Bhagavatam · The Rasa Lila

The Ganga ran slow that morning, as though the river had paused to listen. Parikshit looked at Shukadeva and for a while said nothing.

Then he spoke. “Bhagavan, one thing has lodged in my mind like a thorn. You told me this same Krishna came down to set dharma back on its feet. Yet I have heard that on one autumn night he danced with the women of Vraja, and those women were the wives of other men. I have only a handful of days left, Munivar. I would rather not die with this story half understood. What kind of dharma was that?”

Shukadeva smiled, the smile of a man no question can unsettle.

“Rajan, you have asked the very thing that should be asked. Whoever will not ask it is not yet fit to come near this story. Listen. And as you listen, watch closely, and settle it for yourself: is this the play of the body, or of the soul?”

He closed his eyes, as if looking again at a night seen from very far away.

It was the full moon of autumn. Jasmine had opened across Vrindavan and lay heavy on the night air, and the sand along the Yamuna was cool underfoot. The moon climbed the eastern sky stained red at first, the way a traveler home after a long absence might touch saffron to the face of the wife he has missed, and then its light turned to silver and washed the whole woodland pale.

Krishna set the flute to his lips.

One note rose. Nothing plain about it. The kind of note that draws itself far out across the night and does not come back.

In the houses of Gokul the women were each at their own work. One stood over a pot of milk. One patted an infant toward sleep. One was setting food before her husband, and another feeding a child at the breast.

The note reached them.

Hands stopped where they were. Milk left to boil over, the child half-patted, the meal abandoned on the plate. Not one of them could have said afterward what she had been doing.

They went out exactly as they were. One forgot to bind her hair. One had darkened a single eye with kohl and left the other bare. One had put her clothes on crooked and reversed, and still she went.

Their households tried to hold them back.

A husband called after one of them, “Where are you going at this hour?” An elder scolded another, “Have you lost your senses?”

The women did not answer. Their feet simply kept moving. And those who were shut inside and could not get out closed their eyes and fixed their whole minds on Krishna. The agony of not reaching him burned through their sins; the joy of holding him in thought spent the last of their merit; and with nothing left to bind them, those women let go of their bodies where they sat and were gone into him, though they had never known him as anything more than the one they loved.

The rest reached the bank of the Yamuna, soaked in moonlight, out of breath.

Krishna stood beneath a kadamba tree, the flute still at his lips.

He looked at them, and a faint smile came, and then he said the thing none of them was ready to hear.

“You are all welcome here, and I am glad to see you. Is everything well in Vraja? But tell me what has brought you out. The night is deep and full of things that hunt in the dark. Go home. Your mothers and fathers, your children, your husbands will be searching for you by now. Do not frighten them.”

“You have seen the forest under the full moon, the leaves stirring in the breeze off the river. You have seen it. Now go back and look after your own. The calves are lowing, the children are crying to be fed. A wife’s first duty is to serve her husband and his people and to raise her children, and a woman who wants the higher worlds does not turn her back on her husband, whatever kind of man he is.”

He did not stop there. “And if you have come only because your hearts are tied to me, I understand it, for every living thing turns to me in the end. But love for me grows in the one who hears of me, who looks toward me, who keeps me in mind, who sings of me. That love does not need your feet on this sand. So go home.”

The women looked at one another. Who had called them out into the night, and who was now telling them to go home?

They stood with their faces lowered, scratching the ground with their toes, their breath coming hot, the kohl running with their tears and washing the color from their breasts. Then one of them wiped her eyes and spoke, and her voice shook with something close to anger and would not stop.

“Do not be so cruel to us, Govinda. We have already come. Which home are you sending us back to? Your flute called us, and we left everything standing where it was. You yourself just said that a woman’s duty is to serve her husband and his people. Then let us serve you, for you are the self of every living soul, the one that all that service was always meant for. Water the root, and the whole tree is fed. What would we do now with husbands and children, who bring us only grief? You have taken the minds that used to rest in our houses. You have taken the strength from our hands. Our feet will not carry us one step back from your feet. Tell us, Prabhu, where is the justice in calling a woman with everything she has and then turning her away?”

Krishna looked at her for a long moment.

What runs in the depths of a person does not falter because the feet are tired. This was what he had been watching for, and now that he had seen it, he was satisfied.

He laughed then, a full and easy laugh, and out of nothing but tenderness he gave them what they had come for.

And then came what they call the rasa.

They gathered around him on the silver sand of the Yamuna, and the play began.

He moved among them like the full moon among stars, a garland of five colors at his throat, singing as they sang. He took one by the hand. He drew another into his arms. He traded a joke with a third and rested his eyes, only his eyes, on a fourth.

And every one of them was certain, past all doubt, that his whole heart was raining down on her alone.

One was scolding him. “When do you ever think of us, Mohan?”

Another asked, laughing, “Where did the flute find so much sweetness tonight?”

And one said nothing at all, drowned in his eyes.

Whatever fell on any of them fell whole. Not one received a half of him.

The play went on. The flute, the turning feet, the ring of them, all of it moving on a single breath.

Then a thin ripple moved through their minds.

“If he pours out this much upon us, then surely we are above every other woman alive.”

The pride had barely formed when he was gone.

Out of their very midst, in one instant, the way a lamp goes out.

The ring broke. Their hands closed on air.

They looked at one another, and only then did it reach them: a moment ago each had held him, and now not one of them did.

The weeping did not come first. First came the silence that falls on a full courtyard the instant it empties. Then one cry rose, and another, and in a little while the whole bank was sobbing.

They went looking for him, and they were so full of him now that they began to become him. One draped her arm across a friend’s shoulder and said, “Look at me, I am Krishna,” and walked his walk. They went from tree to tree asking after him. Had he passed this way, they asked the ashoka and the jasmine and the mango, and which way had he gone. They asked a doe whether he had crossed here with his beloved, for the wind carried the scent of the flowers he wore. They asked the earth herself what she had done to deserve the touch of his feet, that her grass should stand on end with joy.

Then, in one stretch of sand, they found his footprints, marked with the flag and the lotus and the goad they knew so well. And running beside his prints were a woman’s. One of them, it seemed, he had drawn apart from the rest and walked with alone. Here his prints pressed deeper, where he had carried her; there hers vanished, where he had lifted her over the sharp grass. The others read it all in the sand, and their hearts turned over. And the one he had taken apart, they would learn, had thought in her own heart, he has left all the others and keeps only me. In that very thought her arms had emptied, exactly as theirs had, and she was left alone in the dark, calling his name into the trees.

They searched while the moonlight lasted, in the kadamba thickets, along the water, behind every bush, in every shadow. When the dark finally closed in they gave up. By then they no longer remembered their own bodies, let alone their homes.

Krishna was nowhere.

Worn through, the gopis sank down on the sand of the Yamuna, and everything still left in them they began to pour into a song. That song is for another night, Rajan. This one rests here, on the empty bank, where every woman was alone and all of them wept together.