Damodar – The Tying of Krishna

At a Glance

• Central figures: Krishna, the divine child; Yashoda, his foster mother in Gokul; and Nalakuvara and Manigriva, two celestial beings cursed into the forms of Arjuna trees.
• Setting: Gokul, in the household of Yashoda; drawn from the Bhagavata Purana, in the tradition of Krishna’s childhood lilas.
• The turn: Yashoda attempts to tie Krishna to a grinding mortar as punishment for stealing butter - but the rope is always two fingers too short, no matter how much she gathers, until Krishna allows himself to be bound.
• The outcome: Krishna, dragging the mortar behind him, uproots two Arjuna trees and releases Nalakuvara and Manigriva from their curse; they ascend to the heavens after offering him prayers.
• The legacy: The episode gives Krishna one of his most beloved names, Damodar - “he whose belly was bound by a rope” - and is honored each year during the month of Kartik.

Yashoda had heard the complaints before. Too many times. The women of Gokul would arrive at her door, one after another, describing the same scene: a broken pot, butter smeared across the floor, and Krishna already gone, laughing, with his friends and a pack of monkeys eating whatever they had managed to carry. Yashoda would listen, apologize, and resolve to do something about it. Then her son would look up at her, and she would find that she had forgotten her resolve entirely.

One morning she decided to catch him herself.

Churning and the Boiling Milk

She was up before dawn, churning butter, singing softly about Krishna’s misdeeds - not as a lament but almost with pride, the way a mother catalogs the mischief of a child she loves past all reason. Krishna woke to the smell of fresh butter and came to her in the half-light, hungry, pulling at her sari, asking for milk. Yashoda set aside the churning and drew him into her lap.

She had just settled him there when she smelled something burning. The pot of milk on the stove had boiled over. She set Krishna down and ran to the kitchen.

It was a small moment. A pot of milk. But Krishna had been on the verge of being fed, held, attended to - and then placed aside for a pot. He sat in the quiet room and looked at the freshly churned butter.

The Broken Pot

He found the butter, broke the pot, and ate. Then he called his friends in from the courtyard. Then he called the monkeys. The gathering was cheerful and chaotic, children and animals together in the morning light, the broken shards of the pot scattered across the floor, butter everywhere.

Yashoda came back to find it.

She did not shout. She picked up a small stick and went looking for him. Krishna saw her coming - saw the stick, saw the expression on her face - and ran.

What followed was a chase through the courtyard and the house, Yashoda breathing hard, her hair coming loose, Krishna always just ahead of her, glancing back, his feet slapping the stone floor. He was fast. But he did not disappear. He did not fly. He did not become invisible or summon any of the vast powers that were, in truth, entirely available to him. He ran like a child being chased by his mother.

She caught him near the back wall.

Krishna looked up at her - stick in her hand, chest heaving, furious - and began to cry. Not the howling cry of a frightened child but the careful, deliberate cry of a child who has learned that tears have power. He rubbed his eyes with his small fists. He looked up at her through wet lashes.

Yashoda threw the stick away.

The Rope That Fell Short

But she was not finished with him. If she could not bring herself to punish him, she could at least confine him. She would tie him to the grinding mortar, heavy and immovable, and he would stay put while she worked and he would have time to think about what he had done.

She took a rope and knelt beside him.

The rope was two fingers too short.

She went and got more rope, tied it to the first length, and tried again. Two fingers short. She gathered more rope. More rope still. The neighbors watched from the doorway. The pile of rope grew absurd - enough to bind a calf, enough to encircle the whole courtyard - and still, every time Yashoda brought the ends together around Krishna’s small waist, there were two fingers of gap she could not close.

She was sweating now, genuinely bewildered, working with the methodical determination of a woman who has decided to accomplish something and cannot understand why the world is not cooperating. Krishna stood and let her work, watching her face.

Then he let her tie him.

The rope came together. The knot held. Yashoda stepped back, satisfied, wiped her hands on her sari, and went to finish her chores. Behind her, Krishna stood tied to the grinding mortar with every rope she owned. He looked at the courtyard. He looked at the two tall Arjuna trees standing at its edge.

He began to crawl.

The Yamala-Arjuna Trees

The grinding mortar was heavy. It did not matter. Krishna dragged it across the courtyard stones toward the two trees, the rope taut behind him, the mortar grinding along the ground with a sound that brought the neighbors to their windows.

What no one in Gokul knew - though Krishna knew it perfectly well - was that the trees were not trees. They were Nalakuvara and Manigriva, sons of Kubera, the lord of wealth. Long before, drunk on their own prosperity and the wine that comes with it, the two had been bathing in a river with several women when the sage Narada passed by. The women dressed and showed respect. The men, arrogant and careless, did not bother. Narada looked at them and spoke a curse: let them become trees, rooted and silent, unable to move or speak or waste their lives in pleasure, until Krishna himself walked between them and freed them. They had stood in Yashoda’s courtyard since before Krishna was born.

He crawled between them now, trailing the mortar. The mortar caught on the narrow gap between the trunks. Krishna kept moving. The rope went taut. The wood groaned.

Both trees came down.

The sound shook the whole neighborhood. People came running from every direction, arriving to find two enormous Arjuna trees uprooted and fallen, the grinding mortar wedged sideways in the gap where they had stood, and Krishna sitting cheerfully in the wreckage, still tied to the rope, entirely unharmed.

From the fallen trees, light rose. Two figures emerged, shining, their long imprisonment ended, and they stood before the child who had freed them. Nalakuvara and Manigriva offered their prayers in full - gratitude, recognition, the formal acknowledgment of what Krishna was and what he had done for them. Then they ascended, rising back into the heavens they had left in disgrace.

Yashoda at the Fallen Trees

The villagers did not know what to make of it. A small child, tied to a mortar, had uprooted two of the largest trees in the courtyard. Some of the older residents said they had heard a sound like that once before, when a great storm came through. But there had been no storm.

Yashoda arrived at a run, her heart clenched, expecting to find Krishna crushed beneath one of the trunks. She found him sitting upright, watching her come to him, the same expression on his face he always had - open, attentive, waiting to see what she would do next.

She untied the rope. She checked his arms, his legs, his head, running her hands over him with the quick, frantic thoroughness of a mother convincing herself that her child is whole. He submitted to the examination patiently.

The gathered neighbors were still talking, still looking at the fallen trees, still trying to construct an explanation that made ordinary sense. Yashoda did not try. She had stopped expecting ordinary sense from this child some time ago. She gathered him against her and held him there in the ruined courtyard, the mortar lying on its side behind them, the sky open and wide above the place where the trees had stood.

His name from that day - the name that would follow him across every telling of the story, every song, every prayer - was Damodar: dama, the rope, and udara, the belly. The one whose belly was bound.