Bhagavatam · The Bhramar Geet

In the court of Mathura, among the princes of the Vrishni clan, there was a man before whose mind the proudest heads went quiet. His name was Uddhava. He had studied under Brihaspati, the sage who tutors the gods themselves, and had come away the finest thing that school ever made; Krishna kept him as counselor and loved him as a friend beyond all the rest. Nature had shaped him from Krishna’s own drawing: arms that hung to his knees, eyes like lotuses on the first morning they open, yellow silk at the waist. A stranger seeing him across a field would stop where he stood, certain for one suspended breath that he was looking at Krishna.

One day Krishna took Uddhava’s hand and held it in both of his own. That was his way with someone who belonged to him entirely, to keep hold of the hand while he asked for something. “Gentle Uddhava, go to Vraja for me. Vasudeva and Devaki gave me my birth, in chains, in Kamsa’s prison; Nanda and Yashoda gave me everything after it, the lap, the milk, the first years under those trees. They are my father and my mother, and they are grieving. Bring them joy. And the gopis, who are sick with the sickness of my absence, carry my message to them and draw that pain out. 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. I am the breath in them, Uddhava. I told them once that I would come. That one sentence is what they have been living on.”

Uddhava received the charge with a bow, mounted the chariot, and turned the horses toward Nandgaon, Nanda’s village at the heart of Vraja. He rode content, and under the contentment ran a fine thread of pride. He knew what Krishna was, knew it the way a jeweler knows stone; and he expected that a little teaching about the atman, the self that stands outside all coming and going, would lift the delusion from these simple herdswomen and set them free.

His chariot came into Vraja at the hour the sun goes down, and Vraja swallowed it whole. The cows were coming home from the forest, and the dust of their hooves stood so thick in the gold air that the chariot moved half unseen. Bulls in rut bellowed and shouldered one another over the cows; mothers heavy with milk ran lowing to their calves; white calves capered sideways across the road. From every courtyard came the steady ring of milking, and threaded under it, from off among the trees, a flute. Uddhava watched the village keep the old evening order Krishna had grown up inside: sacred fires fed, guests and cows and Brahmanas honored, the ancestors and the gods given their portion, incense climbing from doorways hung with garlands, the first lamps lit. Past groves in full blossom, loud with birdsong and the hum of black bees, past ponds where swans rode among the lotuses, he came to the one door in the world Krishna had called home, and stepped down.

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Nanda was on his feet before the greeting had left Uddhava’s mouth, and the embrace he folded him into was the embrace a man gives a returning son; anyone watching could see that he held him as Krishna himself. He fed him rice cooked in milk and sweetened with sugar, had his road-worn feet pressed, and drew him close. “Most fortunate Uddhava ji, tell me first of my friend Vasudeva. Out of Kamsa’s prison at last, his own people standing around him again. Is it well with them all?”

Then the old man’s voice dropped, and the true question came out from under the polite one. “Does Krishna ever think of us out there? He is our boy. This whole Vraja holds him as its one treasure and looked to him as its protector: these cows, this Vrindavan, this Giriraj he walked every day of his boyhood. Will he come, even once, only to see his own people? Once would be enough. We would look again at that face, the fine-cut nose, the smile that starts in the eyes.”

Nanda talked on, and as he talked, the years turned in front of him one by one. “How wide that heart is, Uddhava ji. Whatever came for us, he stood in front of it. Forest fire. Storm and flooding rain. Arishta the demon, charging in the body of a bull. The python Sudarshana, which had my leg already halfway down its throat when that boy set his foot on it and it let me go. Kamsa carried the strength of ten thousand elephants, and he finished him the way a lion goes through cattle, and the wrestlers Chanura and Mushtika with him, and Kuvalayapida, the war elephant they had posted at the arena gate. Kamsa’s great bow, three talas long, he snapped the way an elephant snaps a stalk of sugarcane. Giriraj he held up on one hand for seven days. Pralamba, Dhenuka, Trinavarta, Baka, demons that had driven back the gods themselves, he and Balarama ended here, in this Vraja, as if it were a game between chores. The sage Garga said at his naming that this child was divinity come down for some great work of heaven. I believed him then. I believe him more today. And still, when the sidelong look and the laughing talk come back to me, my hands forget the work they are holding; when I pass his footprints by the river, the rest of me goes wherever he is.” The words thinned as he said them, and then his throat closed, and the flood rising under the words took him, and he sat silent.

Yashoda sat close beside him and said nothing at all. She listened. At every deed named, the tears came down her face, and the old mother-love rose in her body until milk came to her breasts again, as it had come when he was small, wetting the cloth over her heart. There were no words anywhere in her. She listened, and wept, and overflowed.

Uddhava looked at the two of them and for a while could not speak either. What manner of love was this, that answered in milk when words gave out? He joined his palms. “Of every being that wears a body on this earth, you two are the most blessed. The child you raised on your knees is the Father and Ruler of all that is, and toward him you carry this pure parent-love that the greatest ascetics work whole lifetimes to approach. Understand whom you have for a son. Balarama and Krishna are the clay of the universe and the potter’s hand at once, the Person and the primal Nature; they enter every living form and steady its awareness from within. A dying man who fixes even a scattered mind on Krishna for the length of one breath burns through the whole store of his karma and does not come back to be born again. That is the being who ate from your hand. He is your son, and he is more: the Son and the Self of everything, the Father, the Mother, the Ruler of all. Nothing you have seen or heard, nothing gone or standing or still on its way, has any footing of its own apart from him. He alone is, and he alone is real. And he is near. As fire sleeps inside every stick of wood, he sits in the heart of every creature that breathes. In a few days he will come to Vraja and gladden you both. Do not grieve.” In such talk the night went past the two men, and neither noticed it going.

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Some of the night was still standing when the women of Vraja rose. They lit their lamps, made worship at the thresholds to the gods who keep a house, swept the courtyards clean, and sat down at the churns. Then Vraja made the sound it has made every morning of the world: ropes hissing on the churning staffs, curd knocking in the pots, bangles ringing down pulling arms, earrings swinging against cheeks marked with saffron, lamplight catching the gems at throats that rocked with the work. One woman raised a song of some shining deed of Krishna’s, and the rest came into it without being asked, the way a second rope takes up a load; and song and churning braided into a single sound that climbed until it touched the sky, and the ill fortune gathered overnight in the four quarters of the world loosened under it and let go.

Dawn came, and the sun with it. And then the women saw, standing at Nanda’s door, a chariot plated with gold. They gathered, asking one another whose it was. “Has Akrura come back,” one said, “Kamsa’s errand-man, the one who carried our dark, beautiful Shyamasundara off to Mathura?” Another answered through a closing throat, “His master is dead. Has he come for us this time, to lay our flesh down as the offering at that funeral?” They were still turning it over in low voices when Uddhava, bathed in the Yamuna, his morning devotions finished, came out among them.

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They stood very still and looked. Arms that hung to the knees. Eyes like a pair of lotuses just opened. Yellow silk, a garland of lotus flowers at the throat, jeweled earrings, a face in full bloom. Everything about the stranger quoted Krishna, the cut of the dress, the way he carried himself, and the quotation went through them like grief and welcome in a single stroke. They whispered to one another: beautiful, yes, but who is he? From where? Whose man? And why has he dressed himself in our Krishna’s exact fashion? Then, hungry to know, shyness losing to the hunger, they came in from every side and stood around him.

When it came clear that this was the messenger of the Lord who is Lakshmi’s own husband, they bowed, smiled behind lowered eyes, and seated him apart with every courtesy; and the courtesy lasted exactly as long as the seating. “Uddhava ji, we know you. You attend the Lord of the Yadus, and you have been sent to bring comfort to his mother and father, and that is fitting; the bond of a parent is one even hermits cannot cut out of themselves. But past his parents, what is left in Vraja worth his remembering? This is pasture, grass for cows. As for the thing people call love, look anywhere you like: it keeps faith exactly as long as it feeds. That is how the bee loves the flower, and how a man loves a woman. The harlot stays while the money lasts; subjects stay while the king can protect them; the student, his learning got, is gone from the teacher’s door; priests stay through the rite and leave with the fee. Birds fill a tree until the fruit is done. Guests bless the house until the meal is eaten. Deer keep to a forest until it burns. And a lover is devoted to a woman exactly until the hour he has had her.”

Whatever teaching Uddhava had carried from Mathura stopped on his tongue and stayed there. Before him were women whose speech, body, and mind had gone into Krishna and never come back. Talking to Krishna’s messenger, they lost hold of what was being said and to whom; his infancy, his boyhood, one remembered scene handing them to the next, until they were singing the deeds outright; and then the singing broke, and the modesty a woman is born wearing fell away with everything else, and they wept openly, together, in front of a stranger.

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Among them sat one woman whom an old memory of union with Krishna had closed over, that very hour, like water over a head. Her eyes were shut. She was somewhere years away. And a black bee came down through the morning, humming, and began to circle at her feet. She watched it through half-open lids, and something in her rose slowly to a boil. Black, like him. Honey-mouthed, like him. Arriving from somewhere else with sweetness on its breath, like him. She decided at once what it had to be: his messenger, sent by a master too clever to come himself, who knew she was angry and meant to have her coaxed round by proxy. So she straightened where she sat and addressed it with the full formality due an ambassador, in words half love and half arraignment.

“Madhup. Honey-drinker. Friend of a cheat, and therefore a cheat yourself. Take your whiskers off our feet. We see the yellow on them, and we know that kumkum: it came off his garland, and it got onto the garland from the breasts of our rivals in Mathura when he crushed it against them. Carry the token back where you found it. Souvenirs of that kind would raise a laugh even in the court of the Yadus, and we are not yet so poor that we take what other women have worn. And stop this bowing. You bow to every flower in the garden, one after another, and love none of them. Why would you? As the master is, so is the servant.”

The bee hovered on, as though under orders to wait out the anger. Her voice tightened. “Once, one single time, we let him drink that small draught of the wine of our lips, and he left us standing, simple as we were, the way you leave a flower once the honey is out of it. And no woman on the earth or above it or beneath it has ever been hard for him to win; one lift of that eyebrow, the smile that goes with it, and the thing is done. Lakshmi herself keeps to the service of his feet, Lakshmi, whom the world’s fortune follows, so of what account are we? She must have swallowed the same buttered talk. The great everywhere sing him as Uttamashloka, the one of stainless fame, and I will tell you the day that name is earned: the day he shows mercy to the wretched, who have nothing left to charm him with. Until then it is a sound. And you, six-legged one, why glorify him here, at this length, to women who signed away their homes for him long ago? We knew him before the city did. We need no introduction. Sing him to the proud ones of Mathura whose ache he is soothing now; they are the ones holding your payment.”

“Get your head off my foot. I know where you studied pleading; those arts have one teacher, and you serve him. Understand it clearly: nothing will be paid out here. For his sake we gave up our children, our husbands, our share of the world to come, the share a woman buys with a whole obedient life; and he shrugged, and walked, and left us to be the lesson the village tells. Now his messenger wants terms. What treaty is there with the ungrateful? And it is old habit in these dark-bodied lords. As Rama he shot the monkey-king Vali from cover, the way a hunter kills from cover, without challenge or combat. Ruled by the wish of his own queen, he had a woman disfigured whose one offense was to come to him desiring him. As the Dwarf he took Bali’s gift of three strides of ground and repaid the giver by binding him, the way a crow turns on the man whose food it has eaten. Enough, then, of loving anything colored dark. Except for this, that the treasure of his story will not let go of us; and there stands the whole of our ruin.”

For a breath she stopped. The bee rose, wandered to a leaf, and came back to her, and she watched it come back. What entered her voice then lay past anger, down where the wound was. “You ask why, if all this is true, his name is still in our mouths. Because it will not leave. That is the truth of it. One drop of him on the tongue and a person is ruined for everything else. Men have heard a single telling of his story and set down house, family, name, the whole built life, and walked out with the birds, owning nothing, wanting nothing, ruined and light. And we were the does who trusted the hunter’s song. It was sweet. Sweetness was its work. We walked into it again and again, and the shaft has stood in us ever since. So no more of him, messenger. If you must speak, find another subject. Any other subject.”

And then, all at once, everything sharp in her failed. “Friend of my beloved. He sent you, and you came back to us even after such words, and for that you are dear to me, and worth honoring, and I will ask you what I truly want to know. Can you take us to his side? Is there any road there? Whoever has had his company once cannot do without it again; no one recovers from him. Though Sri herself lives on his chest and never steps down, even so. Tell me of him. Is my darling in Mathura now? In all that city’s talk, does he ever speak of his father’s house, of the cowherds, of us, the women who served him? And will he ever again lay that arm on our heads, the arm with the scent of aloewood in it, the way he laid it when he meant to say, be comforted? Will such an hour come into our lives at all?” There she stopped. The bee hummed on. All around her, the seated women went on quietly coming apart.

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Uddhava had stood inside all of it without moving. The teaching he had brought lay in him undelivered, and he made no second attempt at it. He had spent a life on the shastras. He had sat in the stillness that yogis spend decades earning. He had heard the truth of things from Krishna’s own mouth, which is as close to the source as hearing gets. And what had just poured past him appeared in none of it, written nowhere, taught nowhere: a village woman with her eyes half shut, quarreling with an insect, and inside the quarrel, plainly visible, burning where anyone could see it, the very thing yogis hunt through birth after birth.

When he finally spoke, he spoke slowly, with the care of a man entering a sanctum. “Of all women alive, you are the most fortunate, and what you carry is what the whole striving world is trying to reach. Sages fast for this devotion. They give away wealth, pour offerings into the fire, mutter the Name across decades, walk the Veda line by line, wrestle their own senses to the ground, and it still stands away from them. It came to you through separation alone. You have handed me a gift past any repaying: I have seen it now, with my own eyes. So hear what your beloved charged me to say. These are his words. You cannot be parted from me; it has never once been possible. As ether, air, fire, water, and earth stand inside every created thing, I stand inside mind, breath, and sense; I am what your own thinking rests on. Where would I go? I keep myself from your eyes for one purpose only, that your minds should hold to me without a break, for a woman’s heart reaches harder for the beloved beyond the horizon than for the man at her elbow. Think of me without pause, pour the mind into me whole, and you will come to me, and it will not be long. You have the proof already: the women your households kept home on the night I danced in the forest reached me that same night by thought alone. Every road the wise have ever cut, the Veda, the eight limbs of yoga, the countings of Sankhya, renunciation, austerity, truthfulness, the mastered senses, runs to one sea, and the sea is a mind gathered into stillness. You are standing in it to your hearts.”

At first the message only made the ache worse, and the questions came all at once, over one another. Was he happy among the city women, then? Could a man so practiced in everything that passes between men and women even help being won by their sweet talk? Did he ever, in some unguarded palace evening, say the word Vraja? Did he remember the full-moon nights, the jasmine, the ring of the dance, the anklets keeping the beat? Would he come back to them the way rain comes back to a forest the summer has burned, and put the life into them with his own two hands? Or why should he, a king now, ringed by his kin, wed to princesses: what use is a village of herdswomen to a man whose every wish has been met? They remembered Pingala then, the courtesan in the old story who found her one night of peace only when she let hope go, and they admitted they knew it, knew it exactly, and that their hope would not lie down even so. How could it? The Yamuna threw his footprints back at them; Govardhan stood where his hand had held it; every flute-note off the evening water said his name. “Lord,” they cried at last, half to Uddhava and half to the sky, “protector of cows, savior of Vraja, ender of pain, lift this Gokul from the grief engulfing it.” And then, slowly, underneath everything, the message began its work. If he stood inside mind and breath, inside the ache itself, then their Shyamasundara had never for one hour been out of Vraja. Something in the fever turned and broke. They looked at the man who had carried such words to them, dressed in Krishna’s yellow, wearing almost Krishna’s face, and they honored him the way a house honors a festival, very nearly as the Lord himself.

Uddhava stayed on, and the errand of a few days became month after month. He spent them telling Krishna: lila after lila, until the whole of Gokul was glad on the strength of the telling. He walked to the riverbank, up into the folds of Giriraj, under the flowering trees, and at each place he asked the people, what did he do here? and they told him, and went down twice into the same remembering, once for the grief in it and once for the joy. With Krishna in every mouth from morning to dark, the months crossed Vraja like a single afternoon.

And the man who left was another man. The courtier who had driven in with the atman on his tongue and pride under his ribs now wanted one thing on this earth: the dust from the feet of forest herdswomen, on his own bowed head. When the day came, he asked leave of the gopis, of Yashoda, of Nanda, and the household walked him to the chariot in tears, arms full of gifts for Krishna and Balarama, praying the one prayer they had left: whatever births we are thrown into, wherever karma carries us, let the mind live at his feet, let the voice keep his name, let the body keep its bowing. At the border of Vraja, Uddhava stopped the chariot, joined his palms toward the village, and sang inside himself: “These cowherd women alone have made the wearing of a human body worth its wearing. The love they hold is what the fearful strivers want, what the freed sages want, what we who serve him want; and against one taste of the story these women live inside, what is a Brahmana’s birth worth, or three of them? The grace that came down on them in the circle of the dance never came to the nymphs of heaven; it never came to Sri at his very chest. Let me be born in this Vrindavan again, and let me be born small: a shrub, a creeper, a blade of healing herb, anything that stands low along these paths, so that the dust of their feet keeps falling on me; for the road these women walk is the road the Upanishads are still asking after. I bow to that dust, and I bow again. The singing of the women of Nanda’s Vraja keeps the three worlds pure.” Then he turned the horses toward Mathura, and when he came before Krishna he went down flat upon the ground; and what he laid at those feet first was Vraja itself, everything he had seen, the whole uncounted wealth of its love; and after it, Nanda’s gifts, into the hands of Krishna, of Vasudeva, of Balarama, and of the old king Ugrasena.