Bhagavatam · The Gopi Geet

Seated on the bank of the Ganga, Parikshit joined his palms and asked, “Bhagavan, yesterday you told of the rasa, that night on which the Lord was with every one of them at once. I have only a few days left now, and I keep thinking: if someone is granted that nearness once, and then that very nearness is taken from them, what must pass inside them?”

Shukadeva paused for a moment. Then his voice took on that low warmth which returned every time the telling came to Krishna.

“Rajan, listen. It happened that very night. From the very women who had the Lord beside them, he slipped out of sight for a spell. What followed, the Bhagavata counts among its highest notes. And that note is the note of parting.”

That night in Vrindavan was in full bloom. The water of the Yamuna trembled without any wind, and the moonlight was so bright that every footprint on the sand could have been counted. At the very center of the rasa, where a moment earlier he had stood, now only his absence was standing.

Krishna had vanished.

At first the gopis thought he was somewhere close by, just behind a branch, laughing. Then the flute did not sound. Then it did not sound for a very long time. And the moonlight, which until then had been a festival, suddenly began to feel as vast and cold as an empty room.

One by one they rose. Into the kunjas, through the groves, along the bends of the river. Feet sinking into the sand, breath rising and falling, and on every lip the same question, put to no one and yet put to everything. They were so far gone in him by now that some of them began to move the way he moved, to speak the way he spoke, until one of them, lost in it, said out loud, “I am Krishna,” and the others hardly noticed.

One gopi stopped beside a kadamba tree, her hand resting on its bark, as if listening for a heartbeat.

“O tree, did you see him pass, the darling of Nanda? His color is the dark of your shade. A flute at his lips. A peacock feather at his brow.”

The tree stayed silent. Only the scent of its flowers deepened into the night, the same scent that once used to walk beside them.

One gopi went up to a doe and looked into her eyes.

“O harini, you catch every scent the night carries, and his garland is all jasmine and wild bloom. Did he come by this way? Which way did he go?”

The doe only looked back. Something quivered in her eyes, and no answer came.

One gopi was questioning a vine, its leaves gathered into her palm.

“O madhavi, his hand has brushed you, pulling your blossoms loose. You know his touch. In which direction is he tonight?”

They asked every one of them. Every one stayed silent. And when the tree, the doe, and the vine had all failed to answer, something began to rise inside the gopis that could no longer be said to any animal or any creeper, only to him.

They drew together at one spot on the Yamuna’s bank, sat down on the sand, and leaning shoulder against shoulder, with no single voice leading, they began to sing. Nineteen times that melody rose, and each time it rose a little more broken.

The opening verse rose like pride, the reproach still to come.

“Beloved, by your birth the glory of Vraja has climbed past Vaikuntha and every other realm. That is why Lakshmi ji has left her own abode to dwell in this dust forever, and here she stays, her eyes never leaving you. And we? We who laid down our very lives at your feet in this same dust are wandering forest to forest, searching for you.”

The melody sharpened a little.

“We are the maidservants of your loving heart, and you paid nothing to win us. With those eyes of yours, that steal the light out of a full-blown lotus in an autumn pool, you wounded us through and through, and then you walked away. Tell us, is killing with a glance not slaughter? Is it slaughter only when a weapon does it?”

And then everything he had once done for them began to return to them, and their throats began to close.

“Best among men! The water of the Yamuna that Kaliya had turned to poison, you carried us clear of the death in it. Aghasura, who came in the coils of a great serpent to swallow us whole, you carried us clear of him. Indra’s downpour, the gale, the lightning and the fire it loosed on the forest, the demon who slipped in among the herd as a calf, Vyomasura the son of Maya. Time after time, danger after danger, you shielded us from every terror there was. And tonight, under this open sky, you are the one who has left us. The hand that saved us so many times is nowhere in sight.”

One gopi’s voice came from somewhere deeper, as if the complaint were turning into worship.

“We know you are more than Yashoda’s darling. You are the witness seated in the heart of every living being, the one who watches from inside us all. It was at Brahma ji’s prayer that you came down into the line of the Yadus to guard the world. Then how does the one who sits within and knows everything not know that our breath is failing now?”

Now the song began to beg for union, and the begging reached down into the body.

“Those who dread the wheel of birth and death and run to your feet for shelter, you shade them under your hand and make them fearless. That same hand, the hand that once clasped Lakshmi ji’s, lay it on our heads. Only that much. Take us as your own, we are your servants, and turn your face to us, let us see it once.”

“And set your feet on our breasts. Those feet that wipe away the sins of everyone who bows to them, that follow the cows through the grass all day, that are the home of Lakshmi ji herself, that once stood on the raised hoods of Kaliya without a tremor. Set them here, and put out this fire that is burning inside us.”

“Bring us back to life with the nectar of your lips. That voice of yours, sweet enough to hold even the wise still, has already carried us past ourselves. And the people who go through this world telling the story of you, they are the openhanded ones; that story gives the grieving their breath back, the wise have never wearied of it, it burns sin down to nothing, and it soothes the very ear that hears it. Your laugh, your sidelong looks, the small jokes you leaned in and murmured to us where no one else could hear, all of it went straight into us and stayed. Now that you are gone, it will not stop turning inside us. You knew it would, deceiver.”

Then rose the verse the whole song had been built for, the verse in which love climbs above argument, above reproach, above everything.

“Your feet are softer than any lotus. By day, when you follow the cows into the forest, we sit here and cannot stop seeing it: the pebbles pressing into those soft soles, the dry stalks pricking them, the kusha thorns catching at them. The moment the picture comes, our minds will not sit still.”

Their voices dropped a little further.

“And every evening you come back out of that forest, your face under its dark curls, dusted with the earth the cows kick up, like a lotus in a moving cloud of bees, and the sight of it lights the same longing in us all over again. Set those feet on our breasts, we ask you again, the feet even Brahma ji bows to worship, the ornament of the whole earth, the feet a heart holds on to when nothing else is left. And give us the nectar of your lips, the same nectar your flute drinks its fill of before us ever do, the nectar that makes a heart forget every other thing it once held onto.”

Their voices began to tremble.

“And the time without you. The moment you leave for the forest, a single blink, that much time, stretches into a whole age for us. And when you come back at dusk with your curling hair and we finally have your face again, even the falling of our own eyelids feels like a punishment, because for that one instant they close and you are gone. Whoever it was that set eyelids on our eyes must have been a fool.”

The melody had nearly broken now, and still it did not stop.

“We stepped over the wishes and the commands of our husbands, our children, our brothers and kin, our whole families, and we came here at the sweet call of your flute. Women who have walked out into the night like this, who is left to take them in but you? You know it. You know we have no other road. Trickster. What kind of man leaves women alone in the dead of night?”

“We only have to think of you and it begins again, the way you would lean close with some secret, that smile, those long looks, that broad chest where Lakshmi ji herself lives, and our minds are gone all over with wanting you. Your coming wiped the grief off the face of all Vraja, and off the forest and its creatures too, and it was a blessing on the whole world. We are your own. Hold out to us even a little of the one medicine that can quiet a heart like ours. And those feet, the feet we are frightened to rest on our own hard breasts in case we bruise them, tonight we cannot stop seeing them out there, walking the stones of this wilderness, and our minds, which have nothing left in them now but you, turn and turn and will not stop.”

And then, at the close of the nineteenth verse, the song let go of all its cleverness.

“Shri Krishna. Shyamasundara. Prananatha.”

Three names, and nothing more. One gopi bent forward, hands braced in the sand, forehead sinking toward her chest, and her breath grew so short that only one fragment was left for speech.

“Our life is for you. We are living for you. We are yours.”

There were no words after that. One after another, the gopis sank onto the sand. One head came to rest on a neighbor’s shoulder, someone’s bangles chimed once and fell quiet, someone’s palm stayed open where it lay, still waiting for the hand that had not yet come. The Yamuna kept flowing. The moonlight kept falling just as before. And in that small emptiness where no voice remained, only the coming and going of one broken breath could be heard.

Into that very breath, he appeared.

He stood in the middle of them in yellow silk, a garland of wild flowers across his chest, and on his face the smile those nineteen verses had been calling toward all this while, the smile that unsettles even the god of desire.

The gopis opened their eyes. For one moment none of them could believe it was truly him. Then all at once they came back, the way a body comes back when the breath returns to it, and they rose together. One caught both his hands in hers. One drew his arm, still cool with sandal paste, onto her shoulder. One took the feet she had been too frightened to touch and held them against a heart that had burned for him all night. One simply pulled him in through her eyes and shut them, to keep him from ever leaving again.

Krishna looked at them and spoke, very slowly. “I took myself out of your sight so that your minds would fasten on me and nowhere else, so that your love would only grow deeper. Think of a poor man who stumbles on a treasure and then loses it; after that he can think of nothing else in the world. I wanted your hearts turned toward me like that. As for what you have given me, I could not repay it if I lived as long as the gods themselves. So I will not pretend to clear the debt. Let your own tenderness, your own love, be the payment, and let it rest there.”

Then the rasa began again. This time no gopi held the thought that Krishna was hers alone, that she stood apart from the rest. There was only a dance, and inside it the counting of who stood nearest to whom had fallen away.

Shukadeva was silent for a while.

“Rajan, these women knew no shastra, no yoga, no tapas. They had one thing only: their breath was no longer their own. The feet that the greatest of the wise strain toward their whole lives and never reach, these women asked for upon their own breasts, and even as they asked, they were afraid the feet might get hurt. This is the love the Lord cannot keep standing outside of. He comes back. And then he says he can never repay it.”

Parikshit asked nothing. He looked out at the flowing Ganga, and one more of his days was gone.