Narakāsura had taken a great deal that was not his, and the last of it was a pair of earrings belonging to the mother of the gods.
So Kṛṣṇa went to get them back. And he did not go alone.
Satyabhāmā went with him, onto the field, which queens in these stories generally do not.
There was a reason. Naraka had a protection on him — he could not be brought down by Kṛṣṇa. Nobody had thought to include Kṛṣṇa's wife.
It was her hand at the end. The tellings are firm about that, and it is the part most people have never been told.
Then they went into his house, and found sixteen thousand women being kept there who did not want to be.
They were let out. And then there was the question nobody wants in a story — where sixteen thousand women were supposed to go, in a world that would not take them back. Kṛṣṇa married all of them, which was not romance. It was a roof.
And Naraka was somebody's son. His mother is the earth, and she was there, and she asked for his boy to be left alone, and she was listened to.
Then he asked for something himself, at the end, which is the strangest request in the whole festival: that when people remembered this day — the fourteenth, the chaturdaśī — they should not remember it as the day he lost. They should light lamps and be glad.
His city had been ringed with hills and water and fire and a net of nooses, and all of it had to come apart before anyone could even see him. She stood in the same chariot for the whole of it.
Everyone remembers the lamps. Almost nobody remembers that the man they are for asked for them himself, on the worst day of his life.