Krishna

Kamsa killed each of Devaki's first six children within moments of their birth, certain that a prophecy naming her eighth child as his killer would come true. He imprisoned Devaki and her husband Vasudeva through the pregnancy, but when the eighth child was born, the infant was carried out of the cell and exchanged for a baby girl born the same night in the house of the cowherd Nanda and his wife Yasoda. Kamsa reached the girl first and killed her in the true child's place, believing his enemy already dead. Yasoda then carried the real Krishna away in a cow cart, across the Yamuna river, to raise him as her own son among Nanda's herders, alongside his brother Balarama, whose own life had already been saved before birth when a goddess moved him out of Devaki's womb into that of Vasudeva's other wife, Rohini.

Krishna grew up playing leaf whistles and a gourd drum with Balarama in the forest, far from any council of state or courtier, and later told his cousin Arjuna that men such as Duryodhana and Shishupala meant it as an insult when they called him a cowherd, not knowing what it had meant to him to grow up free in a village and wander the forest as a boy. When the truth of his birth reached the Kuru court, sages said that Krishna was in fact the Supreme Lord, and that his escape to Vrindavana had been his own arrangement rather than chance: God himself had appeared among Nanda's people.

Grown to a young man, Krishna returned to Mathura and killed King Kamsa, the uncle who had spent his whole life trying to kill him first. Kamsa's death was enough to make the crowd want to tear his body apart with their bare hands, in payment for the years he had spent murdering any child, including Krishna's own brothers, who might grow up to threaten him. Krishna would not allow it. He protected the tyrant's body himself and presided over the funeral in person. The Yadava chiefs despised Kamsa as much as anyone in Mathura, yet they despised themselves more, for having let his cruelty go unanswered for so long, and out of that shame they refused to come to the funeral at all. Krishna's answer, when he heard of their refusal, was short: after death, he said, there was no enmity left to hold.

Daruka, who had been there himself, later told the story to Arjuna one afternoon, adding a detail from its aftermath: that Jarasandha, whose two daughters had married Kamsa, then laid siege to Mathura, a siege everybody else had already heard of besides. He called Krishna's conduct that day noble, and repeating Krishna's own words about enmity was enough to silence them both for a moment. Arjuna answered, once he could speak again, with an echo of it: that when the Pandavas eventually killed Jarasandha himself, years afterwards, Krishna had the dead man's own son placed on his father's throne, and treated him with the same kindness he had once shown Kamsa's corpse.

Rukmini's brother Rukmi, a close friend of King Sishupala, arranged to give her to Sishupala in marriage. Rukmini loved Krishna instead, and sent him word before the wedding could take place. On the day set for the ceremony, in front of a hundred assembled kings, Krishna carried her away from Vidarbha and married her himself. Even before this, Krishna had already promised Sishupala's own mother, his aunt, that he would forgive up to a hundred insults from her son, a promise the loss of Rukmini only made harder for Sishupala to bear: he never forgave Krishna for it, and nursed the grievance for the rest of his life.

Rukmi took the humiliation just as hard. Everyone knew what Krishna had done to him that day, and years afterwards, arriving at Kurukshetra with an army of his own before the great war, Rukmi was still remembered first as Krishna's sworn enemy on account of it, a king who had since won conquests and a blessing from Siva but was known, in the same breath, as the brother whose sister had been taken from her own wedding. Sishupala, for his part, never let the matter rest: it became one grievance among an unending stream of insults he went on to hurl at Krishna for years afterwards.

Ashwatthama, cornered after the war and determined to wipe out the last of the Pandava line, aimed the Brahmastra at the unborn child in the womb of Uttara, Abhimanyu's widow. Krishna, riding beside Arjuna when the weapon was loosed, moved at once to protect her: one account had him expand his own power and enter her womb himself in a mystical form to shield the child directly, another had him open his own third eye and force the weapon to retract before it could do any harm. Either way, the Brahmastra was turned aside and rose harmlessly into the sky, watched by Uttara and the Pandava women in wonder.

Arjuna, freed to act once the danger had passed, fired a weapon of his own that bound Ashwatthama in cords, dragged him from his hiding place by the hair, and hauled him onto the chariot. He hesitated to kill his own teacher's son, but Krishna told him plainly that Ashwatthama had earned no mercy: a man who murdered sleeping boys forfeited any claim to the protection his birth as a brahmin would otherwise have given him.

When Uttara's time came, the child was born without breath, and the household's joy turned to wailing in the same moment. Krishna was sent for and found Uttara's newborn son lifeless in the birthing room. He took the small body in his hands, poured holy water over it, and said that if he himself had always served dharma, the child would live. At his words the baby's limbs twitched and his eyes opened. Krishna promised the child would go on to rule the Kuru line for sixty years, and Vyasa, standing by, named him there and then: Parikshit, the tested one.

Some Yadava youths dressed Krishna's own son Samba as a pregnant woman to mock a group of visiting sages, asking whether she would bear a son or a daughter. The sages saw through the joke and cursed them for it. The curse left behind an iron club too dangerous to keep whole: it was ground down, but one arrowhead-shaped sliver resisted grinding, and Balarama had it thrown into the sea instead. A fish swallowed the sliver, fishermen netted the fish and discarded the iron when they gutted it, and an old hunter named Jara found it lying on the shore and fixed it to the head of his hunting arrow. Krishna, reading the omens gathering over Dwaraka, told his people that thirty-six years had passed since the war at Kurukshetra and that the time had come for Gandhari's curse on their whole line to fall due.

At Prabhasa on the coast, the assembled Yadavas spent two days in sacrifice before the wine took hold of them. Satyaki, still angry that Kritavarma had once helped kill the Pandavas' sons while they slept, taunted him for it in front of everyone, and Kritavarma answered back. The insult spread into a full brawl, and when their proper weapons ran out, the Yadavas snatched up handfuls of strange reeds growing at the water's edge, grown from the same cursed iron that Balarama had cast into the sea. Even a scratch from one of the reeds was enough to kill. Father turned on son and brother on brother until, within the hour, almost the whole assembly lay dead.

Krishna saw his own son Pradyumna killed in the chaos, and when three of his other sons turned on him along with his cousin Akrura, he took up the reeds himself and killed the men responsible, grieving even as he fought. Only Krishna, Balarama, and the charioteer Daruka survived the slaughter. Afterwards Krishna withdrew alone into the forest, sat beneath a tree, and thought back over his own life: growing up at Gokul with Yasoda, his love for the milkmaid Radha, the day he had killed Kamsa at Mathura. The hunter Jara, out looking for deer, saw Krishna's blood-reddened feet through the trees, mistook them for game, and loosed the cursed arrow. It struck the one place Krishna could be wounded, the sole of his foot, the single spot a sage named Durvasa had once left open when he blessed the rest of Krishna's body against every weapon. Jara ran to him, recognised who he had shot, and fell at his feet in horror.

Arjuna arrived, performed the last rites for Vasudeva and the dead, and led the surviving women, elders, and priests out of Dwaraka with what gold they could carry. The sea rose the moment the last chariot passed through the gates, and the city broke apart and sank beneath the waves, Krishna's own palace going under last of all. On the road away, bandits attacked the column; Arjuna found his once-inexhaustible quivers empty and could do nothing to stop them taking the gold and many of the Yadava women. He led what remained of the people to Indraprastha, where Vajra was crowned king in their place. Krishna's wives Rukmini, Saibya, Hymavati, and Jambavati ended their own lives on funeral pyres, while Satyabhama and others withdrew to the forest and, after years of austerity in the mountains, were said to reach final liberation.