All over Vrindavan, the cowherds were busy. Milk was being set aside, grain was being ground, ghee was simmering in huge vessels, and the whole village was getting ready for the yearly offering to Indra, king of the gods and giver of rain. Then a small boy walked up to his father, Nanda, and asked
A soul arrives in Yamaloka, trembling, with nothing in its hands. On a great throne sits Yama, and beside him a man with a pen, an inkpot and a heavy ledger. He does not ask the soul to explain. He simply opens the book and begins to read, page by page, every kind word and
It is still dark. The lamps of Diwali night have burned down, the sweets are finished, and the house is quiet. Then, from somewhere inside, comes a loud, ugly, rattling noise: a woman beating an old, cracked soop (winnowing basket) with a stick, walking from room to room, corner to corner, calling out into the
The first thing you notice is not the view. It is the sound. You step out of the car in Chaminoo, a village of terraced fields above the Ravi valley, and somewhere below the old house a stream is talking to itself. It runs past the walls, under the trees, and through a small stone
Read the Daliddar Bhagana soop ritual at dawn after Diwali. Imagine a king who has won the three worlds, and a goddess who lives in his kingdom but is no longer free. Bali, the generous demon king, ruled heaven, earth and the skies, and Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune, stayed within his realm. Then a
Smoke rose from a funeral pyre, and Vishnu would not leave it. Vrinda, the wife of the asura Jalandhara, had just given up her life in grief and rage. A moment earlier she had cursed the god she worshipped every day: you who have a heart of stone, become a stone. Now the preserver of
Chitragupta Puja on 11 November: chant the Chitragupta mantra (ॐ श्री चित्रगुप्ताय नमः) and the lekhani shloka with meaning. For years, the river goddess Yamuna laid out a meal for a guest who never came. Her brother was Yama, the god of death, and the dead never stop arriving, so he never found a free
Gandhari cursed Krishna because she held him responsible for the Kurukshetra war. After losing all hundred of her sons, she told Krishna that he could have stopped the war but chose not to. She cursed him that in thirty-six years his own clan, the Yadavas, would destroy one another, and that he would die alone
Lord Krishna was killed by a hunter named Jara. Thirty-six years after the Kurukshetra war, after the Yadavas had destroyed one another, Krishna sat in meditation in a forest near Prabhasa. Jara saw his foot from a distance, mistook it for a deer, and shot an arrow into it. Realising what he had done, Jara
Krishna did not marry Radha because their bond was never meant to be a marriage. Krishna left Vrindavan as a boy to kill Kamsa in Mathura and never returned, while Radha stayed behind. In devotional tradition Radha is Krishna’s own energy, his hladini shakti or power of bliss, so they were never two people who
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