Bhagavatham Stories

One morning, Nanda and Yashoda arrived again with a procession smaller but warmer—the household that had raised Krishna came to revisit the boy who had become a city's foundation. Yashoda carried with her a shawl she had woven when Krishna was young, threads dyed with love that only a mother knows how to brew.

Krishna received them not as subjects but as the source—without these hands, these sleepless nights of care, there would be no Dvaraka to defend. He sat with them in a chamber away from state, and they told stories that only parents know: the day he crawled, the first word he spoke, the time he ate mud and she ran in circles between fear and laughter.

Yashoda wept—not in sorrow, but in the luxury of being able to cry beside her son. Nanda held her hand the way husbands do when the word "enough" has been earned. They did not ask for privilege; they asked for presence. Krishna granted them more: he made their visit a festival. The city celebrated the parents of their leader, and in doing so, learned that gratitude moves upward before it spreads outward.

The cowherds from Vrindavan stayed for weeks. They walked Dvaraka's streets and marveled at the stone and order. But they also taught—through their simplicity, through their joy that came from working well rather than owning much, through their conversation that never forgot the person behind the titles.

When they departed, Krishna walked beside their carriage to the city gates. Yashoda blessed him with hands that trembled slightly, the tremor of a mother who has kept vigil through many nights and is learning to trust the day. "The city loves you because you remember us," she said. Krishna bowed—not as ruler to subject, but as student to the ones who taught him first.

Dvaraka understood that morning: the foundation of any order is the family that prepared the one who stands at its center. Humility revisited. Policy updated. And somewhere in the archive, a shawl hung as reminder that the greatest strength is made of threads.