The friend who walked to Dwarka with a handful of beaten rice and asked for nothing

Two boys and a load of firewood

At Sandipani's ashram in Avantipura the students sat on the same mats, ate the same food and were sent on the same errands, and nobody there was anybody's servant. Two of the boys became friends in the ordinary way. One was dark and quick and came from a herding family in Vraja. The other was a brahmin boy from a poor house, thin, careful, good at learning things by heart.

One afternoon the guru's wife sent the two of them into the forest for firewood. They were still gathering when the sky shut and the storm came down, rain in sheets, lightning, the low ground filling with water. The paths went under. The boys could not find the way back and did not try after a while. They held on to each other's hands and walked through the dark and the cold, and called out, and heard nothing.

At sunrise Sandipani himself came out searching and found them, wet through, still holding on. He said that a student who suffers for his teacher's household will not go wanting afterwards, and blessed them both.

The brahmin boy kept the blessing. What he kept better was the hand in the dark.

Then the years at the ashram ended, as they end, and the boys went home to their separate lives. The dark one went to Mathura, and from Mathura to Dwarka, and became a king with a city on the sea.

The house where nothing came in

The brahmin went back to his village and took a vow that made his life hard. He would accept what came to him unasked, and he would not solicit. Nothing much came.

He grew old in that house. His clothes went from thin to patched to rags. There were children. Some days there was food and some days there was water and salt and the day was got through. His wife, whom the tellers call Susheela, never once said that she was hungry, which was the thing he found hardest.

She came to him one morning shaking with cold and said what she had been carrying for years.

Your friend, she said, is lord of the Yadavas now. He loves brahmins. He is not a man who forgets. He sat beside you on the same mat. Go to him.

He did not want money. But he thought that the sight of his friend was worth any road, and that a man does not refuse his wife the one thing she has ever asked, so he said yes. Then he said the other thing that was on his mind, which was that he could not walk into a friend's house with his hands hanging empty.

She went out around the neighbours and came back with four fistfuls of poha, beaten rice, a little grey, a little broken, and she tied it into a torn corner of her own worn sari. He carried it the whole way like a man carrying something that was not his, because it was not. She had gone from door to door for it that morning.

The road to Dwarka

He walked for days. When Dwarka came up out of the sea, he stood and looked at it for a long time: the water on three sides, the gardens, the gates, houses with coral and gold on them, gates within gates.

He went in with a crowd of brahmins, past three sets of guards who did not stop him, and came at last to the inner apartments, where Krishna was sitting on the couch in Rukmini's rooms. An old man in rags stood in that doorway with dust to his knees and a knot of cloth under his arm.

Krishna saw him from across the room and got up.

He came off the seat and crossed the floor and put both arms round the man in the rags and held on, and could not speak, and wept, and the tears went down onto the brahmin's shoulder. Then he took him by the hand, sat him on the bed he had just risen from, brought water in a vessel with his own hands, washed the dusty feet and put the water on his own head. He rubbed sandal paste on his arms. He picked up the fan.

Rukmini took the yak-tail fan from him and fanned the old man herself.

The women of the palace stood at the edges of the room and looked at the man on the bed, and at the queen fanning him, and could not make it come out right. He owns nothing, they said quietly to one another. He has no beauty, no learning that shows, nothing on him but rags. And he is being served here like the lord of the three worlds.

They talked for most of the night, the two of them, about Sandipani and the guru's wife and the firewood and the storm. Krishna asked whether he had married and whether his wife was of the same mind as himself, and said that he knew a contented man when he saw one.

What have you brought for me

Then Krishna laughed and asked him what he had brought from home.

Anything given to me with love, he said, a leaf, a flower, a fruit, a little water, I take, and it fills me. Everything a man gives without love leaves me hungry.

The bundle stayed where it was, under the old man's arm. He looked at the floor. He had come to see his friend. His wife had sent him to ask for money. He was sitting on a bed in a house with jewelled floors, holding four fistfuls of borrowed beaten rice tied in a piece of a torn sari, and his hand would not move.

Krishna already knew what was in the cloth, and knew why he had come, and knew that he was not going to ask. So he reached across and put his hand into the folds of the tattered upper cloth and pulled the knot out himself.

What is this, he said. What have you been hiding from me. You have brought me something wonderful.

He undid the knot on his lap. Beaten rice, grey, broken, four fistfuls of it.

This will satisfy me, he said, and the whole world with me. He took a handful and ate it.

Rukmini's hand

As his hand went out a second time, Rukmini caught his wrist.

That is enough, she said. And what she said after the stopping is the part worth sitting with. This much is enough to give him every abundance in this world, and in the one that comes after.

She was not the wife of the house grudging a poor man his meal. She is Sri. The fortune of the world was sitting on that couch watching her husband hand her out by the fistful to a man who had not asked for anything. One handful had already gone out over a hut in a village hundreds of miles away, and gone on past it, over whatever lies beyond this life. That was the whole of it. There was no second kind of wealth left to give. What remained was Krishna himself, and Krishna is not his own alone to give away. The one who said stop was the one being given.

So it was not thrift and it was not a rebuke. She held his wrist the way you hold the wrist of someone whose giving has run out past the edge of what he owns.

The brahmin saw a queen take her husband's hand and had no idea what he was looking at. He was simply glad that his poor food had been eaten, and that nobody had laughed.

The road home

He slept there, and in the morning Krishna walked a little way along the road with him and turned back.

Nothing had been given. No question had been asked and no answer offered, and Sudama went home in the same rags with the empty cloth folded up small.

He was not unhappy, and this is the strange middle of the story. He kept turning it over the whole way. The arms round him in the doorway. The water on his feet. The queen with the fan. A king who sat up half a night to talk about a night of rain forty years ago.

He did not give me riches, the old man thought, and then he thought that this was deliberate, and kind. A poor man who is handed a fortune forgets very quickly who he was and who gave it to him. He kept me poor so that I would keep thinking of him.

The other thing he could not get to the bottom of at all. The asking had been the entire plan. His wife's face when she handed over the bundle had been the entire plan. He had walked the whole distance with the sentence ready in his mouth and walked the whole distance back without saying it, and he could not find the moment where he had decided not to. There had been no moment. There had been no decision.

The house he came back to

Where his hut had stood there was no hut.

He stopped at the edge of his own village and thought he had walked into the wrong place. Gardens. Water tanks with lotuses on them and birds coming down. Courtyards. A house that threw the morning light back at him. Some great man has settled here, he thought, standing in the road in his rags, and then he stood there a while longer because the road was his road and the trees were the trees he knew.

Then the doors opened and people came out to meet him, and his wife came out of that house. She was in clean clothes with attendants behind her and she was weeping, and she came across the courtyard and did not stop until she reached the old man standing in the dust.

He went in with her. He lived there for the rest of his life, and the text takes care to say how he lived in it, which was as a man staying somewhere rather than as a man who owns a house. He knew exactly where it had come from. He had asked for none of it. He had never once said the sentence.

A note on the names

The verses do not name him. The Bhagavata calls him a brahmin friend of Krishna's from the days at Sandipani's ashram and leaves it there, and it does not name his wife either. The chapter headings are another matter: Tagare's translation and the wisdomlib text both head these chapters with the name Sridaman, so a reader who goes to the source will meet it there. Sudama and Susheela come from the retellings. In Kerala he is Kuchela, the man in rags, and the story is sung as Kuchelavrittam, a boat song by Ramapurathu Warrier that Malayali households have known by heart for close to three centuries.

Two small differences are worth knowing. The telling above follows the Sanskrit, where Krishna eats one handful and Rukmini takes his wrist as his hand goes out for the second. Most people who know this story know it with two handfuls eaten, wealth here and wealth hereafter, and the queen stopping the third. That count comes from the commentators and from the way the story is sung and spoken aloud rather than from the verses. And there is a much loved episode, told in villages everywhere, in which the two boys are given parched grain to share in the forest and the brahmin eats all of it while Krishna sleeps, and his poverty is traced back to that. It is a good story. It is not in the Bhagavata, which gives no reason at all for the poverty and does not seem to want one.

Sources

• Bhagavata Purana, Canto 10, chapters 80-81 (the poor brahmin friend of Krishna; the offering of prithuka at Dwarka, with 10.81.4 on what Krishna accepts and 10.81.9-10 on the handful and Rukmini stopping his hand)
• Bhagavata Purana, Canto 10, chapter 45 (Krishna and Balarama as students at Sandipani's ashram in Avantipura)
• Kuchelavrittam Vanchippattu by Ramapurathu Warrier, the eighteenth-century Malayalam boat song that carries the Kerala form of this story.