Brahmavaivarta Purāṇa· ब्रह्मवैवर्त पुराण
The Wedding in Bhāṇḍīravana
Krishna-Janma Khaṇḍa, around chapter 15
An ordinary afternoon in Vraja. Yashoda is busy in the kitchen. Krishna is a small child. She asks the older Radha, who has come over with a basket, to take him outside for a while. Radha lifts the boy onto her hip and walks toward the forest by the river.
She walks past the cow-pen and the gate of Nanda's house and on into the lane that runs 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.
The Brahmavaivarta places the wedding inside ordinary time, in a forest beside a village, on an afternoon when the cosmos has nothing else on its calendar. The whole later theology of Radha turns on this passage. She is not Krishna's beloved by accident. She has been his bride from before the world began, and the world has simply been arranging itself ever since around the fact.