Where Radha’s Wedding Is Recorded

He is one and he is alone. Before the syllable of creation is spoken there is no one beside him. He is the unmoving center of his own delight, complete, lacking nothing. And yet delight, when it is complete, has a way of looking for a face to look back at it.

He turns slightly, the texts say, the way a person sleeping on one side turns in their sleep without waking. From his left side, vāmāṅga, a figure separates. She is not made of any other substance. She is made of the same substance that he is. The light that has been one body becomes two bodies, the way a single flame in a lamp can be lit from and become two flames without the first flame growing any smaller.

She steps forward. She is the color of liquid gold. Her hair is the color of the rain cloud he is. Her eyes are large the way a doe's eyes are large in the moment before it lifts its head. She is wearing the same yellow cloth that he wears, only in her case it is bordered with the dark blue that is the color of him, and the cloth he wears is bordered with the gold that is the color of her. Each of them is wearing the other.

Her name is Radha. She has not been given the name. The name is the sound her presence makes. He sees her and he is for the first time looked at, and the looking is what he has been waiting for since before there was a thing called waiting. From this moment the cosmos begins to unfold. The gods will arrive. The worlds will arrive. The whole of creation that the Veda will eventually describe is the play that is now beginning between the two of them. She did not enter the story. She was the reason the story started.

The world has grown heavy. The earth has gone in the form of a cow to the door of Brahmā and Brahmā has gone with her to the door of the unbegotten and the unbegotten has heard her complaint. He has looked across to the platform where she stands beside him and she has nodded once. They have agreed.

On a midnight in the rainy season, in the prison cell of Mathurā, he is born. The Bhāgavata tells the story you already know: the manacles fall, the doors open, the river parts, the father carries the child across. The Brahmavaivarta tells the same story, only it lingers longer on the moment of arrival in Gokula. The exhausted father lays the boy down beside Yashoda, who has just given birth to a daughter and is sleeping the sleep of the recently delivered. He picks up the daughter, walks back through the still-parted river, returns to the prison, lies down beside Devakī, and waits.

Yashoda wakes to the small sound of a child breathing beside her and finds, in place of the daughter she remembers, a son the color of a rain cloud. She does not question it. The mind of a mother freshly woken is a mind that does not question. She takes him to her breast. The boy who is the source of every world below begins, for the next sixteen years, to be a cowherd's son.

The cowherd setting now takes its hold on the rest of the text. The cows. The wide-eyed mothers. The boys his age who run past his door with sticks for the pasture. The Yamunā at the bottom of the lane, where the women gather at dawn to draw water. The forest beyond the village, with the grove called Bhāṇḍīravana in its heart, that no one visits much because the path is overgrown and there is nothing in there worth walking to. None of these notice that they are now the stage of the largest event in the history of the worlds. The stage will not notice for some time. Krishna prefers it that way.

She walks past the cow-pen and the gate of Nanda's house and on into the lane that runs down to the Yamunā. The afternoon is the kind of afternoon that has no events in it. Crows in the neem. A breeze moving the cloth around her ankles. The boy in her arms is heavy in the way small children are heavy when they have fallen asleep. She crosses the path that leads down to the water and turns instead into the grove they call Bhāṇḍīravana, where the tamāla trees stand close together and almost no one walks at this hour.

Inside the grove the light changes. A mist rises from the ground that is not dust and not smoke. The air becomes the quiet that is in a house at night when everyone is asleep but you. The boy in her arms shifts. He is no longer the boy. He has become the cowherd of every dream she has ever had: dark like a rain cloud, with a peacock feather in his hair, holding a flute. He is looking at her. And she, looking down at herself, sees that she also is changed. The cloth she is wearing is no longer the cloth she put on this morning. It is yellow as turmeric and woven with gold. Her hands have rings she did not own. She is no longer the girl who was carrying him.

Brahmā arrives. He comes out of the mist with the marriage-fire already lit in a small clay pot and sits down at the root of the largest tamāla. He pours the ghee. He recites the mantras. He places her hand in Krishna's. The two of them walk seven times around the fire. The tamāla trees are the witnesses. The Yamunā beyond the grove is the witness. The cosmos at this moment has shrunk to one small clearing in a forest near a village where most of the people are still inside their houses, eating.

When the seventh circuit is complete the mist falls away. The grove returns to the grove she walked into. The boy is the boy again, asleep on her shoulder. She is the girl with the basket. She turns and walks back the way she came. The forest keeps its mouth shut. The Yamunā keeps its mouth shut. Brahmā returns to his lotus. By the time she reaches the gate of Nanda's house, only the rings she still wears under her sleeve, and the small smile that will not leave her face, remind her that any of it has happened. And when, days later, she looks for the rings, they are gone too.

He is the boy again. She is the girl with the basket again. They are no longer wearing the gold-bordered cloth and the blue-bordered cloth. The flute has gone back to wherever the flute waits when it is not being played. The peacock feather is no longer in his hair. He is asleep on her shoulder, the slight weight of a child who has been asleep for some time.

She steps out of the grove and onto the path that leads back toward the village. The path is the same path she walked in on. The afternoon light is the same afternoon light. A neighbor is calling to a goat across a courtyard. Two boys go past with a stick and a hoop, not noticing her. The Yamunā at the bottom of the slope has begun to catch the gold of the lowering sun on its surface.

She does not yet know what to do with what has happened. She is six or seven years older than the child on her shoulder. She is a girl from a respectable cowherd family. She is, by every external sign, exactly what she was when she left the kitchen of Nanda's house this morning with this child on her hip. And yet, beneath the sleeve of her ordinary upper cloth, three rings she did not own this morning still press against her wrist. And in some place that is neither her chest nor her throat but somewhere between them, a quiet has settled that was not there before.

She returns the child to Yashoda, who is now done in the kitchen and reaching for him. Yashoda thanks her. Yashoda offers her sweets from the platter. She takes one, smiles, declines the rest, walks home. The whole exchange takes the length of any ordinary errand. The neighbor's goat is still calling. The boys with the hoop come back the other way. The forest behind her holds what it has just held and does not say. She enters her own house and lies down, and the sleep that comes is the deepest sleep she has slept since she was a child.

He has stayed too long with one of the other gopīs. Or he has been seen smiling at her in a way Radha does not approve of. Or he has not come to the kunja at the hour he had agreed to come. Or one of her sakhīs, mischievous, has whispered something into her ear that may or may not be true. The cause is small. The pride is enormous. She turns her face away from him and will not turn back.

He comes to the door of her kunja. He stands outside. He calls her name. She does not answer. He puts down the flute. He sets aside the peacock feather. He folds his hands. He begins, in a voice the cosmos has not heard him use before, to apologize. He admits things that may not even be true. He invents fault to claim it. He asks her to forgive him for sins he has not committed and for some he has only thought about committing.

She listens. She wants to forgive him. She has wanted to forgive him from the moment she turned away. She does not yet allow her face to soften. The sakhīs gather at a small distance, watching, half delighted, half afraid. Lalitā tilts her head. Viśākhā raises a finger to her lips. The whole forest is watching. The Yamunā is watching. The flute, lying on the ground, is watching with the patience of a thing that knows it is about to be picked up again.

Then he says one thing more, the right thing, the small specific phrase that only he, of all the lovers in the worlds, would know how to say to her. And her eyes fill. She turns. She does not yet smile. She allows him to come close. He takes her hand. The forest exhales. The Yamunā moves on. The sakhīs scatter, laughing into their veils. He picks up the flute. The night, which had paused, resumes.

She is called Vṛndāvaneśvarī, the queen of the forest of basil. She is called Goloka-vāsinī, the dweller in the country of cows. She is called Rāseśvarī, the lady of the circle dance. She is called Vraja-vallabhā, the beloved of the cowherd land. The names that come first are the names of place. They locate her. They tell the worshipper that her address is not metaphor.

She is called Hṛdaya-vāsinī, the dweller in the heart. She is called Antaryāminī, the inner ruler. She is called Cit-svarūpiṇī, the form of consciousness itself. She is called Ānanda-rūpā, the form of bliss. The middle names of the hymn move inward. The forest she dwells in is not only the forest in Mathurā. The country of cows is not only the country above the Vaikuṇṭhas. The address she keeps is also the chest of the worshipper who is now reciting the hymn.

She is called Kṛṣṇa-prāṇa-priyā, dearer to Krishna than his own breath. She is called Vāmāṅga-sambhūtā, born from his left side. She is called Premānanda-rasonmattā, intoxicated with the rasa of the bliss of love. She is called Hlādinī, the joy-power, the energy by which the absolute knows itself as bliss. The names of relation now arrive. She is being defined, again and again, by her belonging to him, and he by his being defined entirely through her.

And she is called Karuṇāmayī, full of compassion. She is called Bhakta-vatsalā, fond of those who love her. She is called Patita-pāvanī, the one who lifts up the fallen. She is called Śaraṇāgata-rakṣiṇī, the protector of those who have come for refuge. The hymn closes on these. The hundred names that began as the names of place have walked inward to the heart and outward again to the hand of the supplicant. To take her name, the text suggests, is to be already taken by her.