Raghunātha Dāsa’s Lament-Flowers

Listen. I do not want what other people want. I do not want a cottage in Vaikuṇṭha with a courtyard of my own. I do not want the four kinds of liberation that the texts list and praise. The dissolution of my self into the absolute does not interest me. The companionship of Nārāyaṇa on his serpent-bed does not interest me. The pure undifferentiated bliss the renunciants describe with shining eyes does not interest me. I have walked past all of these on the road that brought me here.

I do not want to be your beloved's beloved either. I see how the gopīs love him and I know that he loves them in return, each in her own measure. I do not want my measure of him. I do not want him to look at me with the glance he gives them. If he looked at me that way I would not know what to do with the look. I would only want to bring it back to you and lay it on the cushion at your side, because the look belongs there.

What I want is small. I want to be the one who is allowed to stand a little behind you when you are dressing for him. I want to be the one whose hands you ask for the comb when your own hands are busy with the mirror. I want to be the one who is in the kunja before you arrive, smoothing the bedding, and then out of the kunja before he arrives, so the two of you find the place ready and find no one in it. I want to be the one whose breathing in the next garden is so quiet that neither of you ever notices, but who is there, who is the form that the kunja itself is taking.

If you grant this I have no other prayer. If you do not grant this I have no other prayer either, because there is nothing else to ask for. I will keep asking until the asking ends in the granting, or until the asking ends in the asker. Either ending is the same to me.

It is late afternoon. The light has begun to slant. The cows are coming home along the lane and their bells are far. In the inner room of Yāvaṭa, your sakhī is unbinding your hair. I am sitting on the floor by your foot with the small box of kohl. I do not speak. You do not speak. The whole house has fallen into the quiet that comes before something important.

Your sakhī finishes your hair. She puts the comb down. I stand up with the kohl and you turn your face toward me and I touch the soft skin under your eye with the thin stick. My hand does not shake. I have practised this so that my hand will not shake when the moment comes. I look at the eye I am painting and I see, in the eye, the kunja you are about to walk to, and the dark boy waiting at its centre, and the place on the bedding where my hands have already smoothed the cloth. The eye knows what the eye is going to.

You stand. The cloth falls into place around you. Your sakhī arranges the necklace. I tie the small bell on the inside of your ankle. The bell is for the moment of the meeting, when the bell will sing once and stop. You walk to the door. I walk three steps behind you, holding the lamp, and I follow you down the path until the place where the path turns into the kunja, and there I stop. You do not look back. You do not need to. You know I am stopping. I know you know.

I sit down on a stone at the edge of the path. I extinguish the lamp because the moon has come up and the kunja does not need the lamp. I listen. I hear, after a while, the bell sing once. Then I hear nothing. I sit on the stone and the kunja is silent and the river is silent and the night is doing what it has come for. I am not in the kunja. I am here, on the stone. And here, on the stone, is where my joy is. My joy is that the bell sang once. My joy is that the kunja is silent. My joy is your joy, which I am not in. I am the form your joy takes when it has overflowed and become the night around the kunja.

Your pond is small. You could walk around it in the time it takes a deer to drink. The water is the colour of dark honey because the earth at the bottom is the earth of Vraja, which is the colour of your skin in the third hour of an afternoon when the sun has been on it for a long time. The trees around the pond are kadamba and tamāla. They lean toward the water as if the water were what they were listening to.

I sit on a flat stone on the eastern bank. I have sat here for so many days that the stone has begun to take the shape of the place where I sit. The pilgrims who come do not see me, because I am thin and the colour of the bank, and they are not looking for a person of my size. They walk around the pond reciting your names. I listen to them. They go on. The pond returns to its quiet.

Sometimes, in the second watch of the night, the wind moves the surface of the water in a way that is not the way the wind usually moves water. I have learned that this is the moment when you and your beloved are walking along the western bank, on the path that runs under the kadambas. I do not stand up. I do not turn my head. To turn my head would be to want to see, and I do not want to see. I stay on the stone. I lower my eyes. The wind passes. The water becomes still again. I know what has just happened. The pond has been the witness, not me, and that is correct, because the pond is your pond and I am only its tenant.

If I am to die, let me die on this stone. Let the body fall into the water of the pond and let the water of the pond do with the body whatever it does. Let no one find the body. Let no one build a memorial. Let the kadambas drop their flowers on the place where the body went in, and let the wind move the surface again the next night and the night after, and let me be a little of the silt at the bottom of your pond forever. I want no other monument. I want no other grave.

I am afraid. I am afraid because I know what the world does. The world wants to make me something other than this. The world looks at a man who sits by a pond and does not eat and writes small poems, and the world wants to call him a saint. The world wants to put a garland on him. The world wants to print his name in a book. The world wants to make him a teacher of others, and a recipient of donations, and an answerer of questions in the evenings.

I am not asking for any of that. I am asking the opposite of that. I am asking you to keep me a girl in your retinue who has no name in any book of saints. I am asking you to keep me invisible to the men who would put a garland on me. I am asking you to keep me from becoming a teacher, because as soon as I become a teacher I will begin to enjoy being a teacher, and the enjoyment will be the small worm at the centre of every offering I bring you afterward.

Do not let the rasa I am tasting now become a rasa I describe to other people in clever metaphors. Do not let the little phrases I have written down here become quotations that other people memorise to flatter other people with. Do not let me become a household word in any household. Let the verses, when I am gone, scatter. Let some be lost. Let some be misattributed. Let the parts of them that are useful pass into the speech of women drawing water at your kuṇḍa, who do not know they are quoting me.

And when I myself begin, in some half-conscious moment, to be pleased with my own austerity, place your foot on my chest. Place your foot on it gently, the way you would step on a small flower that had fallen on the path you were walking. The flower is honoured by the foot. The pride is crushed by the foot. Both are done in the same gesture. That is the gesture I am asking for. That is the only correction I will accept.

Mistress. I have written what I had to write. The hand is tired. The leaf is full. There are no more flowers in the cloth. I lay the cloth down at your feet, with the thread that tied it, and the thorn from my own finger that fell into the cloth as I gathered them, and I kneel.

The only thing I want is this. When the hour of my dying comes, let it come here. Let me not be moved to a hospice. Let me not be wrapped in the shawls of well-meaning disciples and carried away on a bed. Let the hour find me on the stone by the pond, and let the eyes close where the eyes have been opening every morning for these many years, on the same water, on the same bank.

And in the last breath, let your face be the face the mind is on. Not the boy's face. Not even both your faces. Only your face. Let the breath go out toward the sole of your foot. Let it become a small wind that moves the dust on the ground at your foot, and let the dust settle again, and let the matter be finished.

Let me not be born again into another life. I do not want another body in this world or in any of the worlds the texts list. I do not want a body in your eternal Vṛndāvana either, if that body is not the body of the youngest of your handmaids. If you have such a body for me there, give it to me. If you do not have one, do not give me anything else. Let me be nothing. Nothing at your feet is more than everything anywhere else. I have looked. I have walked the routes. There is nothing better than this. Let me end here.