Even Brahma, the four-headed creator of the worlds, once decided to test the cowherd boy.

It happened on a bright morning in Vrindavan. Little Krishna had taken the calves and the cowherd boys out to graze on the green riverbanks. They had eaten their lunches of curd and rice, wiped their hands on the grass, and run off laughing after the calves into the woods.

High above, Brahma watched. He had heard the villagers call this child divine, the source of everything — and a small doubt itched in his mind. "Can it really be true?" he wondered. "He looks like any other boy with mud on his feet. Let me see what he is made of."

So Brahma, using his vast power, quietly gathered up every single calf and every single cowherd boy and hid them all in a secret cave, fast asleep. Then he sat back to watch what the little one would do. Surely now the boy would be lost and frightened. Surely now the truth would show.

Krishna came to the riverbank and saw at once that his friends and the calves were gone. He understood exactly who had taken them, and why. A small smile crossed his face.

Then he did something Brahma never expected. Krishna simply became them. He made himself into every missing calf — the same brown coats, the same wet noses. He became every missing boy — the same laughing faces, the same favourite games, the same way each one called for his mother at dusk. He went home as all of them, and not one mother in the whole village noticed anything different. For a whole year, Krishna was every child and every calf in Vrindavan at once.

When Brahma finally returned to check his trick, he looked down — and there were the boys and calves, exactly as before. He hurried to his cave: there too were the boys and calves, still sleeping. There were two of everything.

Brahma's four heads spun. The creator of the universe, who knew so much, found he could not understand this one small boy at all. He floated down, knelt in the dust, and bowed.

"I know all beings," Krishna would say one day on another field. "Past, present, and yet to come. But Me — no one truly knows. Not even the one who made the worlds."