do justice to the parable, I might have slightly differed on some points from the traditional stories, but that’s due to the fact that as a writer I have maintained my individual style in rewriting it. But at the same time, I have tried to retain the facts as close to reality as possible by seeking advice from those who have an in-depth knowledge of the story and by checking various mythological books on the subject.

Lord Krsna’s birth…as

narrated by Lord himself…

The night was set like a symphony orchestra. The first shower of monsoon was growing disobediently in intensity, and when the thick droplets poured on the ground, they were beating like the perennial tapping of a thousand drums, akin to the African Congo that dances in celebration and revelry. Avocado green wild frogs had been croaking, sounding like the guitar strings that have gone awry and struggling to find back their lost notes. A gust of cold wind penetrated through the soft skin of my mother’s abdomen and travelled right into her womb where I lay nestled. I shivered with the impact. Today was seemingly different. The pain had been lurking in my mother’s voice and corroborating which, she had been shrieking in intervals. I felt pressure on me; the force equalling squalls of wind-blown into a saxophone. Then as I struggled to find back my foothold, magnetic energy suddenly drew me towards a dark chasm, a vacuum. Caught unprepared by this impromptu development, I jumped up on my feet and ran helter-skelter, swerving right forth and centre, guarding the long umbilical cord against probable strangulation at the same time; how I dreaded a royal suicide! I prayed to God for strength while waiting to see the bright lights, since sooner or later, I had to submit myself to that dark abyss, and which will lead me ultimately to my liberation from this haven of nine months, as I will be stepping into a new world with my birth. I give up going against the tide and try as much to cooperate with my mother’s effort, subsequently relaxing my body and letting it go. But that wasn’t as easy as I thought would be, my head got caught in there and I feared I would choke. I screamed for help, and by the time I stopped, I was already out, into a new realm, being held upside down and getting beaten up on my back continuously. I started to cry loudly.

I opened my eyes with difficulty in bright lights to a fair and reasonably tall man, who took me in his arms immediately. Did I hear the sweet sound of a thousand violins playing? Is he the man I had been waiting to see, the man whose embrace I yearned for, my saviour, my god, my father, and who I had often heard devising plans to save me from Kansa? But before I could feel him further, he passed me on to a woman. Devaki, hold him carefully, he whispered.

I shifted my gaze towards a beautiful woman, who was taking me into her hold while sitting at the prasutigruha⁶ bed in tiredness. Her forehead had been glistening with sweat drops but her eyes were sparkling with a rare joy.

Devaki. I heard my father call out her name again.

These two seem inseparable, successively realising that she was my mother, I tried to look closely at her pretty as a picture face. Her big black eyes had been changing shades, from joyous to harried, and that started to worry me. Even she seemed to be equally concerned about my life. Hmm, I folded my arms on my chest for a solution to our common worry, Kansa, or Kamsa! the one who has been gunning for my life; a vile fact, that I had often snooped from their regular conversations during my 9 months’ haul in her womb.

Hmm, I sighed again, thinking, tomorrow’s another day, and astutely pushed back my worry to some other time while deciding to look at the sunny side of life.

Foreword by the Author

Once, when I had been passing by Bandra flyover, I came across this expression on a display board, A mother doesn’t give birth to a child but a child gives birth to a mother, which was so striking yet meaningful. The strong bond between a mother and a child is equally as sensitive, fragile and blissful as the pure joy and deep ecstasy spawned by the sight of a sun-kissed beautiful flower which has been blossoming in the wee hours of the morning. Both the phenomena are simply natural, unstoppable, uncontainable and unmatched!

Therefore, a mother has been compared to God because of her unparalleled and unconditional love for her child. She will protect her child, no matter what, that too, with a thankless show of heroism, while reducing herself to the locus of an unsung hero who doesn’t expect any reward in return for her bravery. As an embodiment of sacrifices, she safely boasts of a wide fedora of endless love as shelter to her child. As such she is always taken for granted but she never complains. By virtue of biology, even after the umbilical cord is snipped off at the time of delivery to separate the child and the mother, it remains intact figuratively, while strengthening their bond even more with each passing day.

But can a foster mother go the extra mile like any biological mother and love her child in the same fashion? More so, since her sincere though contradicting dogma more or less often exposes her to the risk of a complaining and a cruel society that doesn’t tire from finding faults with her