Citraketu — whose son was taken

A king paid for one laugh with a birth among demons — and he had no complaint about it

Citraketu — whose son was taken is chapter 4 of Bhagavata Devotees. Source: Bhagavata Purana. It is told in 4 scenes — The man who had everything but one thing; Poison; In the sky; The curse — followed by 10 quiz questions.

The man who had everything but one thing

Citraketu was emperor of Shurasena. He had ten million queens, a kingdom brimming with wealth and grain, and not a single child. In all that crowded palace, the emptiest place was the one where a child's laughter should have been.

One day the sage Angiras came. He arranged for the senior queen, Kritadyuti, to have a son — but as he left he said, "This son will bring you joy, and he will bring you grief."

The king did not understand then what that meant. He only kept looking at his son.

Poison

The other queens burned with jealousy; all the king's fondness was now for that one child. One day they poisoned the infant.

The baby died. The court wailed, and Citraketu broke.

Then Angiras returned, this time with Narada. To teach the king, Narada called back the child's departed soul for a little while and let it speak.

"In my many lives I have had so many mothers and fathers," the soul said. "Whom do you mean? I have belonged to everyone, and to no one."

Then it was gone. And Citraketu's grief broke open into understanding.

In the sky

Narada initiated Citraketu into a sacred teaching centred on Sankarshana — a hymn of praise to him. Citraketu practised it and in seven days became lord of the Vidyadharas — radiant, flying through the sky, master of mantras. He became a true devotee too, freed from the weight of his crown.

One day, in his gleaming aerial chariot, he was flying over Mount Kailasa. Below, he saw Shiva seated in an assembly of sages with Parvati on his lap and an arm around her.

Citraketu burst out laughing. "He teaches the whole world dharma, and here he sits before a full assembly clinging to his wife like any ordinary man?"

The curse

Parvati was stung. "You mocked us," she said. "Go — be born among the asuras."

Citraketu neither pleaded nor raged. He climbed down from his chariot, bowed, and said, "Curse and blessing are all one to me. Whatever the cause of this body, God alone is my refuge. I accept."

Then Shiva said to Parvati, "See — this is what a devotee is like. See how he stands."

Citraketu was born as Vritra. And the Bhagavata says that on the battlefield Vritra fought like the greatest of devotees — speaking of God even as he died.

Note: Citraketu's story is in the sixth canto of the Bhagavata Purana (chapters 14–17). The other half of Vritra — the war with Indra — is in a very old Vedic layer of the Rigveda too, where Vritra is only an enemy with no backstory; and in some Mahabharata Vritra accounts his killing is tied to the sin of brahmin-killing. The Citraketu frame — a devotee born as the demon — is the Bhagavata's own. One modern literary reading sees the Bhagavata as reinterpreting the old Vedic Vritra myth inside a new devotional story; that is a modern interpretation, not the Bhagavata's own claim. Do not read the curse scene as "Parvati the villain" — the text keeps both right: a goddess stung on a point of propriety, and a devotee the curse cannot reach; Shiva takes no one's side.

Source: from the Bhagavata Purana, Citraketu — whose son was taken