Premnidhi

The rain had been falling since dusk, and by the time the lamps of Agra guttered out one by one, the lanes had turned to a soup of mud so thick that a man's sandal could vanish in it. In a small house near the river lived a priest of Krishna named Premnidhi, and it was his nightly discipline, rain or clear sky, to walk down to the Yamuna after midnight, draw a fresh pot of water, and bring it back before dawn for his beloved Thakur's bath and first offering. On this particular night the darkness was total, no moon, no star, only water falling out of a black sky, and Premnidhi stood at his own doorway turning the problem over in his mind. If he waited for first light to go, the whole town would be awake and moving through the same mud, and he could not bear the thought of his sanctified water being splashed and jostled on the crowded ghats. If he went now, he would be groping blind through flooded lanes with a clay pot balanced on his hip. He decided, as he always seemed to decide in such moments, that service to his Lord could not wait on comfort, and he stepped out into the rain.

He had gone only a few paces when he became aware that he was not alone. A boy, seven or eight years old by the look of him, was standing near him with a lit torch held high, its flame somehow untouched by the downpour. The child said nothing, only turned and began walking toward the river, and Premnidhi, too startled and too grateful to question the mercy, followed the small dancing light through streets he could no longer see with his own eyes. What should have been a long and treacherous walk seemed to take no time at all, later tellings of the story insist it felt like three steps, and before he had gathered his thoughts he was standing on the bank of the Yamuna. He bathed, filled his pot, lifted it to his head, and turned to thank the boy who had appeared out of nowhere on the worst night of the season. The torch was still burning a few feet ahead, lighting his way home with the same unhurried patience, and it was only when Premnidhi reached his own threshold, turned to offer the child a place to dry off and take some food, that he found no one there at all. No footprints in the mud, no light retreating down the lane, nothing.

He stood there a long moment, water dripping from his clothes, before he carried the pot inside and began the morning arti as he did every day of his life. It was only while he stood before the black stone image of Shyam Bihari with the lamp trembling in his hand that he caught, faintly, a sweetness in the air near the deity's garments, the same fragrant oil that had burned in the torch on the riverbank. There was no torch in the temple room. There had never needed to be one. Premnidhi sank to the floor of his own sanctuary understanding, the way such things are understood rather than reasoned, that the small barefoot boy who had walked ahead of him through the flooded dark, lighting a way that required no light, had been his own Lord, come down to keep company with a frightened old servant on a bad night. Devotional memory has never let go of that image, and later hands, trying to praise him, found they could not do it without punning on his own name, calling him a very treasury of love whose devotion had become so thick it had drawn the Treasure of Love himself out of hiding to walk beside him. One of the verses remembered from that circle compares the dark, dilated pupil of the eye to Shyam's own dark form: it is the black center, not the white surround, that lets a man see anything at all, and without it he counts himself blind. Premnidhi's whole life reads like a commentary on that single image, a man who found that it was precisely in the blackest hour, when every human aid had failed him, that the truest light came looking for him instead of the other way around.

To understand where such devotion came from, the story goes back a generation, to Premnidhi's father, a man named Dhir Gosain. Dhir Gosain had been raised in Agra as one of nine brothers, and when the family property came to be divided, his eight siblings shut him out entirely, leaving him with nothing. Grief and humiliation drove him out of the city and toward Govardhan, and tradition holds that when he reached Govind Kund, the sacred pool at the foot of the hill, despair had closed in on him so completely that he waded into the water intending never to come out of it. What came up in his hands instead of death was a black stone image of Krishna, lifted, it is said, from the very floor of the pool, the same murti that would come to be known as Shyam Bihari, or Bade Govind. A man who had gone into that water to end a life came out of it instead carrying a god. He carried the image back to Agra, built a small shrine for it in the old quarter of the city, and gave the rest of his years to its care. It was to this inherited altar, to this deity rescued from the bottom of a pool rather than acquired by any conventional means, that Premnidhi devoted his own life of service, and it is in that light that the boy with the torch makes a kind of sense: this was a family whose god had already shown, once before, a habit of appearing exactly at the point of greatest need.

What made Premnidhi remarkable was not only his private discipline at the river but his gift for telling the story of Krishna aloud. He was known for a sweetness of speech that people described as auspicious in itself, the kind of voice that seemed to bring good fortune merely by being heard, and he had chosen, deliberately, not to hide himself away in the seclusion of Vrindavan, close as it was, but to stay amid the noise and traffic of Agra and offer his katha to whoever would come and sit. When he opened the Bhagavata and began to speak of Krishna's childhood, of the gopis, of Radha, something in his telling made the story land freshly on people who had heard it a hundred times before, and it did not take long before his courtyard could not hold the crowds. Men and women both came, sat together on the same swept ground, wept together at the same verses, and went home lighter than they had arrived. He asked nothing of any of them. He lived, by every account, as a man detached even while remaining a householder, wanting nothing for himself, using whatever came to him for the barest needs of his own life and the service of his Thakur, and giving the rest of himself, freely, to whoever wanted to hear about God.

Crowds of that size and that mixed a character eventually draw suspicion, and Premnidhi's did. Small men who could not account for their own resentment except by inventing a story went to the ruler of the city and told him that a great many respectable women were spending their evenings gathered in one man's courtyard, and let the insinuation do the rest of the work. Temple memory in Agra has long named the ruler in this story as Akbar himself, though it should be said plainly that the Bhaktamal's own old commentary is more careful, calling him only the sovereign of the age without naming him outright, so the identification survives as a strong local tradition rather than a fact anyone can now verify beyond doubt. Whoever he was, the ruler took the accusation seriously enough to send his men to bring the priest before him. They came for Premnidhi at the worst possible hour, just as he was preparing the night's water for his Lord, and by every telling he begged for a few minutes' grace, wanting only to set that one vessel before the image before he went anywhere. The guards would not wait. He was pulled away with the offering unmade, and it is remembered that this, and not his own arrest, was the thing that visibly wounded him.

Brought before the throne, he was accused to his face: it is said you keep the wives and daughters of this city sitting in your house every evening, what do you have to say for yourself? Premnidhi's answer, as later generations preserved it, was disarmingly simple. He said that he did nothing but tell the story of Krishna, that people came because the story itself was dear to them and not because of any invitation of his, that anyone was free to come and anyone was free to leave, and that if a man's own eye carried impurity into that gathering, the fault belonged to the eye and not to the story being told. It was not the kind of answer calculated to placate an angry court, and it did not. He was thrown into prison, and there he sat, not raging against the injustice done to him, but consumed instead by a single worry that had nothing to do with his own comfort or safety: his Thakur, at that very hour, would be waiting for the water that never came. Local memory at the shrine holds that in that cell, in the grip of that particular grief, Premnidhi composed twenty five verses of lament and longing, still called the Karuna Pachisi and still kept and recited at the temple raised in his name, though this too rests on the temple's own memory rather than independent record.

That same night, the story goes, the ruler could not sleep easily either. In his dream a figure appeared to him whom he recognized, with the particular authority dreams carry, as the Prophet himself, and this figure said simply that he was thirsty and wanted water. The emperor, honored and eager to serve, offered everything his palace held, cool water from the finest vessels, carried by his own most trusted hands. The figure refused all of it. There is only one man who can give me water to drink, he said, and you have put him in chains. The dream did not end gently; some tellings have the ruler struck or rebuked before he wakes gasping in the dark, the sleep shaken entirely out of him, understanding with total certainty whom his dream had been describing. He did not wait for morning. He sent men that same night to unlock the cell and bring Premnidhi to him, and when the priest was set before him again it was the ruler now who could not meet his eyes with any pride, who begged forgiveness and pressed on him whatever honor or wealth might undo what had been done. Premnidhi wanted none of it. He said only that he belonged to his Lord's feet and intended to go on belonging there, empty-handed, exactly as he always had, and asked leave to go back and finally give his Thakur the water he had been carrying, in his heart if nowhere else, since the previous evening.

What endures from this whole account is not really the drama of the arrest or even the wonder of the dream, though both have kept the story alive for centuries. It is the picture of a man for whom devotion had become so total that his own suffering barely registered against his fear that his Lord might be left wanting for something as small as a cup of water. That is the thread that runs from the flooded lane where a nameless boy carried a torch he did not need, through the prison cell where a frightened man wept not for himself but for a thirst not his own, to the temple that still stands in old Agra bearing his name, sheltering to this day one of the largest and most beloved images of Krishna in all of Braj. The shrine keeps Krishna's own tradition of household devotion alive in its yearly festivals, and pilgrims who go there are told, still, of the priest who could not tell where his own love ended and his Lord's began, and of a god who, twice in one family's memory, chose to meet desperation and slander not with punishment but with astonishing, undeserved tenderness. Whether every hard fact of the tale, which emperor, which year, can be nailed down the way a historian would want is less important, in the end, than what the story has always been trying to say: that the eye which sees anything worth seeing does so only because something dark and hidden and infinitely loving sits at its very center, and that the servant who forgets himself entirely in another's thirst is the one such love comes looking for.