Premavāṭikā and Sujān Rasakhān

Begin at the gate. Prema is not the kind of love that grows out of similarity, not the easy affection between people who like the same things and walk at the same pace. Prema is the love that grows when the lover and the beloved are unlike, when one is small and the other is vast, when one is dark and the other is fair, when one is the keeper of cows and the other is the maker of worlds. The unlikeness is the soil. The garden grows in it.

Prema is not desire dressed up to look more respectable. Desire wants to consume. Prema wants to be consumed. Desire pulls the beloved toward the lover. Prema pushes the lover toward the beloved and is happy to be lost there. The first sign that what you have is prema and not its imitator is that you stop counting what you are getting back. The accountant inside the heart has put down the pen.

Prema is not the same as bhakti, though it lives inside bhakti the way fragrance lives inside a flower. Bhakti is the relationship. Prema is the heat at its center. A devotee can practice bhakti for years without prema arriving, the way a gardener can tend a plant for seasons without the flower opening. When prema comes, it comes as a gift. It cannot be earned. It can only be received.

Prema is not loud. It does not advertise. The lovers in the garden walk softly. The poet who has entered the garden writes softly. Anyone who is shouting about prema, says the garden, has not yet crossed the gate.

Prema simplifies. The lover who walked into the garden carrying a hundred preferences walks out with one. Food becomes whatever Krishna has left on the plate. Cloth becomes whatever covers the body warmly enough. Friendship becomes whoever else loves Krishna. The hundred small wants of the ordinary heart fall away on their own, not because they have been renounced but because they have been forgotten in the presence of the one large want.

Prema undoes. The lover who came to the garden with a name and a reputation finds that the name has stopped mattering. The reputation has been left at the gate with the sandals. Inside the garden no one is asking what caste the lover is, what family, what learning. Inside the garden everyone is reduced to the same condition: the condition of someone who has fallen in love with Krishna. Caste is undone. Status is undone. The arrangements the world insists on are undone.

Prema transforms. The lover begins to take on the qualities of the beloved. The dark of Krishna's body begins to color the lover's seeing. The flute of his playing begins to color the lover's listening. The cow-dust of his pasture begins to settle on the lover's clothing. After a long enough time in the garden the lover has become so steeped in Krishna that ordinary people, meeting the lover on the road outside the garden, sense Krishna's presence without being able to name what they are sensing.

Prema completes. The lover who came to the garden looking for completion stops looking. The completion has already happened. Whatever still remains to be lived is the playing-out of a marriage that was made before the lover knew there was a garden.

If I am to be born a man again, the doha says, let me be the kind of man Rasakhān is, the kind who walks among the cowherds of Gokula, the kind whose company is the company of cattle and milk-pails and dust. If a man's worth is his birth and his learning and his rank, that is one kind of life. If a man's worth is whose feet he sits at, that is another. The poet has chosen the second.

If I am to be born an animal, the next doha runs, let me be one of the cows whose neck Krishna pats in the late afternoon, when he counts them coming home and his hand passes briefly over the warm hide. The cow does not understand who is touching it. The cow only feels the touch. That is enough. The poet wants no more knowledge than the cow has.

If I am to be born a stone, let me be one of the stones on the path between Nanda's house and the river, the stones his feet press as he walks down to bathe at dawn. The stone has no eyes and no ears. The stone has only the weight of the foot for the moment the foot is on it. The poet wants only that weight. He wants nothing else from any future life.

If I am to be born a bird, let me be the bird who sits on the branch above the kunja where Krishna and Radha are meeting, who hears the soft talk no one else hears, and who never tells. The poet asks for the position of witness, with the discretion of the witness built in. He does not want to be a singer of what he has heard. He wants only to have heard.

A pada of the tree. Let me be the kadamba on the bank of the Yamunā where he ties his cow on hot afternoons, the kadamba whose shade falls across the dust where he sits. The tree does not move. The tree only is. The cow grazes near its roots. The boy leans against its trunk. The afternoon passes. The poet wants nothing more than to be that trunk, that shade, that not-moving while a god leans against it.

A pada of the flute. Let me be the bamboo that was cut to make his flute, the bamboo that lies now against his lower lip. The bamboo has been hollowed. The bamboo has been pierced. The bamboo has been emptied of everything it once was. What it is now is only the channel of his breath. The poet wants this. He wants the cutting and the piercing and the emptying, as long as the breath that comes out the other end is Krishna's.

A pada of the path. Let me be one of the stones on the path that runs from the cow-pen to the river. He walks this path twice a day, at dawn and at dusk, with the herd before him and the herd behind him. His feet are not always clean. His feet are sometimes muddy and sometimes thorned. The poet wants the muddy feet. The poet wants to feel the thorn the moment the boy feels the thorn.

A pada of the dust. And if not even a stone, let me be the dust the cattle raise as they come home in the evening, the dust that settles on his hair and his shoulders and the cloth tied at his waist. The dust has no shape. The dust has no name. The dust is only the smallest conceivable unit of being-in-Vraja. The poet wants even that. The poet wants only that.

In the morning, the padas say, the boys gather before the sun has fully risen. They tie their dhotis, they pick up their staffs, they call to each other across the lanes. They are eight years old, ten years old, twelve. They are not yet the men they will become. Krishna is among them, indistinguishable except to the eye that has been trained. They walk together to the cow-pen. They open the gate. The cattle come out into the cool air still smelling of straw, and the boys, laughing, drive them toward the pasture.

By mid-morning the herd is grazing. The boys sit on rocks or under trees. They eat what their mothers wrapped for them, jaggery and roti and sometimes a small piece of pickle. They share. The one who has more passes a piece to the one who has less. They do not call this generosity. They do not have a word for it. It is simply what is done.

In the heat of the afternoon they bathe. They strip and run into the Yamunā and they shout and they splash. They are not pure. They are not impure. They are children. The cattle drink at the bank. The flute is on the rock with their dhotis. After a while one of them picks it up and begins to play, and the others fall quiet and listen, the way children fall quiet when an older child begins a story.

In the evening they bring the herd home. They count the cows. Each boy knows his own. They go in to their houses. They eat what their mothers cooked. They sleep. The day was the practice. There is no other practice. Anyone who is searching for a practice, the poet says, let him look at this day. Anyone who has found this day already, let him rest.

The tomb is small. It does not announce itself from a distance. There is no large gate, no painted entrance arch with verses inscribed above it. There is a low wall, a courtyard, a structure inside the courtyard with a green cloth on the cenotaph and incense burning at its head. The visitor takes off the shoes, walks in, stands. There is nothing very much to do. The tomb does not require anything to be done.

On any given afternoon the visitors are mixed. A village family from a nearby Vraja hamlet, the women in saris, comes to pay respects. They have always come. They speak of Rasakhān as one of their own poets. A small group of Muslims from Mathura comes the next hour. They recite the fatihah. They speak of him as a Sufi who reached union by the path of love-of-the-image. A few foreign students who have read about him in a book come the hour after that. They take photographs respectfully.

No one corrects anyone. No one inside the courtyard claims him for one community against the other. The arrangement of who is honored as what has been settled, by him, four hundred years ago, by the simple act of being everything he was. He was a Pathan and a bhakta. He was a Muslim and a Krishna-lover. He was buried in Vraja and his poems are sung in temples. The double belonging is not a problem requiring resolution. The double belonging is the gift.

What the tomb teaches now, in a country and a world where religious belonging is being weaponized in every direction, is small and very serious. It teaches that bhakti has never asked the lover for a passport. It teaches that the cowherd country has always taken whoever loved it. It teaches that the line drawn between communities is a line drawn by people who do not know what is on the other side, and that the people who do know walk across the line without ceremony, because they cannot remember what the line was for.