The hill Krishna held for seven days

Every year the cowherds of Vraj held a great sacrifice for Indra, king of the gods and lord of the rains. One year a boy asked them why, and could not be given a good answer.

A question nobody could answer

The preparations were already under way — grain gathered, ghee measured, the whole village turned out for it. Krishna, still a boy, went to his father Nanda and asked what the offering was for.

For Indra, Nanda said. He sends the rain. Without the rain there is no grass, without grass no cows, without cows nothing at all.

And Krishna asked the next question, which is the one the story is built on. Where does the rain fall? On Govardhan, the hill at their doorstep. And what holds the water and grows the grass and shelters the herds in the heat? Govardhan. And who walks the cattle up it every morning? They do.

Then let the offering go to the hill and to the cows and to the people who tend them, he said. Not away to a king who has never once been seen here. Give thanks to what actually feeds you.

The village thought about it, and agreed, and carried the whole feast to the foot of the hill.

The storm

Indra took it exactly as badly as a king takes a withdrawn tribute. He sent the Samvartaka clouds — the ones kept for the end of an age — and the rain came down on Vraj in ropes, and hail with it, and wind that flattened everything standing. Within hours the cattle were sinking in mud and the children could not be kept upright.

They came to Krishna, because there was no one else, and he walked to the hill and lifted it.

He raised Govardhan on the little finger of his left hand and held it over the village like an umbrella, and told them to bring the herds in under it. And they did — every cow, every cart, every family — and stood dry underneath while the sky came apart above.

Seven days

He held it for seven days and seven nights without setting it down and without eating.

The detail the tellings always keep is this one: the cowherds, watching him, felt they should help. So they propped their sticks and their staffs up against the underside of the hill and pushed. It did nothing. A hill is not held up by shepherds' sticks. But Krishna let them, and said nothing, and for seven days the village believed it was carrying part of the weight.

On the eighth day the clouds emptied and Indra understood what he had been throwing rain at. He came down and asked to be forgiven, and the hill was set back where it had always been, and the herds walked out from under it.

The Govardhan episode is told in the tenth canto of the Bhagavata Purana and in the Vishnu Purana. It is marked each year as Govardhan Puja, the day after Diwali.