King Nriga, an ancestor of the Yadava lineage that would later include Krishna, was renowned throughout his reign for extraordinary generosity, regularly donating enormous numbers of cows to deserving Brahmins as acts of charity and religious merit, maintaining meticulous records of who had received what to avoid any confusion in an administration built substantially around exactly this kind of ritual giving.
One cow, given twice by mistake
The trouble began when a single cow that Nriga had already gifted to one Brahmin wandered back into the royal herd, unrecognized among the vast numbers of animals the king maintained, and was subsequently gifted a second time to a different Brahmin without anyone realizing the animal had already changed hands once before. Both Brahmins, unaware of each other’s claim, took the cow as their own property, and when the mix-up eventually surfaced, both men approached Nriga separately, each insisting the cow belonged to him by virtue of the king’s own gift.
A king who couldn’t fix his own mistake
Nriga, mortified at the error and genuinely wanting to make it right, offered both Brahmins compensation – additional cows, wealth, whatever would satisfy their claim – but each, in the specific telling most commonly repeated, refused to relinquish what he considered rightfully his own gifted animal, unmoved by the king’s attempts at restitution. The dispute went unresolved during Nriga’s lifetime, the cow’s ownership never cleanly settled despite the king’s genuine efforts to correct an honest administrative error.
A curse for a mistake, not a crime
After Nriga’s death, the unresolved dispute followed him regardless: because of the improperly re-gifted cow, he was cursed to be reborn as a lizard, trapped inside a deep well for an extended period, his considerable reputation for justice and charity throughout his actual reign apparently insufficient to outweigh this single unresolved administrative failure involving something as ordinary as livestock recordkeeping.
Krishna’s arrival at the well
The lizard-king’s release finally came generations later, when Krishna, traveling with his cowherd companions, discovered the massive lizard trapped at the bottom of an old well and pulled it free with his own hands. The moment of Krishna’s touch broke the curse entirely, restoring Nriga to his original divine radiance before he passed peacefully into liberation, having finally received release through direct contact with an avatar of Vishnu himself.
A lesson about the smallness of what actually counts
Nriga’s story is frequently cited within the tradition as a caution against assuming that overall good character or an otherwise admirable life record exempts a person from the specific consequences of individual actions, however minor or unintentional they might seem at the time. A king remembered for generosity spent an unspecified but clearly lengthy stretch of existence as a lizard in a well over one recordkeeping error involving a single cow – proof, in this telling, that the moral ledger the Puranas describe is considerably more exacting than reputation alone would suggest.