Krishna-Karṇāmṛta

Begin at the feet. Soft and pink as the inside of a lotus. Two small marks, the conch and the discus, faintly visible on the soles where they touch the dust of Vraja. Anklets that ring when he walks but are silent now because he is standing still. The legs are the color of new rain cloud. The yellow cloth around the waist has been tied loosely and falls in folds that the breeze keeps adjusting.

Move up. The waist holds a small sash of pearl. Above it the chest is broad and has a single garland of forest flowers across it, blue lotuses alternating with mango-leaves, the work of a sakhī who has not slept all morning. On the chest there is also the mark known as the Śrīvatsa, a small whorl of hair where Lakṣmī is said to live. The poet does not stop long there. He has been told not to.

The arms come down to the knees. They are the arms of someone who has lifted hills and tied calves to posts and embraced cowherd boys in wrestling. The hands are holding the flute. The flute is not at the lips. It is balanced lightly between the thumb and the first finger of the right hand, the way a man holds a flute when he is about to play but is waiting for some other event in the forest to settle first.

Then the face. The poet slows the verse here. The face is the color of the rain cloud that is still about to rain. The eyes are the long lotus-petal eyes that the texts have agreed on. The mouth has the smile that is the source of every smile that ever passed across a human face. Above the forehead, tucked into the hair which is itself the color of the bee that has just left the lotus, is the peacock feather. The peacock gave it. It is the one ornament that did not have to be made by anyone.

The poet stays a long time at the face. He has nowhere else to go. Whatever else there is to see in the forest is already visible in the eyes he is looking into. The portrait does not end. It only stops being described, because the describer has run out of what speech can do and begins, at the next verse, to pray.

He has arrived first. He is sitting on the seat of leaves. The flute is lying across his knees. He is looking toward the path she will come from. Outside the kunja the forest is doing its usual work. A koel is calling from somewhere in the high branches. A small wind is moving the leaves of the kadamba. A bee has settled on the rim of a flower and is taking its time. None of it matters to him. His attention is in the path.

She comes. The first thing the poet sees is the cloth, blue as the sky just after the cloud has passed, edged with gold. Then the anklets, ringing because she is walking faster than usual. Then the eyes, looking everywhere except at him, because she has not yet decided whether she is going to look at him at all. The sakhīs around her step away one by one. By the time she reaches the kunja she is alone.

He stands. She does not. There is the small interval of time during which neither of them is sure whether to speak first. The forest holds its breath. Inside that interval the poet is doing the work the poem was made to do. He is watching. He is not interrupting. He is not breathing too loudly. He is the thirteenth sakhī, the one even the eight do not see, the one whose only function is to hold the gaze of the two of them in the gaze of his own attention.

When the moment passes, when the first word is finally said, the poet does not record what was said. He is not a court reporter. He records the smile that came up before the word, the half-step she took toward him before she remembered she was supposed to wait, the way the flute slipped from his knees to the leaf-floor when he stood, the small embarrassment that followed and made them both laugh. These are the things the inner eye remembers. The words can take care of themselves.

He breathes once. The flute is at his mouth. The first note has not yet come. Already the forest knows. The koel stops calling. The bee on the flower lifts and hovers and does not return to the flower. The river beyond the trees changes the rhythm of its own running. The trees do not move but they have all turned, in some way the eye cannot see, in his direction.

Then the note. It is one note. It is not a song. He is not performing. He is simply letting his breath go through the bamboo and out into the world, and what comes out is a note that is the same shape as the breath but is also the entire grief and joy of every cowherd boy and every cowherd girl who has ever walked in this forest and not been able to stay forever.

The note travels. It does not stop at the kunja. It crosses the river. It enters the houses of the village where the gopīs are at their evening tasks. Each gopī, hearing it, stops what she is doing. The pot she has been pouring milk into overflows and she does not notice. The thread on her loom slips out of her hand and she does not pick it up. The child at her breast pauses in his nursing because his mother has stopped breathing the rhythm he is used to.

The poet is not in any of these houses. He is back in the kunja. He is watching the boy who has lifted the flute and does not yet know what the note has done. The boy will know in a moment. The gopīs will start arriving at the edge of the forest. The night will turn into the night the texts have already written about. None of that has happened yet. For now there is only the one note, and the one breath behind it, and the poet who has been allowed to hear it before the world hears it, because the inner eye is faster than the outer ear.

He says: I am not asking for liberation. The Vedānta has its four mahāvākyas and its four results and they are all very fine. I do not want them. The yogis have their eight limbs and their samādhi at the end. They can keep them. The bhaktas of other forms have their Vaikuṇṭha and their personal company with the four-armed Lord. I do not want that either. None of these is what I have come for.

What I have come for is this. Let me keep watching. I do not need to be young. I do not need to be a sakhī. I do not need to be called by name. Let me be a small bird in one of these trees. Let me be a leaf on one of these branches. Let me be a particle of dust on the path she will walk on this evening. Whatever is the smallest thing in this kunja, let me be that, and let me stay.

He says it again. He says it many ways. He cannot stop saying it because the saying of it is the only insurance he has that he will be allowed to keep doing what he is now doing. He is afraid that if he forgets to ask, he will be moved. Some other afterlife will claim him. Some other heaven will take him in. He will be granted some destination he does not want. Therefore the asking does not stop.

And he says: if it must be that I am moved, if some karma I do not remember insists on a destination I would not choose, then at least let me carry the memory of this. Let the next life have a small window in it through which the kunja is visible. Let me look up sometimes, in whatever life I am put into, and see her bending toward him at the bent base of the tamāla, and let that be enough.

The pot has been hung from the rafters. Yashoda has hung it there because the day before he ate his way through the lower one and the one before that. The rope is short. The pot is high. She has placed beneath it nothing he could climb on. She has gone outside to grind the spices for the evening meal.

He has come into the kitchen. He is small. He looks at the pot. He looks at the floor. He looks at the pot again. He gets the small wooden mortar and turns it upside down. He gets the grinding stone and balances it on the mortar. He gets the round brass bowl and sets it on the stone. He climbs. The structure trembles. He does not. By the time the small face has reached the rim of the pot, the entire household of Nanda has held its breath, because everyone in it has watched this happen before and is watching it now without telling Yashoda.

He puts his hand in. He takes out a fistful. He eats it. He takes out another fistful. He turns and offers it, his small fingers dripping butter, to a young monkey that has come in through the open window. The monkey takes it. The two of them eat together. The monkey is not afraid of him. They have an understanding.

Yashoda comes back. She sees. She drops the spice-stone and runs. He sees her coming and laughs and tries to climb down and fails and falls and lands in her arms because she has reached him just in time. The monkey vanishes. He buries his butter-stained face in her neck. She is angry and not angry. She is the only person in the universe who can be both at once, in this exact arrangement, holding this exact small body. The poet, watching, is not sure whether he is watching the mother of the universe or the mother of a small dark boy who has been stealing butter again.

He says: if you have read this far, you have understood. I have not been arguing. I have not been teaching doctrine. I have not been advancing a school. I have been describing what one man saw when his outer eyes were closed. Whether you are a Vedāntin or a yogi or a follower of one of the other Lords, that is between you and your tradition. With me, in these three āśvāsas, you have only been looking.

He says: the looking is the practice. There is no further practice. If the verses have made you see the dark boy at the bent base of the tamāla, that is the entire benefit of the poem. If they have not, no further explanation will help. The poem is a window. Either you have looked through it or you have not. The window is not the view. The window is what makes the view possible.

He says: I am leaving the verses here. I will not say goodbye to him because he is not gone. He is in the same kunja in which I first found him. He is bent against the same tamāla. She has just stopped at his side again. The poem is over but the scene is not over. The scene was not made by the poem. The scene was always already there. The poem only opened the curtain for a moment.

He lays down the flute he has been holding all this time, which is not the boy's flute but the small flute of his own tongue. He closes his outer eyes, which were already closed. He sits in the silence the verses came out of. The colophon is the silence. There is nothing else to add.