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Mausala Parva · Episode 1 · Chapters 1–4
Young Yadavas dress Krishna's son as a pregnant woman to mock three sages, and the sages say he will give birth to his people's end
In the thirty-sixth year after the war, Yudhishthira watched the world turn against itself.
Dry winds blew, raining grit. Birds circled the wrong way. Great rivers flowed backwards, mist covered every quarter, and meteors fell trailing coals. Each morning the sun rose dim and rayless, crossed by headless shapes. Then news came from Dvaraka. Krishna's own people, the Vrishnis and Andhakas, had killed one another with clubs, and Krishna and Balarama were gone. The Pandavas could not believe it. Krishna's death, the text says, was as unthinkable to them as the ocean running dry.
Janamejaya asks how this could happen to the Yadavas while Krishna looked on, and Vaishampayana goes back to the start.
Three sages came to Dvaraka: Vishvamitra, Kanva and Narada. A group of young Yadava heroes, led by Sarana, decided to have some fun with them. They dressed Krishna's son Samba as a woman, brought him before the sages and asked: this is the wife of Babhru, who longs for a son — you are wise, so tell us, what will she bear?
The sages were not fooled, and their answer holds the whole Mausala Parva in a sentence. Samba, they said, would give birth to an iron pestle — a musala, the heavy club used for pounding grain — for the destruction of the Vrishnis and Andhakas. With it these cruel, arrogant young men would wipe out their whole race, all but Balarama and Krishna. Balarama would leave his body and enter the sea. And a hunter named Jara would pierce Krishna as he lay on the ground.
The sages went to Krishna. He told the Vrishnis only this: what has been said will happen. Then he went back into his house. The lord of the world, the text says, did not wish to make fate otherwise.
The next day Samba gave birth to an iron pestle, huge, like a messenger of death. King Ugrasena, also called Ahuka, had it ground to fine powder and thrown into the sea. A proclamation went through the city: from this day no one among the Vrishnis and Andhakas would brew liquor, and anyone who did would be impaled alive with his family. Out of fear of the king, the city obeyed.
Later retellings join the pieces together: the iron dust washes ashore and grows into the reeds that will kill the Yadavas, and a fish swallows the last lump of iron, which becomes the tip of Jara's arrow. The constituted text makes neither link. The powder simply goes into the sea, and when the time comes the grass is simply there.
Then Time itself walked through Dvaraka. A grim, shaven-headed figure, dark and tawny, looked into the houses of the Vrishnis and was never seen again. Rats overran the streets. Mynas shrieked all night. Donkeys were born to cows, cats to dogs. Worms appeared in cooked food. The Yadavas did wrong without shame, scorned brahmanas, ancestors and gods, and insulted their elders — though not, the text notes, Balarama and Krishna.
Krishna watched and counted. The days of the moon had been cut short, so that the new moon came early, as it had at the time of the Bharata war. The thirty-sixth year had come. What Gandhari, crazed with grief for her sons, had cried out over the battlefield was arriving now. And Krishna, wishing to make her words true, ordered a pilgrimage to the sea.
His discus rose into the sky. His chariot horses carried the chariot off over the ocean while his charioteer Daruka watched. The Yadavas set out for Prabhasa on the coast with their women, with food and drink and meat in great quantity, as if for a festival. Uddhava, who understood, took his leave. The food cooked for brahmanas they mixed with liquor and gave to monkeys.
At Prabhasa the drinking began, with music and dancers, in Krishna's presence. Satyaki, drunk, laughed at Kritavarma: what kshatriya, what warrior, kills men in their sleep as if they were already dead? Pradyumna applauded. Kritavarma answered with Bhurishravas, whom Satyaki had killed after his arm was cut off, while he sat in a vow of fasting to the death. Satyaki reminded Krishna of the old quarrel over the Syamantaka jewel, and Satyabhama went weeping into Krishna's lap. Then Satyaki stood up, swore to avenge the men killed in the night raid, and cut off Kritavarma's head with a sword in front of Krishna.
The Bhojas and Andhakas closed round Satyaki and beat him with the pots they had eaten from. Pradyumna ran in to save him, and both were killed before Krishna's eyes. Krishna snatched up a handful of the eraka grass that grew there, and it became an iron club in his hand. After that, every blade of grass anyone pulled up became a club. Father killed son and son killed father. They fell into it like moths into a flame, and no one thought of running. When Krishna saw Samba dead, and Charudeshna, Pradyumna, Aniruddha, and his brother Gada lying among them, he finished what was left.
Babhru and Daruka found him standing with the club and told him he had killed nearly everyone. It was time to go and find Balarama.
What happens at Prabhasa is the war, a generation late. The quarrel that sets it off is the war's own unsettled accounts — the night raid, the killing of a man seated in a fast — reopened by drink. The Mahabharata does not exempt Krishna's house from the law it applied to the Kurus. It applies it faster, and lets Krishna himself carry it out.
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