Karmeti (Karmaiti Bai)

On the night before dawn was to carry her away forever, Karmeti did not sleep. In the priest's house at Khandela, a temple town in the rocky Shekhawati tract of what is now Rajasthan, the wedding chests had already been packed. Word had come that her husband's people, the Joshis of Sanganer near Jaipur, were arriving the next morning for her gauna, the old rite by which a child bride, once she has come of age, is finally sent from her father's home to her husband's. Lamps were lit, sweets were made, new cloth was folded and set aside for the journey. Karmeti, said to have been no more than twelve, lay awake in the dark turning over a single unbearable fact: that within a few hours a stranger would come to claim a heart that, since she had first been able to speak, had never belonged to anyone but Krishna.

Her parents did not think this strange devotion in their daughter was anything to fear. Her father, Parashuram, served as purohit, family priest, to the Shekhawat rulers of Khandela, and by every account he and his wife delighted in the girl's transports rather than worrying over them. From early childhood, it is said, she would weep aloud in the middle of ordinary days, crying "Ha Nath! Ha Nath!", O Lord, O Lord, as though grief itself were sweet; she would break into dance during kirtan and dissolve into unexplained laughter, drunk on a joy no one else in the room could see. Her parents took this as a sign of grace on their house, not a warning of what it would eventually cost them.

The old commentary that preserves her story lets us hear the argument she had with herself that final night. This body, she reasoned, is only bone and flesh and skin bound in a covering of hide; it was never made to be handed over in that way. Enough sleeping, she told her own mind: wake now from moha, the sleep of delusion, and give your love, finally and completely, to the one dark, beautiful form that has lived in your heart since infancy, so that the heart's own grime might be washed away at last. If it is the son of the king of Braj that you love, she told herself, then let go of shame; and if you go on minding this house and this household instead, you will only be undoing yourself. Having reasoned her own fear into stillness, she waited for the hour when the whole house was asleep, kept the dark, tender image of her Lord before her mind, and let no other thought accompany her.

At midnight she rose alone and walked out of Khandela on foot, taking nothing with her but that single remembrance. When morning broke and her absence was discovered, the household dissolved into an uproar no one there would forget. Her mother and father searched frantically from place to place; men were sent out in every direction to comb the countryside for her, and, in some tellings, the ruler of Khandela himself lent riders to the search. Karmeti, hearing hoofbeats and voices closing in on the road, did the one thing no pursuer would think to do: she found the half-eaten carcass of a camel that jackals had torn open at the ribs, and crawled inside it to hide.

She stayed there three days and nights. It is one of the strangest and most physical images to survive from the whole gallery of the Bhaktamal, and the old tilak does not flinch from it: so revolted was she by the stench of the world's sin, the commentary says, that the stench of a rotting carcass seemed sweet to her by comparison, and she felt no fear at all in that hiding place, only the steadiness of her own resolve. On the fourth day, when danger had passed, she came out, and by one telling fell in with a party of pilgrims bound for the Ganga; she bathed in the river, gave away every ornament she had worn as a bride, and walked on toward Vrindavan with nothing left to mark her as anyone's daughter or anyone's wife.

What happened next belongs more to the fuller, living memory of her story than to the terse verses of Nabhadas: that for eighteen days in or near Vrindavan she went without food or water, refusing to break her fast for anything less than the Lord himself, until Krishna, moved by that stubbornness, appeared before her in the guise of a wandering sadhu and fed her prasad with his own hand. Whether or not every detail of that meeting can be traced to the oldest text, it is the story Vrindavan and Khandela still tell of her, and it fits the shape of everything else she did: a girl who would rather starve in the Lord's presence than eat safely in his absence.

She settled at last near Brahmakund, one of the sacred bathing ghats of Vrindavan, then a stretch of dense forest at the town's edge, and made her home in the branches of a tree there, lost in hari-smaran, the ceaseless remembrance of Hari, indifferent to comfort and to company alike. It was there, months later, that her father finally found her. Parashuram had wandered as far as Mathura in his search, and it was the people of that city who finally pointed him toward Vrindavan. Following the path into the thick of the forest near Brahmakund, he climbed a tree himself to get a better view of the wilderness, and from its branches he caught sight of his daughter at last. He wept until his tears wet the ground beneath him.

He climbed down and ran to her, fell at her feet, and begged her to come home. You have cut off my nose before the whole world, he told her, using the old Hindi idiom for a ruined reputation; I can no longer show my face to anyone out of shame. Come back, he pleaded, live in your father's house if you will not go to your husband's, worship there in safety, for this forest holds lions and tigers that could kill you, and your mother and I are already as good as dead with grief; only your return can revive us.

Her answer, as the old commentary records it, was not the answer of a frightened runaway but of a teacher. You speak the truth, she told him, but know this: a body without bhakti is already a corpse, whatever it looks like from the outside. If you truly wish to live, then love the feet of the Lord and spend your days singing his name; there is no other way to be alive at all. And as for the nose you say I have cut, that is a thought spoken without reflection, for what pride was ever real to begin with? Honor exists only in devotion; without it, every being in this world, and in the heaven above it, already walks about without one. Consider, father: for fifty years you tasted the pleasures of this world and were never satisfied by them, chewing again and again on what you had already chewed, the way cattle bring up the cud and go on grinding it, so that people do a thing once and then spend the rest of their lives turning its memory over and over. I have not even glanced at those pleasures. I have looked at nothing but Shyam.

The commentary caps her reply with a Braj savaiya carrying the signature of Tulsidas himself, words to the effect that mother, father, son, kinsman, friend, teacher, and every other bond that seems dear are all, in the end, lost to us, and that only the one who has staked everything on Ram's name truly lives, however others may wander about wearing a living face over what is, spiritually, already a corpse. It is a hard teaching to receive from one's own child kneeling in a forest, and the texts suggest it broke something open in Parashuram rather than merely wounding him.

What became of father and daughter afterward is remembered today less in the Bhaktamal's own verses than in the living memory of Khandela itself. Local tradition holds that Karmeti drew a small murti of Krishna from the waters near Brahmakund and placed it in her father's hands, along with her teaching on devotion, and that this same image, carried home to Khandela, is the one still worshipped there as Banke Bihari, unusual among Krishna temples for enshrining the dark Lord alone, without Radha at his side. The same tradition says the ruler of Khandela, on hearing what had happened to his priest's daughter, made the journey to Vrindavan himself and came away a changed man, and that a small kutiya, a hermit's hut, was raised for her near Brahmakund so that she would not have to live entirely exposed to the forest; one modern account even claims that hut was still pointed out to visitors as late as 1712, the very year Priyadas is remembered to have written his commentary on her life. None of this can be checked against Nabhadas's own spare Braj couplet, and it is offered here as the tradition tells it, not as settled history.

Of her later years, her exact dates, or how she came finally to leave this world, no source consulted here, Sanskrit, Hindi, or English, offers anything certain, and it would be dishonest to invent what none of them supply. What survives instead is sharper than a biography: a single unrepeatable night when a twelve year old girl chose the stench of a dead animal over the comfort of a wedding bed, and meant it; a forest meeting in which a weeping father was answered not with an apology but with a sermon; and, if the temple memory of Khandela is to be trusted, an image of Krishna still bathed each Janmashtami in a hundred and eight kinds of herbs, said to have come to that town in the hands of the very girl who ran away to find him. She is remembered by name as nishkalank, unblemished, one who was born into a hard and darkened age and somehow came through it without a single stain, and whatever else has been lost of her story, that much both the old commentary and the living town agree on.