Wonder Days

Did you ever wait for something so long that the waiting felt like it might swallow you whole? And then the thing you were waiting for finally arrived — in the most surprising way?

That is how Krishna came into the world.

His mother’s name was Devaki, and she loved him before she ever held him. But a prophecy — a kind of serious prediction — had reached her brother Kansa, a cruel king who was terrified of what it said. It said that Devaki’s eighth child would be his end.

So Kansa locked his own sister in a prison cell. He locked her husband Vasudeva there too. And every child born to them in that dark place — Kansa took.

On the eighth night, the air changed. It was the middle of the monsoon season. Rain hammered the prison walls. Thunder rolled across the sky. The guards fell asleep — every single one, without a sound.

And at midnight, in the deepest dark of the year, a baby boy was born.

He was beautiful. He was calm. He looked up at his father Vasudeva with eyes that seemed to hold the whole sky inside them.

The cell doors swung open on their own.

Vasudeva knew what he had to do. He wrapped the baby against his chest and walked out through the sleeping guards. But the Yamuna River was swollen with monsoon water, wild and dark and fast. Vasudeva stepped in anyway. The water rose to his waist. To his chest. He held the baby higher.

And then — the baby’s foot touched the surface of the river.

The waters parted. Just enough. Vasudeva walked across.

How people celebrate today:

Janmashtami, the birthday of Krishna, is celebrated at midnight — because that is when he arrived.

Temples fill with people who have been fasting all day, waiting just like Devaki waited. The air smells of incense and marigolds and the sweetness of butter, because Krishna famously loved butter as a child.

At the stroke of midnight, a small statue of the baby Krishna is bathed in milk and honey and rosewater, then dressed in bright yellow cloth and tiny ornaments. Conch shells blow. Bells ring.

In many neighborhoods, young men and boys build a human pyramid — climbing up on each other’s shoulders, higher and higher — to reach a clay pot of butter hung high in the air. The crowd below throws water to make the climbers slip. Everyone laughs. When the pot finally breaks, butter and curds rain down and the whole street cheers.

And underneath it all is that feeling: something precious arrived safely in the dark. Something that seemed impossible was carried across impossible water.

And it made it. He made it.