Bhagavatam · The Bhramar Geet

On the bank of the Ganga the afternoon had already thinned to gold. Parikshit sat a while inside his own silence, then turned to the sage Shukadeva. “Bhagavan, yesterday you told how Akrura’s chariot rolled out of Gokul and left the gopis standing in its dust. One thing has stayed lodged in me ever since. Krishna reached Mathura, struck Kamsa down, freed his imprisoned parents, and set old Ugrasena back on the throne. Every task was accomplished. But the cowherd women who stayed behind, who held no rite and no shastra, who had not even a single word promising their return, what became of them? Did the Lord forget them? And if he did not forget them, then as they burned in the fire of that separation, what support ever reached their hands?”

A faint light moved across Shukadeva’s lips. “Rajan, Shri Hari had forgotten nothing. He sent the dearest and the most clear-sighted of all his friends, certain that a few words of knowledge would draw the fever out of those women. What happened in Vraja instead, neither that messenger of Krishna’s had foreseen, nor perhaps had anyone under the sky. Listen.”

In the court of Mathura, among the Vrishnis, there was a man before whose intellect the proudest heads bent. His name was Uddhava. He was a direct disciple of Brihaspati, preceptor of the gods, and the finest mind of his line, and he was Krishna’s beloved friend. His body was such that a stranger seeing him from a distance would stop where he stood, for the arms that hung to his knees, the eyes like lotuses newly opened, the yellow silk at his waist, all of it echoed Krishna so nearly that the eye could be forgiven the mistake.

One day Krishna took Uddhava’s hand into his own. This was his way with a devotee who belonged to him entirely, to hold the hand while he spoke. “Gentle Uddhava,” he said, “go to Vraja. My father Nanda and my mother Yashoda are there. Bring them joy. And those gopis, who are sick with the sickness of my absence, carry my message to them and lift that pain away. Their minds rest on me through the night and through the day. For my sake they have set aside husband and son and every claim a life is built on. They have let their own good in this world and the next fall from their hands for me. I am the very breath in them, Uddhava. I told them I would come. That one word is the ledge their breathing hangs from.”

With deep respect Uddhava received his master’s message, mounted the chariot, and turned it toward Nandgaon. His heart carried contentment, and under the contentment a thread of pride, for he knew the truth of what Krishna was, and he believed that a little teaching of the atman would loosen the delusion of these simple cowherd women and set them free.

His chariot came into Vraja at the hour the sun goes down. Just then the cows were turning home from the forest, and their hooves lifted so much dust that the chariot all but vanished inside it. Bulls in rut shouldered and fought one another over the cows, and their bellowing rolled across the whole of Vraja. Cows heavy under the weight of their udders ran to their calves. From the courtyard of every house came the rhythmic sound of milking, and threaded through it, from somewhere far off, the call of a flute. Uddhava saw that in each home the fire had been fed, the guest honored, the sun and the ancestors and the gods worshiped, that incense hung in the air and the lamps were already lit. Past groves in full flower, where black bees hummed and lotus ponds carried their swans, between houses dressed with garlands, he stepped down at the door of Krishna’s father.

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Nanda Baba was so glad at the sight of Uddhava that he rose and folded him into his arms as though Krishna himself had walked in at the door. He had milk-rice sweetened with sugar set before him, had the tired feet pressed, and then, drawing him close, began to ask his questions. “Most fortunate Uddhava ji, our friend Vasudeva is free of Kamsa’s prison at last, and his kinsmen are gathered around him. Is all well with them?”

Then the old man drew a breath, and his voice dropped low. “Does Krishna ever remember us, out there? He is our boy. All this Vraja that holds him as its whole treasure, these cows, this Vrindavan, this Giriraj, does he ever call any of it to mind?”

Nanda went on, and as he spoke, one deed after another rose and turned before his eyes. “Uddhava ji, how wide his heart has always been. In the wildfire, in the black storm and the drowning rain, in the charge of the bull-demon Arishta, in the coils of the python that once swallowed me whole, again and again he reached in and pulled us out. As lightly as a child at play he finished the wicked Kamsa, who carried the strength of ten thousand elephants, and his two unbeaten wrestlers Chanura and Mushtika, and the rutting palace elephant Kuvalayapida, the way a lion goes through a herd. He caught up Kamsa’s great bow, three tala in length, and snapped it as an elephant snaps a stalk of sugarcane. And Giriraj he lifted on a single hand and held aloft seven whole days. Pralamba, Dhenuka, Trinavarta, Baka, demons who had beaten back the gods themselves, he and Balarama undid here in this very Vraja, as if it were sport. The sage Garga told us long ago that these two were divinity come down for some great work of heaven, and I have believed him ever since.” As he spoke his throat closed on him. The love in him rose so high that speech went out of him and he fell silent.

Yashoda sat close beside him, taking in every word. At the naming of each of Krishna’s deeds the tears ran from her eyes, and the old mother-love rose in her until milk began to seep from her breasts. She said nothing at all. She only listened, and stayed wet with her weeping.

Watching the two of them, Uddhava was struck still. What manner of love was this, that spilled itself as milk where words failed. He joined his palms. “Honored ones, of all who wear a body on this earth, you two are the most blessed. Toward the one who is the maker of everything that moves and everything that stands still, this pure parent-love has risen in your hearts. Understand who your son is. Balarama and Krishna are the stuff the universe is made of and the hand that shapes it, both at once. They are the Person and the primordial Nature, and entering into every living form they hold its very awareness in place. Fix even a scattered mind on Krishna for the space of a single breath at the hour of death, and the whole weight of one’s karma burns away and the highest state is won. He is not your son alone. He is the son, and the Self, and the father, and the mother, and the ruler of all that is. Nothing you have seen or heard of, nothing gone or here or still to come, has any standing of its own apart from him, for he alone is, and he alone is real. In a very few days he will come to Vraja and gladden you, his mother and his father. Do not grieve. As fire lies hidden and awake through every stick of wood, so is he seated forever in the heart of every being.” Talking on in this way, the two of them let the whole night pass.

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Some of the night was still left when the gopis rose. They lit their lamps, made their worship to the gods of the household at the swept thresholds of their homes, cleaned the courtyards, and sat down to churn the curd. As they hauled the churning ropes their bangles rang, and the necklaces at their throats and the rings in their ears swung with the motion, their cheeks bright with earrings and their faces touched with red saffron. Into the steady beat of the churning one of them lifted a song of Krishna’s shining deeds, and the rest slid into the same key. That song, braided with the sound of the churning, rose until its topmost notes touched the sky and rubbed the ill fortune out of all four quarters of the world.

Dawn came. The sun climbed. Just then the cowherd women caught sight of a chariot plated with gold standing at Nanda Baba’s door. They began to ask one another whose it could be. “Is it Akrura come again,” said one, “the man who did Kamsa’s errand and carried our dark, lovely Shyamasundara off to Mathura?” Another answered in a choked voice, “Has he come now to drag us away and make us the offering at the funeral rites of his dead master Kamsa? What else could bring him back to us?” They were still talking in this vein when Uddhava, his morning bath and prayers at the Yamuna behind him, came out to them.

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Arms long enough to brush his knees, eyes as soft as petals just unfolded, yellow silk, a garland of lotuses at his throat, jeweled rings in his ears, and a face in open bloom. The gopis stopped and looked. Then they murmured among themselves. “This one is beautiful to see. But who is he? Where has he come from? Whose messenger? And why has he dressed himself so exactly in Krishna’s fashion?” Hungry to know him, many of the cowherd women drew in and stood around this friend of Krishna’s on every side.

When it became clear that this was the message-bearer of the Lord who is Lakshmi’s own, they bowed with modesty, smiled a shy smile, seated him apart on a mat, and began. “Uddhava ji, we know you for an attendant of the Lord of the Yadus, come here bearing his word. Your master must have sent you to comfort his mother and his father. As for us, we no longer hold anything in this Nandgaon that could be worth his remembering. The love a child owes a mother and a father even the greatest rishis cannot cut away. But the show of love that is struck up with anyone else runs on self-interest and nothing more. The bee’s love for the flower and a man’s love for a woman are that kind of bargain. The harlot leaves the lover once his money is gone; the people abandon a king who cannot protect them; the student, once he has what he came for, walks away from his teacher; the priests leave the patron the moment the fee is paid; birds desert the tree whose fruit is finished; the guest forgets the house the instant his meal is eaten. Every one of these keeps faith only as long as it is fed.”

The knowledge weighing on Uddhava’s tongue stopped there, before it could leave his lips. The minds and the voices and the bodies of these women were sunk wholly in Krishna. Talking with Krishna’s messenger, they lost all track of what was being said and to whom. Remembering one lila after another, from his infancy up through his boyhood, they began to sing, and, forgetting themselves entirely, forgetting even the modesty a woman is born wearing, they broke into open weeping.

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Among them was one gopi whom, in that hour, some old lila of union with Krishna had closed around like water. Her eyes were shut, her mind was somewhere far. Just then a black bee came humming and settled near her, and began to circle at her feet. Through half-open eyes she watched it, and something inside her came to a boil. She decided that this bee was no ordinary bee, that Krishna had made it his messenger and sent it, knowing her to be sulking and meaning to coax her back. And so she began to speak to it, half her words love and half of them reproach.

“Bee, you are the friend of that cheat, and so you are a cheat yourself. Keep away from our feet. Do not bow those false little bows and wheedle at us. We can see it plainly. That yellow kumkum on your whiskers came off Krishna’s garland, the garland he crushed against the breasts of our rivals in Mathura. You yourself love no single flower; you drift from this one to that one. As the master, so the servant. That kumkum-smeared favor, the kind of trophy the whole assembly of the Yadus would only laugh at, keep it for yourself. Why carry it here to us? Take his praises instead to those proud city women whose hearts he has soothed, and let them pay you what you are after.”

The bee went on hovering, as if it had something of its own to say. Her voice sharpened, and under the sharpness lay a wet, unhealed ache. “Bee, one time, only the one time, we let him drink that small draught of our charm and the heady wine of our lips, and then he left us, trusting fools that we were, and went off to that city. I cannot think how the delicate Lakshmi keeps at the service of his feet, unless she too has swallowed the smooth, buttered talk of that dandy Krishna and can no longer see straight. The great ones sing him by the name Uttamashloka, the one of highest fame. But the name only means something on the day he shows some mercy to the wretched. Withhold that, and the name is left a lie.”

“Do not lay your head down on my foot. I know how practiced you are at pleading and at begging pardon, for you learned every trick of it from your master. But be clear, none of it will cook here. For his sake we gave up our husbands, our children, our very good in the world to come, and he proved so hollow that he simply walked away and left us standing. And it is an old habit with these dark-skinned lords. As Rama he shot Vali dead from cover, without warning, giving him no open fight. He took a blade to a woman who came to him wanting only him, and sent her away disfigured. He accepted Bali’s gift of three paces of earth and then bound the giver hand and foot. Enough, then, of loving anyone of that dark color. And here is the whole of our helplessness, that the treasure of his story is the one thing we cannot make ourselves put down. So tell me, what treaty are we to sign with a man so ungrateful? Do you still stand there and say he is to be trusted?”

For a moment she stopped. The bee lifted off, settled on a leaf, then came back to her. Something else had risen into her eyes now, the fire that would not go out under the ash of her anger. “You ask why, if all this is true, we go on speaking of him. We will tell you the truth. Once a person has the taste of him, they cannot leave it alone. Let a single drop of the nectar of Krishna’s lila fall on the tongue, and likes and dislikes, pleasures and griefs, all of it drops away. Men have walked out of their houses and their families for it and taken to the road with nothing, free and wandering as birds. We were the trusting does who believed the sweet piping of that hunter, and again and again we ran straight into the same snare. So, messenger of Krishna, say nothing more on this matter. If you must speak, speak of something else.”

Her voice had begun to shake. “Dear bee, does he ever, in among the people of Mathura, let fall so much as a word about us, his serving-women? Will he ever lay that arm, fragrant as aloewood, upon our heads? Will one such blessed hour ever find its way into our lives?” She said that much and fell silent. The bee hummed on, and the cowherd women seated all around her went on sobbing.

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Uddhava took all of it in. The knowledge he had come here to hand out stayed lodged inside him, undelivered. He had spent a lifetime over the shastras, had sat in samadhi, had heard the truth from Krishna’s own mouth. But the thing pouring past him now stands written in no shastra. In the separation of this one cowherd woman, quarreling with a bee that could not answer, he saw the very thing the yogis run after birth upon birth.

Slowly then, with great respect, he gave them Krishna’s message. “Gopis, of all women you are the most fortunate. That devotion to the Lord which the greatest sages cannot reach through charity, through vows, through austerity, through the fire-offering and the study of the Vedas and the muttered prayer and the mastery of the senses, you have won by separation alone. And in letting me stand here and watch such love with my own eyes, you have given me a gift.” Then he repeated what Krishna had charged him to say. “The Lord says this. Between you and me there can be no separation at any time. As the five elements, sky and air and fire and water and earth, stand present inside every created thing, so do I stand within the mind, the breath, the senses, within all of it. I am kept far from your eyes for one reason only, that your minds should hold to me without a break. A woman’s mind reaches for the beloved gone to a far country far past the way it reaches for the one seated in front of her. Think of me without pause, give me the whole of your mind swept clean of every other thing, and you will come to me, and it will not be long. Every road the wise ones walk, the Vedas, the eight steps of yoga, the reckonings of Sankhya, renunciation, hard penance, the reining of the senses, all of them run down to one sea, and that sea is the gathered and quieted mind. What you already hold, they are still climbing toward.”

For a while the message only opened the wound wider, and the women poured out everything at once. Did he still speak of them there among the city women. Would he ever come and pour life back into them the way the rain-clouds pour it back into a forest burned brown by summer. The river Yamuna, the Govardhana hill, the woods, the cows, the flute-notes carried on the wind, every one of them threw his footprint back into their faces, so how were they ever to forget him. Even Pingala, they remembered, that woman of the old story, had found her one night of peace only when she gave up all hope, and they knew the truth of it, and still their hope of him would not lie down and die. “Lord, protector of the cows, saver of Vraja, ender of our pain, lift this Gokul out of the sea of grief it lies drowning in.” And then, slowly, the message did its quieter work, and the ache of their separation began to settle. They understood that their Shyamasundara is the Self within everything, is present everywhere, is nowhere truly far from them, and with great love and honor they took up the welcome of Uddhava, seeing in him now almost Krishna himself.

Uddhava stayed on in Vraja some months. To draw the fever out of the gopis he told the people of Vraja Krishna’s lilas, one after another, and kept them glad. For as long as he stayed the talk never left Krishna, and to the people of Vraja it seemed as if a single instant had gone by. He would go down to the riverbank, or up into the folds of Giriraj, and at each place he would ask which lila Krishna had performed there, and so drown everyone all over again in the memory of him.

But within himself the man had changed. The courtier who had driven in wearing the pride of his learning now ached to lift the dust of these forest women’s feet onto his own head. When the day came to leave, he asked his leave of the gopis and of Yashoda and Nanda, and the household came out to the chariot with tears standing in their eyes and their hands full of gifts for Krishna and Balarama, praying only that wherever their own lives might be carried, their love would stay fixed on Krishna’s feet. Standing at the border of Vraja, Uddhava joined his palms, bowed to the cowherd women, and sang inside his own heart. “To wear a human body on this earth as these women wear it is the one life that comes to anything. This is the highest reach of love, and even now the greatest of sages go on longing for it. This is the path the very Upanishads strain after and still fall short of. Let this be my one prayer, that in this holy ground of Vrindavan I be born some bush, some creeping vine, some blade of herb, so that the dust of these cowherd women’s feet may keep falling on me without end. I bow, and bow again, to the dust of the feet of the women of Nanda’s Vraja, whose singing of Krishna washes the three worlds clean.” Then he turned the chariot back toward Mathura, and there he fell at Krishna’s feet and laid before him the whole depth of what Vraja carried in its heart, and put Nanda’s gifts into the hands of Krishna and Vasudeva and Balarama and the king Ugrasena.