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Skandha 10, adhyayas 16-17 · Saptah day 5
A many-headed serpent poisons a lake of the Yamuna, and a boy jumps in and dances on its hoods until it yields.
There was a deep pool in the Yamuna where nothing lived. A serpent named Kaliya had made it his home, and the poison in his body had turned the water into something that boiled and fumed. Birds flying overhead fell into it. Spray carried by the wind withered the trees on the bank and killed whatever creature it touched. Only a short while before, the cowherd boys and their cows had drunk from that stretch of river on a hot day and dropped dead on the bank, and Krishna had revived them with a glance.
Now he decided to make the water clean. He climbed a tall kadamba tree on the bank, tightened his waistcloth, slapped his arms like a wrestler and jumped. The water of the pool, stirred up by the serpent's venom, rose and spilled over its banks. Krishna began to play in it, swinging his arms and splashing like an elephant, and the noise brought Kaliya up from below.
The serpent struck him in his vital places and wound his coils around him. On the bank the cowherd boys saw Krishna bound and motionless and fell senseless with grief. The cows, the bulls and the calves stood bellowing and staring at the water.
In the village there were omens of three kinds, on the earth, in the sky and in people's own bodies. Knowing Krishna had gone to the forest without Balarama, the whole village ran out, tracing his footprints, marked with the lotus, the flag and the thunderbolt, all the way to the pool. There they saw him wrapped in the serpent's coils, and the boys and the cows lying stricken on the bank. The women wept, his mother among them, and the cowherds were ready to plunge in after him. Only Balarama, who knew what his brother was, stayed calm, and he held them all back.
Krishna, who had been behaving like an ordinary mortal, saw that his whole village was ready to die for him. He swelled his body until the serpent had to let go. Kaliya reared up, hissing, his eyes burning, poison steaming from his nostrils, and Krishna circled him, toying with him the way Garuda would, until the serpent was worn out. Then Krishna pressed down the raised hoods, climbed up onto them and danced.
The gods came down to play drums and sing, and flowers fell. Whenever one of Kaliya's many heads lifted, Krishna stamped it down. Blood came from the serpent's mouths, his body was broken, and at last, the text says, he remembered in his mind the ancient Lord Narayana and took refuge in him.
Then Kaliya's wives came. They put their children in front of them, bowed to the ground, and spoke for their husband. They did not ask Krishna to pretend Kaliya was innocent. They said the punishment itself was grace, because the Lord punishes even the wicked for their own good. They wondered what austerities this serpent could have done in some past life, that he should now wear on his head the dust of feet that Lakshmi herself longs for. And they asked him to forgive his servant this once, since Kaliya did not know who he was.
Krishna let him go. The broken serpent, slowly recovering his breath, said that serpents are born angry by nature and cannot simply discard what they were made; let the Lord do with him as he wished. Krishna told him to leave the river to the cows and the people and to go to the ocean with his family. And he added a reassurance. Kaliya had come here out of fear of Garuda, but now that his heads bore Krishna's footprints, Garuda would not touch him.
Parikshit asked the obvious question: why had Kaliya come there at all? Shuka explained. The serpents had once made a pact with Garuda to leave him an offering each month at the foot of a tree, so that he would not hunt them. Kaliya, proud of his poison, ate Garuda's share himself. Garuda attacked and beat him, and Kaliya fled to the one place Garuda could not follow. Long before, the sage Saubhari had been meditating in that pool when Garuda swooped down and ate a fish there, and the sage, moved by the grief of the other fish, laid a curse: if Garuda ever entered this water again to eat, he would die. Kaliya alone knew this, and that is why he lived there.
The village welcomed Krishna out of the water as if he had come back from the dead. They were too tired to go home, and they slept that night on the riverbank, where a forest fire surrounded them at midnight; Krishna swallowed the fire.
Every enemy Krishna has met in Vraja until now has died at his hands. Kaliya is the first who lives. The serpent is humbled, marked and sent away, and the river is given back to the cows. The Bhagavatam's Krishna, even in combat, is restoring an order rather than winning a fight.
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