Krishna - The Dark Lord of Dwaraka

Chapter 20 - Vrindavana

Seeing the Arjuna tree fall, changed absolutely nothing for Krishna.

He was as he had always been – full of pranks, mischief and plenty of love – that was something that absolutely no one could escape – none of the Gopas wanted to escape it.

Despite everything that Krishna did – the exasperation that he threw the people around him in, the worry that he caused them, people remembered absolutely nothing about it.

All the Gopas needed was a glance at that dark child of Yashoda – then everything became alright. His eyes, his face, his smile, drove away every single worry that they had.

One of the most beautiful accounts of Krishna was from a fruit seller.

Krishna wanted fruits and went inside his home and got some paddy to exchange it for the fruits of the lady.

The fruit seller saw the tiny hands which brought the paddy and saw that more than half of the paddy had spilled when the young child had brought it out of the home.

But looking at the face of the child, the fruit seller could not refuse the child. She did not have the heart to make the child unhappy.

So she gave as many fruits as the child could hold in her hands and put the pitiful amount of paddy which the child had brought out in her basket.

The child looked overjoyed with the fruits and at that minute that was all that mattered to the fruit seller.

She walked back home happy.

But she was in for a shock. A huge shock.

The paddy was missing. Instead there were precious jewels, the likes of which the fruit seller had never even seen in her life.

******

But the fall of the Arjuna trees for the last straw for the Gopas.

There had becoming far too many unexplained things and it was clear that all the things were occurring with terrifying regularity to be be dismissed as coincidence.

The elders of Gopa got together.

Upananda, Nanda's elder brother looked at his people. "I do not understand what is happening. We are all cowherds and earn our livelihoods through the cows. But somehow, we have been targetted. Far too many times. I think we should leave Gokul."

There was a stunned silence. Most of Gopas knew that this was the purport of the meeting. But still hearing it aloud was slightly scary – like as if it was suddenly going to become true.

"Where can we go?" One of the Gopas asked slowly. "Gokul is our home."

Upananda smiled shaking his head. "We can go to Vrindavana. It is a small forest between Nandeswara and Mahavana. It is a clustered forest and we will be safe there."

The Gopas stared at each other.

But they all recognised the logic of Upananda's words.

The following day, they all left for Vridavana.

*********

It was in Vrindavana that Krishna and Balarama grew up.

When they were older, they even took the calves out to graze in the forests.

That was the time that Krishna first played the flute.

It was said that when Krishna played the flute, forget the people in and around the place, even the animals stopped completely and just listened to the haunting melodies which flowed from the instrument.