Before the Gita, before Kurukshetra, before the conch shell sounded across the ages - there was a butter-smeared infant laughing in the dark, a mother whose rope was always too short, and a love so vast it disguised itself as mischief. The Butter Thief of Eternity opens the sacred birth and childhood pastimes of Sri Krishna with the intimacy and wonder these lilas have always deserved.

This is bhakti as an open door - warm, living, and wide enough for every heart that has ever called Krishna its own. Whether you come from a lineage of Vaishnavas, whether you discovered the Bhagavad Gita in a moment of quiet searching, or whether you simply sense something ancient and luminous calling you closer, these pages were written for you.

• The night of Krishna's divine birth - the Supreme Lord entering the world in chains, in darkness, in a prison cell, and what that choice reveals about the nature of divine love
• A father's walk into the river - Vasudeva's crossing retold with devotional gravity and wonder
• She who first called him hers - the mother whose claim on Krishna preceded every other
• The demons who came for a baby - and what awaited them
• What Yashoda saw inside his mouth - the breathtaking vision at the heart of Vrindavan's tenderness
• The rope that could not bind him - and the theology of love hidden inside that impossibility
• The serpent in the river, the hill held on one finger - Vrindavan's cowherd boy in his full radiant power
• The flute finds its voice - and the Rasa that followed, and the name Radha, behind every name

Readers drawn to the Bhagavad Gita often find themselves hungry for the Krishna who existed before the battlefield - the laughing child, the mischievous thief of butter and of hearts, the blue boy in a green forest. The Butter Thief of Eternity answers that hunger directly.

Book One of The Ocean of Nectar: A Life of Sri Krishna