Sudama and Krishna had been students together under the sage Sandipani, in the years before Sudama’s life became what it became and before Krishna’s life became what it became. They had shared the same ashram meals, carried firewood from the same forest, learned from the same teacher. The friendship between them had been simple and complete, the way friendships are when they are formed before either party has anything to defend.
Decades later, Sudama was a brahmin of complete poverty. His family was hungry. His clothes were worn through. He had the spiritual learning and the devotional practice but none of the material conditions that make devotional practice comfortable, and his wife — a practical woman who was hungry and had hungry children and loved her husband — suggested he visit Krishna.
She made a gift: a small cloth bag of beaten rice. Puffed rice, the poorest possible gift. Sudama looked at the bag and was embarrassed. To come to the king of Dwarka with a handful of puffed rice — it seemed worse than coming empty-handed, a poverty announcement rather than a gift.
But he went.
He arrived at Dwarka in his worn clothes, which were even more worn by the journey, and he stood at the gate and said his name and said he had studied with Krishna at Sandipani’s ashram. The message went in and the response came back: bring him immediately.
Krishna met him at the door. He embraced him. This is described in the text with a specificity that makes it real rather than ceremonial: he wept, the tears of genuine reunion, the feeling that people have when they meet someone from before the world they currently inhabit, someone from the time when they were simply themselves rather than what they had become. He brought Sudama inside. He sat him on his own throne. He washed his feet himself.
Sudama had hidden the bag of puffed rice under his worn shawl. He was not going to give it. To give the king of Dwarka a handful of puffed rice was too embarrassing to contemplate even for a man who had come all this way.
Krishna saw the bulge under the shawl. He reached for it. Sudama resisted. Krishna took it gently and opened it.
He took a handful and ate it. ‘This is enough,’ Rukmini said — another handful would give Sudama unlimited wealth and power in this world, and Rukmini placed her hand on Krishna’s to stop after the second handful. The question of exactly what Rukmini meant by ‘enough’ has been discussed and sung by the tradition for two thousand years.
They talked. They remembered Sandipani’s ashram. They recalled their childhood together, the stories only the two of them shared, the particular intimacy of having been boys together before either of them was the person they were now. Nothing was asked. Nothing was promised. They were just two old friends talking.
Sudama left without asking for anything. He had not been able to ask. He had sat with Krishna and remembered what friendship actually is and asking had seemed beside the point.
He arrived home and could not recognize his house. His small, broken house was gone. In its place stood a palace with gardens. His wife came out in silk, radiant, and his children ran to him. He stood looking at all of it — the consequence of two handfuls of puffed rice given in genuine friendship — and he understood something about the nature of what he had gone to give and what he had given.
He had not brought a gift. He had brought a friendship. And the friendship had done what friendships with the divine have always done: it had given back more than was given, not because the divine is obligated but because genuine love always does.