Krishna and Kaliya, the Serpent of the Yamuna

There was a bend in the river Yamuna that nobody in Braj would go near.

The water there was black. Nothing grew on the banks. Birds that flew over it fell out of the sky. And if a cow drank from it even once, she would sicken before evening.

The reason was a serpent named Kaliya. He had many hoods and eyes like hot coals, and long ago he had come to that bend to hide from an enemy. Ever since, his poison had been leaking into the water, and the whole of Braj had learned to walk the long way round.

One afternoon Krishna and his friends were playing catch with a ball on the riverbank, and the ball went sailing over their heads — straight into the black water.

The boys went silent.

"Leave it," someone whispered. "We'll get another one."

But Krishna was already climbing the big kadamba tree that leaned out over the pool. He walked out along a branch, looked down once at the dark water, and jumped in.

The splash echoed off the banks. The boys screamed and ran for the village.

Down in the black water, Kaliya woke up.

He came up through the murk with all his hoods spread wide, and he wrapped himself around the boy, coil after coil after coil, tighter and tighter, the way he had crushed everything that ever came into his pool.

By now the whole of Braj was standing on the bank. Yashoda was crying. Nanda Baba had to be held back from jumping in. The cows had come down too, and they stood at the edge of the water and would not move.

Then, very calmly, Krishna began to grow.

Not angry, not fighting — just growing, quietly, the way a morning grows. Kaliya's coils stretched, and strained, and finally slipped off him altogether.

Krishna rose to the surface. And then he did the most surprising thing of all.

He stepped up onto the serpent's hoods — and he began to dance.

He danced from hood to hood, light as rain on leaves, keeping time with his feet. And every time his foot came down, some of the poison went out of Kaliya. The serpent thrashed and raised another hood, and Krishna simply danced onto that one too. The people on the bank forgot to be afraid and began to clap along.

At last Kaliya was too tired and too humbled to lift a single hood more. And from below the water came a sound nobody expected: weeping.

It was the Nagapatnis — Kaliya's wives — with their hands folded.

"Please," they said. "He is proud and he is foolish. But he is ours. Do not take his life."

Krishna stopped dancing at once.

Kaliya looked up at the small feet standing on his head, and for the first time in his long life he was not angry. "I was made with poison in me," he said quietly. "I did not choose it."

"No," said Krishna. "But you chose this pool. Leave it. Go to Ramanaka Dvipa in the ocean, where nobody comes to drink. My footprints are on your hoods now — nothing there will trouble you."

So Kaliya went, and he took his poison with him.

By the next morning the water at that bend was clear again. The birds came back. The grass came back. And the cows of Braj walked down to the Yamuna and drank, the short way, for the first time in years.