Ramdas

Every month, on the night of Ekadashi, an old man closed up his hut in the village of Dakor and set out walking toward Dwarka. By the time he reached the great sanctum of Ranchhorji there, the courtyard would already be filling with lamps and voices raised in kirtan, and he would fold himself into some corner near the doors and stay through the jagaran, the all-night vigil, until they opened at dawn for mangala-darshan. Ranchhorji, the dark image of Krishna enshrined at Dwarka, carried that name because older memory already knew him as the king who once left a battlefield rather than see his people destroyed for his pride; Ran meaning field of war, chhod meaning to leave. Having darshan, the old man turned around and walked home again, arriving dust-covered and footsore well past noon, only to begin the same round the following month. He had kept this vrata so many years that no one in Dakor could remember him without it, though in truth the two towns lie a good deal farther apart than the old telling admits; hagiography has never much cared for odometers. He owned almost nothing worth a thief's attention, no land, no gold, nothing but the walk itself and the sight of that face when the doors swung open. That, everyone agreed, was the one thing Ramdas was rich in.

Age did what nothing else could. It bent his back and slowed his legs until each journey became a small ordeal, and Ranchhorji, watching him totter in week after week, could not bear it any longer. "You have served me enough," the Lord told him. "Stay home now, in your own doorway, and sing my name from there. I release you from the walk." It was the kind of mercy most of us would take gladly. Ramdas would not take it. His legs had failed him, but the love that carried them had not, and he told his Lord, in whatever plain words a poor man uses with the one he loves most, that a vow kept for love does not grow old the way a body does, and that rest was the last thing he wanted if it cost him even one night of darshan. He kept walking.

Ranchhorji did not force the matter, because he could see it was useless, but he could not go on watching either. On the eve of a coming Ekadashi he told Ramdas that if the old man loved him too much to stay away, then he himself would come and live where Ramdas lived. The plan he gave was oddly practical for something spoken by God: bring a bullock cart, stand it beneath a particular window at the rear of the temple, and wait there after dark on the night of the festival. Everything else, he said, he would see to himself. He would make his own body light as a flower, so that one old man could lift him without strain.

Ramdas did exactly as he was told, and before he would let himself touch the murti he stripped off what little jewelry he wore on his own person and left it lying inside the temple, unnoticed in the dark. It was a small gesture, and it said everything about the kind of man he was: whatever the priests would later think of him, he had not come to Dwarka that night hunting gold. He lifted Ranchhorji the way a man lifts a sleeping child, laid him down in the bed of the cart, and drove out into the night at an unhurried pace, exactly like a farmer bringing home nothing more remarkable than an evening's shopping.

He very nearly made it away clean. By the time the priests came to open the sanctum for the morning darshan and found it empty, the ornaments scattered on the floor, and the back window standing ajar, Ramdas and his Lord were already well down the road. It did not take long for someone to remember the old devotee who never missed an Ekadashi, and who had, that very night, been the last one seen near the temple after everyone else had gone home. They took up spears and rode after the cart, certain now that a theft, not a devotion, explained the emptied shrine.

They overtook him within sight of a stepwell beside the road. With the riders closing and no way to outrun them, Ramdas asked his Lord in rising panic what he should do, and Ranchhorji told him simply to lower him into the water and hide him there. Ramdas obeyed, and when the priests reached the cart and tore through it and found nothing but straw, their fury turned on the old man standing beside it. They struck him. By the older tellings a spear was driven into his body. Through all of it he said nothing that would give his Lord away, and took the blows as though they were owed to him.

It was the water, not the man, that finally gave the secret up, though not in the way anyone expected. Someone noticed the stepwell had gone the color of blood, and when they searched it they found that the wounds were not Ramdas's alone after all: Ranchhorji, submerged beneath the surface, had drawn every blow meant for his devotee onto his own body. A voice, whether heard aloud or simply known all at once in the heart hardly matters to the story, told the priests plainly that they had beaten and speared not a thief but a bhakta obeying his own Lord's command, and that the blood reddening the well was freely given, his own. He would not be returning to Dwarka with them. In his place, he said, they would find another image waiting for them at a well near the old temple; let that one be raised and worshipped there, and let this one remain where it now wished to stay.

Chastened but not satisfied, the priests still asked for something to carry home: if the murti was to remain in Dakor, custom demanded gold equal to its weight in exchange. Ramdas had no gold of his own. All that could be found in his house was a single earring belonging to his wife, small and unremarkable, and this was what they set on one pan of the scales, opposite the great weight of the deity on the other. What followed left the priests forgetting their anger in sheer bewilderment: however they arranged the weights, the pan holding the Lord's image would not lift from the ground. Only when Ranchhorji chose to make himself light again did the balance finally tip, and a poor woman's earring outweighed a god. The priests went home empty-handed and red-faced, grumbling that the Lord's own good sense seemed to have turned upside down, that he could hardly find more comfort in a beggar's hut than in the marble halls of Dwarka. They had misjudged, as such men generally do, what actually counts as wealth in the sight of God.

Ranchhorji settled into Ramdas's house and, by every account that follows, never really left it again. The old man spent what years remained to him doing what he had always done best, keeping the Name on his tongue, sitting for long hours in japa and dhyana, no longer needing to walk any distance at all to find the face he loved; it had walked to him instead. The old telling of this story closes on a line worth keeping past all the drama of carts and spears and scales: that a bhakta who repeats the Lord's name will find the unmatched yugal-swarup, the paired form of the Beloved, rising unbidden inside his own heart. That, more than the theft or the miracle, is offered as the real point of everything that happened to Ramdas.

The temple that grew up around this story, on the bank of the Gomati tank at Dakor in Gujarat, still stands; its present structure was raised around 1772, generations after the events it commemorates, and it remains one of the most visited Krishna shrines in western India. The image worshipped there as Ranchhodrai is to this day shown with a wrapped or bandaged cheek, which local memory ties directly back to the wounds taken at that roadside stepwell. And every full moon, above all at Kartik Purnima, when the great fair is held, pilgrims still walk to Dakor from towns many miles off, an entire countryside retracing on its own legs something of the journey an old man once made out of love, except that now the road runs toward him instead of away.

It should be said plainly that this same beloved story is not always told with the name Ramdas. In the temple's own Gujarati memory the devotee is more often called Bodana, sometimes Vijayanand Bodana, with his wife named Gangabai, and some versions of that telling are harder on him, holding that the priests' blows killed him outright and that it was his widow, not he, who stood before the scales. The Bhaktamal tradition set down by Nabhadas and expanded by Priyadas, which this account follows, keeps to the gentler ending, in which Ramdas lives to see his Lord installed under his own roof. Whichever name a listener grew up with, both tellings agree on the one thing that finally matters: a poor man's unreasonable, unrelenting love, and a God who chose to bleed rather than let that love be mistaken for a crime.