The Eternal Day in Eight Watches

Krishna at home. Yashoda has already heated the milk. Rohiṇī has already kneaded the dough. Krishna sits on a low stool in the courtyard while Yashoda combs the night out of his hair. He lets her comb. She does not see the small marks on his shoulder where Radha's nails have been. She sees only the boy she nursed. She wraps a fresh yellow cloth around him and ties his sash and sends him to eat. Balarāma is already at the table. Together they eat the breakfast their mothers have made. Then they take the pots and the small cane sticks and walk out to the meadow where the cows have been waiting.

Radha at home. Her mother-in-law Jaṭilā has heard her come in just before dawn and is already suspicious. Radha bathes and changes. She begins the morning's grinding, the morning's cooking, the morning's small thousand tasks of a wife in a village house. She does not look like a woman who has not slept. She looks like a woman who has done her work always. Inside, every breath she takes is for the meadow she cannot see, where he is now walking with his cows.

The mañjarīs move between the two houses with the appearance of casual errands. One brings a basket of flowers to Yashoda's door and lingers long enough to see Krishna leave for the meadow. Another brings a small jar of curd to Jaṭilā's house and lingers long enough to whisper to Radha that he has gone with the cows along the eastern path. Lalitā sees to the morning bath. Viśākhā sees to the morning meal. The flow of small information between the two houses is the work of the eight friends and their handmaids, and the work is invisible to anyone who is not part of it.

By the end of pūrvāhna, the morning chores are done. Radha has cooked what Jaṭilā wanted cooked and worn what Jaṭilā wanted worn. Krishna has taken the cows up to the high pasture where they can graze without being watched and has left Subala and Madhumaṅgala to keep an eye on them. The meadow is clear. The kunja is not far. The morning has held its shape exactly long enough for the watch that comes next to begin.

She arrives first, brought by the mañjarīs along a path the village does not know. The kunja at noon is not the kunja of the night. The leaves are full of light. The flowers have opened. Bees are working in the campaka. Parrots in the trees are repeating the names the mañjarīs taught them yesterday. The leaf-bed has been remade with fresh banana-fronds. Flowers have been arranged in patterns on the floor. A small clay stove has been built in the corner where the cooking will be done.

He arrives by the other path, slipping away from the cows by a story he has told Subala. He does not enter through the door. He climbs in over the low wall of woven creepers, and finds her standing inside, pretending to be angry that he has taken so long. She turns her face away. He goes to her and she keeps her face turned. Lalitā laughs at both of them and takes her by the hand and turns her around. The two of them stand looking at each other and the laugh of the friend is what moves them past the small play of distance into the day's first embrace.

Then the bath. The mañjarīs have brought scented water from the kuṇḍa. They pour it for Radha and Krishna together, in a clearing in the kunja where the sun comes through. They dress the two of them again, in fresh cloth, and arrange new garlands. Then the swing. A swing has been hung from the highest branch of a kadamba. Lalitā pushes them. Viśākhā sings. The two of them go up together into the green canopy and come down together out of it, and each rising and each falling is the whole life of the bhakta who has learned to love this couple.

Then the cooking. Radha cooks. The mañjarīs bring her the rice and the lentils and the small green vegetables of the season. She cooks at the clay stove she has cooked at on every noon since the world began. He sits nearby and watches her cook and is fed by her hand. The food is the food the mañjarī arranged. The hand is the hand of the mistress. The eating is between the two of them. The mañjarī is the one who arranged it and the one who watches and the one whose mouth has the taste of having watched.

Then the dice. Then the parrot-debate. Then the song the friends sing while the lovers rest, reclined together on the leaf-bed with the heat of the noon outside the kunja and the green coolness inside. Then the small noon-sleep, a few breaths long, of the two of them folded into each other while the friends keep watch at the door. Madhyāhna is not one event. It is six sargas of small events folded into each other, and each small event is a meditation in itself, and the rāgānuga sādhaka may stay inside any one of them for as many years as a life allows.

He brings the cows down the long path that comes out at the edge of the village near the grove of palms. The dust raised by the hooves is the famous dust the gopīs have sung of: the dust their devotional songs ask only to be allowed to rest in. The flute is at his lips now. He plays as he walks, and the playing is for one listener, and the listener is in her courtyard pretending to grind grain. She hears the flute. Her hand stops on the stone. Jaṭilā does not see, because Jaṭilā has gone briefly inside.

The village comes out to greet him. The little boys run to take his stick. The mothers come to the doors of their houses and drink him with their eyes and pretend they were looking for their own children. The cowherd women whose work he has made beautiful by walking past it stand at their courtyards and offer him water and arghya and small sweets. He takes nothing and refuses nothing. He walks through their offerings the way a flame walks through a wick.

He reaches Yashoda's door. Yashoda holds him and looks for cuts on his feet and finds none. She washes his feet and feeds him the small sweet she has saved for this moment. Balarāma comes in behind him. The two boys eat. Yashoda watches them eat and is the most fortunate woman in any of the worlds and does not yet know it.

Sāyaṃ falls. The lamps are lit in the courtyards. The cooking-fires are lit. The whole village smells of evening rice. In her house, Radha lights the small lamp at the family shrine. She places the wick. She turns the wick. The flame rises. She holds the flame in her cupped palm and offers it to the deity in the niche, and inside her she is offering it to him, who is at this moment offering his own evening lamp at his own family's shrine across the lanes. The two flames meet in the air above the village. No one in the village sees them meet. The mañjarīs see, because the mañjarīs see everything.

After the meal, the villagers gather at their porches. The old men tell the same stories. The young women bend their heads over their needlework. Radha sits and pretends to listen. She is counting the watches. Two more watches and the night will be hers. The kunja is being remade for her by hands she does not see. The lamps inside it are being lit by mañjarīs she trusts with the whole of her life.

The household has gone to sleep. Jaṭilā is snoring in the back room. The husband is dreaming of his fields. The lamp at the family shrine has been turned low. Radha is sitting on her bed, fully dressed, listening. She hears the small whistle of the koel from beyond the back wall and knows it is Lalitā. She rises. She moves through the courtyard with the silence of someone who has done this every night since before nights were counted. She slips through the small back door that the mañjarīs have left propped open.

Outside, the friends are waiting. They have brought a darker cloth for her, the color of the night sky after the moon has set, woven so that it gives back no light. They wrap her in it. They take the bangles off her wrists so that the bangles will not chime. They pad her anklets with small wads of cloth so that the anklets will not ring. They take her hand and lead her into the forest path that runs along the back of the gardens.

The path is dark. The trees lean over it. The mañjarīs walk before her with small lamps shielded inside their hands. Each lamp is a single point of light inside a closed palm, visible only to the next handmaid in line. The whole procession moves through the forest as a string of small hidden flames. Bees in the night-jasmine are awake. A small wind is moving in the upper leaves. A peacock somewhere in the dark calls out, and the friends stop, and the call ends without becoming an alarm, and they walk on.

The kunja is not far. The kunja is also not close. The whole watch of pradoṣa is the duration of the journey. The mañjarī who has learned to dwell inside this watch has learned the long inward walk that is the heart of the contemplative life: the walk in the dark, by hidden lamps, with friends who keep her safe, toward a meeting whose location she has known by heart since before she was born. When she reaches the door of the kunja, the door is open. He is inside, and has been waiting since the moment she rose from her bed.

She steps into the kunja. The mañjarīs draw the woven door closed behind her. They withdraw a little distance into the surrounding bowers, where they will sit through the night, awake, watching the paths and listening for any disturbance. They have done this every night since before the world began. They do it with the calm of those whose role is so settled that no part of it surprises them anymore.

Inside the kunja, the lamps are very low. The bed of leaves and flowers is freshly made. The two of them are alone. He has been waiting. He stands when she comes in. They look at each other across the small space of the kunja for a long moment that is not narrated, because no narration could hold what passes in it. Then they meet, and the night begins, and the rest is what the poet leaves to the mañjarī's silence.

Outside, the friends sit in the surrounding bowers and tell each other small stories, hum old songs softly, doze without sleeping. From inside the kunja come, occasionally, the small sounds of the two of them: a laugh, a phrase of speech, a verse of song. The mañjarīs hear them and are made happy by hearing. They do not enter. They do not look. Their joy is the joy of those for whom hearing is enough, and even the hearing is incidental. The being-near is the gift.

The night runs its long course. The hours of niśā are long because they are the hours in which time, which has been moving forward through the day, briefly stops moving. The lovers are inside the still hour. The mañjarīs are inside the still hour with them, on the other side of the woven door. Outside the still hour, the world holds its breath. The Yamunā holds its breath. The forest holds its breath. The cosmos holds its breath. This is the hour the meditator has been walking toward all day. This is the hour the meditator will walk toward again tomorrow. The poem does not end here. The poem returns, in its first sarga, to the watch of niśānta, where the lovers part again, and the day begins again, and the day will not stop beginning.