The crack in the butter pot ran from the rim to the middle, shaped like a small river. Yashoda maiya had noticed it three days ago and said nothing.

Every evening now, the calves went missing from their pegs before the sun had even started leaving. Nobody untied them. Nobody saw who did. But somehow, the moment Yashoda sat down to churn the morning’s curd, a calf would start crying for its mother in the far shed, and every woman in the house would drop what she was doing to go and settle it.

By the time Yashoda came back, the churning pot would be half empty and there would be a small handprint on the rim, fingers spread wide, thumb pressed in deep.

“Krishna,” she would call, hands on her hips, “did you go near my curd again?”

And from behind the pillar, a voice thick with fake sleep would answer, “I was sleeping, Maiya. Ask Balaram.”

Balaram, three feet away, eating a piece of jaggery he had definitely not asked for, would nod without looking up.

It was the laugh that gave him away every time. Krishna could hold a straight face through almost anything — a scolding, a threat to tell his father, even Yashoda’s finger wagging an inch from his nose. But the moment she turned to check the pot and found it truly empty, a laugh would burst out of him before he could catch it, high and helpless, and he’d clap both hands over his mouth like that would take it back.

The monkeys of Vrindavan had learned his timings better than the cowherds had. They sat along the low wall behind the kitchen every morning, waiting. Krishna would climb onto an upturned mortar, reach into the hanging pot with both hands, eat one fistful himself, and pass the next straight up to the branches without looking, the way you’d hand something to someone you trusted completely.

“You give it to monkeys,” Yashoda said one morning, only half-cross, “before you give it to your own mother?”

“They don’t have a Yashoda maiya to steal it for them,” Krishna said, and went back to eating.

There was the day the pot hung too high even for the mortar-stool, and he’d stood beneath it stretching his arm until his shoulder shook, and when it still wouldn’t come down he’d picked up a stone and thrown it — not in temper, but the way you throw a last question at a locked door. The pot cracked. Curd ran down the rope and onto the floor in a long white line, and for one second Krishna looked at what he’d done with his eyes very wide, as if he too were seeing it for the first time.

Then Rohini’s little son came running to tattle, and Krishna was gone through the back door before Yashoda had even picked up her stick.

She found him an hour later at Sharda’s house next door, sitting on the doorstep, refusing to leave until Sharda gave him a piece of her sun-dried mathri, arms crossed, lower lip pushed out so far a bird could have perched on it. When Sharda laughed and gave in, he ate the mathri in three bites and immediately forgot he had ever been upset.

That night, Yashoda sat with the cracked pot in her lap, running her thumb along the broken rim. She thought of everything he had done that week — the calves let loose at the wrong hour, the curd gone before she could turn around, the monkeys fed before her own son, the pot in pieces, the tantrum at the neighbour’s door.

If it had been any other child, she would have called it naughtiness and left it there.

But she kept thinking of his hand stretched up to the monkeys, giving before eating. She kept thinking of the laugh he couldn’t hold back, as if joy simply would not stay hidden in him, however hard he tried.

She did not mend the pot with a new rope in the morning. She left the crack exactly as it was, tied a fresh rope through it anyway, and hung it back at the same height as before — just low enough now for a small boy’s hand to reach.