Ka

XII

Nothing was ever more cheerful than Kṛṣṇa’s childhood. He was the ragged, cheeky kid everybody knew in the clay huts of Gokula, the fields around Mathurā, the courtyards of the rich — the kid whose endless mischief they always forgave. Wherever he went, he would always be carrying a cowherd’s goad. His first, perhaps only, rule was that nothing is so sweet as sweets that are stolen. Wherever he passed by, cream would disappear, He began his adventures by splashing in all the muddy puddles around the village. The experience would remain in his mind as the measure of all happiness. A band of little boys followed him everywhere — and he hid among them. Apart from these companions in adventure, the only creatures he ever had dealings with were of the other sex. The mothers would look up from their embroidery, craning their necks, and laugh to see the boys returning smothered in dust, and feel suddenly young again themselves, ready to leap off like antelopes along the Yamunā. And then the enchanting gopīs, the cow girls. Like children in another school you could climb a wall and signal to. There was a never-ending game between them: teasing, stifled laughter, races, practical jokes, gifts. And then the cows, those slow, solemn creatures who were the coinage of the countryside, and everywhere in circulation.

Trying to keep a straight face Yaśodā, Kṛṣṇa’s mother, would often listen to the complaints of other mothers who had become the butt of the urchin band’s adventures. It was a comedy everybody felt bound to act out. Soon they forgot about it and talked about something else. Only once was Yaśodā alarmed. Some little boys had been spying for her: “Kṛṣṇa is grubbing around and eating filth like a pig.” Yaśodā rushed out and found the boy on all fours. She yelled and scolded but then was shocked to see a terrifying flash light up his eyes. “Mother, it’s all lies. If you don’t believe me, look in my mouth.” “Open up,” said Yaśodā.

The mother watched those small lips, whose every crack she knew so well, come apart. Yaśodā bent down to study her son’s palate and found a vast, starry vault that sucked her in. Already Yaśodā was traveling, flying. Where the back of his throat should have been rose Mount Meru, strewn with endless forests. To one side were islands, which perhaps were continents, and lakes, which perhaps were oceans. Yaśodā breathed with a new calm, as if she had walked into the open air for the first time in her son’s mouth. The vision that most enchanted her was the wheel of the Zodiac: it girded the world obliquely, like a many-colored sash. But Yaśodā went further. She saw the mind’s back-and-forth, its lunar inconstancy, its monkey leaps from branch to branch of the universe. She saw the three threads all substances are made of twist together in balls, which produced other balls. And behind it all she saw the village of Gokula, recognized its narrow streets, the patterns of its stonework, the carts, the springs, the wilting flowers. Until finally she saw herself, in a street, looking into a little boy’s mouth.

For years the lives of the two bands, the little cowherd boys and the gopīs, ran parallel. They were like a single body split into two patrols, divided into two wings, moving on opposite sides of a low hill, shouting insults and gesturing defiantly at each other from the two banks of a stream. But it was hard to tell who was speaking and who was answering. They were a twin flock, milling in the air. There wasn’t a ripple in the one that didn’t find its dimple in the other.

But the gopīs were growing up too. One icy dawn in the first month of winter, they met to celebrate a rite in honor of the goddess Kātyāyanī. They were proud and very aware of doing something new. This time the band of boys would not be on the other bank of the Yamunā. They were callow, probably asleep. The gopīs felt more adult. Only they, they thought, could go through this ceremony, Only they could gain intimacy with the Goddess.

It had barely begun to grow light when they reached the Yamunā and took off all their clothes on the bank. They pretended it was a normal thing to do, but they were trembling with excitement on seeing each other’s naked bodies for the first time. They walked off, apparently deep in thought, leaving their robes, all embroidered at the hems, in soft little piles behind. Then they went down into the water till it was halfway up their thighs, which were quickly turning to columns of ice.

They had to make a statue of the Goddess out of sand. They worked like skilled craftsmen. They adorned it with garlands, poured sandalwood oil over it, lit little flames around it, laid it on a bed of leaves, fruit, and rice. They worked of one accord and in silence, and as they did so each one was praying in the silence of her mind, frightened almost by the words she was hearing there, words which for the first time were hers and only hers. They would never have wanted to say those words to any of their companions. They blushed at the mere thought that such a thing might happen. At the very same time, in the mind of each gopī, the same words were being pronounced: “O Kātyāyanī, sovereign of the mind and of deceptions, let Kṛṣṇa, son of the herdsman Nanda, become my husband. I bow down before you.” Not one of them was more eloquent, not one spoke a word more. They had but one desire, but one name to name it. Each felt at that moment that she was the protagonist of a story none of the others could possibly know. Each felt separate from the whole for the first time, and inebriated with being so, ready to endure that corrosive, melting sensation she now discovered in the pit of her stomach.

But they soon passed from praying to playing, in the water. And all at once these lovesick girls went back to being children who tussle together and laugh. Kṛṣṇa slipped out of their minds. But Kṛṣṇa was watching them. Perched on the forked branch of a huge nīpa tree that bent over the river, the bright eyes of his companions darting among the leaves all around, Kṛṣṇa watched the gopīs at play in the water as he raised the clothes they had left behind to his lips, breathing in their perfume one after the other. For the first time he saw the gopīs’ breasts, and found they were like the domed temples of elephants. For the first time he saw the curve of their hips, which he had long glimpsed in the hidden movements beneath their clothes. For the first time he saw those bellies tight as drums converging on that dripping hair that appeared and disappeared amid the waters of the Yamunā. For the first time he saw the agile thighs, thrashing through the waves as they played. One by one he raised their robes to his mouth, whispering the name of the gopī they belonged to. Each time it seemed Kṛṣṇa had found the ultimate name, the name that cancels out all others, the name he would go on repeating forever. But then immediately afterward, he was pronouncing a new name, in a slightly different whisper. This went on for a long time, until one by one, after each had been brushed by Kṛṣṇa’s lips, the gopīs’ clothes passed from the right fork to the left of the branch of the nīpa tree.

All of a sudden one of the gopīs lost interest in their game. She looked toward the bank, turned her head this way and that. The little heaps of clothes were gone. She screamed. She didn’t need to explain anything. The others turned their heads and joined in. It was a solid, penetrating scream, raised in a freezing, empty dawn. Then, wary and sidelong, the gopīs slowly lifted their eyes to the leaves of the nīpa tree. And then they heard Kṛṣṇa’s voice. It was the voice of the tormentor who played tricks on all of them together, and the voice of the lover sending a coded message to each in her separateness from the others. Kṛṣṇa said: “Girls, don’t be afraid, your clothes are all here. You of the slender waists, come one by one to get them back.” He was finding it hard to keep a straight face: the gopīs had all sunk down into the waters of the river, last veil for their nudity, so that all you could see was arched brows over bright eyes staring at the tree. Only their hair floated free, like tendrils of aquatic plants. But the longer the gopīs stayed down in the water, the more an icy cold clutched at their throats. Then they spoke: “Kṛṣṇa, this is the meanest trick you’ve ever played. You are our beloved, but you also know the rules of law and custom. If you don’t give us our clothes back, we will have to tell your father.” Kṛṣṇa answered in what was now unequivocally a lover’s voice: “If you really are my slaves and want nothing better than to obey me, then you will come up here to get your clothes back, you of the lovely hips.” So one by one, shivering with cold, and for the first time making that gesture of covering their dripping bellies with their hands, the gopīs came out of the water and approached Kṛṣṇa. For a moment each imagined that Kṛṣṇa would take her by the hand and run off, with her alone. But Kṛṣṇa did nothing more than give each girl her clothes back, taking care that their fingers didn’t meet.

Before they covered themselves up again, Kṛṣṇa wanted to gaze at them once more, to see those bodies he had stared at, dreamed of, completely naked, out of the water. So, finding a solemn voice, he said: “By bathing naked in the Yamunā, you have sinned against Varuṇa, you have exposed yourselves to him without shame. Now you must seek his forgiveness. Before dressing, raise your arms above your heads, press the palms of your hands together, then bow down. May the god forgive you.” The gopīs obeyed. Kṛṣṇa watched them putting on a stern face, while making mental notes: that one had breasts that pointed away from each other, a sort of felicitous squinting; this one had buttocks that arched over two dimples, like hills rising from tiny lakes; that one’s knees were small, round shields; this one’s eyes couldn’t concentrate on the invisible Varuṇa but were shifting sideways to follow Kṛṣṇa, as though tied to him by a thin thread. The ceremony went on a long time, a ceremony that in no way resembled the one the gopīs had come down to the river for. Kṛṣṇa was eager that it be as solemn as possible. Everything proceeded in silence. In the end, Kṛṣṇa said: “My beloved ones, I know you want nothing better than to adore me. Your desire has made me glad, and deserves to be fulfilled. When this desire has been satisfied, no other desire will replace it. It is a flower that hides no seed. You may touch my feet with your hands. Then go back to Gokula.” Immediately afterwards, one by one, the gopīs were to hear the words that would stay with them all their lives. They heard Kṛṣṇa say their names and then: “I will be with you every night.” Then, bowing their heads, reluctantly, the gopīs walked off in single file and without looking back returned to the village.

While spying on the gopīs, hidden in the leaves of the nīpa tree, Kṛṣṇa was discovering a higher form of theft, which was his vocation and delight: the theft you commit with your eyes. But was he the inventor of that theft? Or was this gesture the reflection of another? The gopīs had shown him the way, before their dripping bodies became the way itself. One day — Kṛṣṇa was five years old — Yaśodā was holding him in her lap, feeding him something white and creamy. They called it “butter,” but it was curdled milk, the common milk that came from the cows of Vraja. Kṛṣṇa was having his breakfast. The god’s face had the round brightness of the moon, and wore an expression of total absorption, as if the butter dripping on his dark chest were everything there was. In the kitchen, hidden in the shadows, two gopīs were watching the scene. It was a “vision,” daŕsana, and if by vision we mean the surrender of he who looks to that which he sees, then this was the first of all. The substance of the world and the substance of the god mixed together, rising and falling, like the wave of the first beginnings, where all was dissolved and latent. The gopīs felt they were immersed in the god, as one day they would be immersed up to their eyebrows in the Yamunā to escape his gaze.

Another day Kṛṣṇa had climbed on a stool and plunged his hands into a terra-cotta jar full of butter. Motionless in the shadows, two gopīs watched that black creature whose glossy skin overlay the gloom of the dark. Did they glimpse two small, flailing arms? Or were there four? As they watched Kṛṣṇa in the deep silence of the kitchen, they felt liquid and warm, and each in her mind spoke the same words: “Oh, come and steal from me, come and steal me.”

And there was another time when the gopīs got together to watch Kṛṣṇa. Exasperated by the complaints of all those Kṛṣṇa had stolen from, Yaśodā had bound him to the mortar, exposing him to the public gaze. This time the gopīs came openly, and in numbers. The show of morality gave the scene its erotic spicing. Could anyone imagine anything more exciting? To be asked to watch a punishment that offered the witnesses material for pure pleasure: to gaze on the body of a helpless Kṛṣṇa? The gopīs tried to look as stern as they could. Their eyes were greedier than ever: for the first time they saw a Kṛṣṇa who was forced to stay still, not that flashing, darting creature they were used to. Then Kṛṣṇa cried, tied up as he was, and the teardrops that fell on his chest sparkled together with his earrings like golden crocodiles. Yaśodā played prison guard. The gopīs’ eyes were directed at Kṛṣṇa, but it was Yaśodā they pierced. Never had they felt so jealous of her, handling Kṛṣṇa and bossing him around as if he were a little animal.

The gopīs, about sixteen thousand of them, suffered jealousy for Kṛṣṇa, a jealousy galvanized by three rivals: Yaśodā, the mother; Rādhā, the favorite lover; Muralī, the flute.

What we call “history,” right up to its blazing conclusion, appears between the seventh and tenth “descents,” avatāras, of Viṣṇu. From that moment on, the key players are no longer prodigious animals, like the turtle, Kūrma, and the boar, Varāha, but two men, in succession: Kṛṣṇa and the Buddha. Since then the white horse that will be the harbinger of the end has never appeared, but in the meantime life has swung back and forth between the consequences of Kṛṣṇa and Buddha, the eighth and ninth descents of Viṣṇu. We mull over the deeds of these two as if they were characters in a novel, sharing with them an intimacy we cannot have with the primordial beasts.

It is to Kṛṣṇa that the world owes the extinction of the heroes — and of himself, when he took part in the massacre of Kurukṣetra, the “field of the Kurus,” as counselor and ally of the sons of Pāṇḍu. But in his infancy and adolescence, when he wandered around Vraja like a cowherd surrounded by cow girls, he had already made us a gift that was to be the most precious viaticum for the age of conflict, then about to begin and as yet still with us: the gift of “devotion,” bhakti. In this dark and faltering age, one cannot practice knowledge without oiling it with devotion, without subjecting it to that impetus of the heart which the gopīs unearthed once and for all. At once superior and inferior to every distinct form of knowledge founded in itself, devotion is an ambiguous gift, yet not so ambiguous as that offered by the next aratāra. For the knowledge the Buddha brought has a corrosive quality, which can lead to a dissolution of devotion or to its exaltation in a sparer and more abstract form, of a kind the gopīs hadn’t yet achieved, and perhaps never wanted to.

Kṛṣṇa came down into the world when many possibilities had already been exhausted. Wars no longer took place between gods but between potentates. There were no more ṛṣis, powerful as the wild beasts of the forest, threatening the heavens with the stillness of their minds. Instead there were shabby, shaggy ascetics. The Apsaras no longer sallied forth from their celestial palaces in embroidered robes and sparkling sandals to meet together by wood or riverbank. Instead there were wild-eyed, barefooted girls gathering herbs, quick to theft and flight.

The gopīs knew no discipline. Their days were not arranged around ritual duties. They obeyed only their emotions. They were the first quietists. It was not that they weren’t familiar with the ceremonies or didn’t respect them, just that as soon as they got the chance they ran off to tend the cows. They neither imagined nor desired that their lives should have direction. They thought of the city as a foreign place that you might visit for the market, or to sell butter and buy small trinkets. Every gopī was obedient to a secret vow. They welcomed new arrivals as though into a sorority. But there was no need to explain a doctrine, just as one doesn’t explain what water is. Some didn’t stay the course. They would go back to the village and wander from room to room for a while with gloomy faces. Then they forgot — or pretended to forget. They became part of the family again. Whereas the gopīs belonged to no one, answered to no one.

The gopīs were good-looking cow girls with thin, nervous legs, gypsylike, as violent in play as in their feelings. While they were tending their cows, the oranges, violets, blues, yellows, others, greens, and reds of the clothes they wrapped so carefully around their bodies would stand out against grass and sky. Walking along the road, balancing jars of butter on their heads, they were as conspicuous as colored ribbons fluttering in the breeze. Sometimes, if they had been playing with Kṛṣṇa and the other herdboys, rolling around on the muddy ground, they would be grimy with dust, bristling, tousled. But for long periods they wandered around alone. Then they would get together in a circle, whisper, conspire. There was one thing their minds came endlessly back to: how to explain Kṛṣṇa’s managing to steal some gopīs’ sugared butter every single night without ever getting caught? They told each other how they would tie him up with a long scarf of red silk. They thought of all the insults they would make up to heap on him. They knew no school but the meadows, woods, and canebrakes. They knew no music but that which issued from Muralī, Kṛṣṇa’s flute. They were jealous of it, because Muralï is a feminine creature, and she would abandon herself to Kṛṣṇa’s mouth before their eyes. They never yearned for another life. When they walked in single file toward Mathurā, there was only one excitement they were hoping for: the game of the butter tax. Kṛṣṇa and the other boys might sneak out of the bushes. Wearing crude masks, they would claim to be the king’s guards and demand that butter duty be paid. The gopīs would resist. But already Kṛṣṇa and the other boys would be grabbing the pitchers and mussing up their clothes. Then they ran off with the loot, brash and cocky as bandits.

Closer to Fénelon than to the Vedas, untempted by any articulated form of knowledge, the gopīs would only ever know an alternation of the presence that melts, the privation that paralyzes. All possibilities between, the things that make up ordinary life, were of no interest to them. Precisely, painstakingly, but like so many sleepwalkers, they got on with their daily duties, milked the cows, looked after the children, drew water, fed the fire. Agreeable, obliging, but absent. Across their bright, empty eyes slid a shadow, the only time you might have suspected the inklings of a thought was when they sat down to put on their makeup. Then they conversed with the mirror as though the two images of their face were two flimsy fabrics that clung to the air between, flittingly haunted by Kṛṣṇa’s phantom.

Rasa, “juice,” “sap,” also means “emotion,” “taste,” “flavor.” Kṛṣṇa is the determined thief of a barely curdled liquid because he himself is liquid. Kṛṣṇa is forever stealing from himself. It is the emotion that steals the heart. Kṛṣṇa is he who opens the liquid path toward the bazaar of love. Going there is as dangerous as diving into waters from which one may never emerge.

When the first full moon of autumn approaches and the jasmine is in bloom, the shrill, soft sound of the flute penetrates the rooms. It is Kṛṣṇa calling. Whatever they are doing, the gopīs are roused. One gets up from the half-empty pail where she was milking a cow. One gets up from the flickering twigs where she was lighting the fire. One gets up from the bed where her husband was about to embrace her. One gets up from the toys she was playing with on the floor. One knocks over the bottles she was using to perfume herself. They are little girls, adolescents, wives who suddenly and furtively set off toward the forest. All you would hear then was a tinkling of bangles and ankle bracelets through the dark. Slipping out from the trees, each believing she was alone, they found Kṛṣṇa in a moonlit clearing. He looked at them, as they stood still, painting from haste, smiled and said: “Women of good fortune, what can I do for you? The night is full of frightening creatures. Sons, husbands, and parents are waiting for you in the village. I know you have come here for me. This is happiness. But you mustn’t let people stay up worrying on your account. Celebrate my name in silence, from afar.” Then one of the gopīs spoke up on behalf of all the others: “Nothing we have left behind is as urgent and important to us as adoring the soles of your feet. No one is closer to us than you are. Why is it that learned men can find refuge in you, and we cannot? We grovel in the dust of your footsteps. Place your hand on our breasts and our heads.” Kṛṣṇa smiled again and began to walk, playing Muralī, the flute. From behind a curtain of leaves came the sound of the Yamunā flowing by. One by one, in order, the gopīs came up to Kṛṣṇa and, shaking breasts damp with sweat and sandalwood oil, brushed against his blue chest. Whenever Kṛṣṇa laid his mouth on a new hole of his musical rod, his lips wet a different part of the gopīs’ bodies. In the milky light you could just see the pink marks his nails left. Dancing ever so slowly, the circle of the gopīs closed around Kṛṣṇa as he went on playing Muralī. Each felt seized, abandoned, seized again, as if by a wave. Then all at once each noticed that her eyes had met those of the gopīs on the opposite side of the circle, while the center was suddenly empty. Yet again, Kṛṣṇa had disappeared. Then they scattered. Some mimed Kṛṣṇa’s deeds, like actresses. One was Pūtanā, the evil wet nurse who tried to poison Kṛṣṇa with her milk; another gripped her breast, sucking it violently as Kṛṣṇa once had. Another copied the slight sway of Kṛṣṇa’s gait. Another put her foot on a companion’s head and said: “I am here to punish the wicked.” But others were quiet and stared at the ground. They were trying to find footprints. Not just Kṛṣṇa’s but the light step of another gopī, Rādhā, the favorite. Doubtless Kṛṣṇa had left them to hide away alone with her. There were those who to their dismay could remember seeing Kṛṣṇa lie down like a riverbed between the columns of Rādhā’s legs and speak words that made them blush: “Adorn my head with the sublime bud of your feet.” The gopīs’ eyes glittered with anger as they hunted. Another clearing opened up, and in the middle, arms clutched around her knees, hair loose, shut up in herself like a bundle of colored rags, they found Rādhā. When she raised her face, it was furrowed with tears. Kṛṣṇa had just left her.

The rāsalīlā, “the dance game,” the circular dance that is echoed in every other dance, couldn’t get started. Each of the gopīs wanted to be nearest to Kṛṣṇa. They were all trying to get close enough to color his skin with the saffron paste smeared on their breasts. That way they would have managed, even if only for a few seconds, to have left a trace of themselves on him. A cluster of shawls, bodices, and slender, glistening chests closed him in on every side. Then in order to get the dance going, Kṛṣṇa decided to multiply himself. He resorted to his knowledge of mirrors and reflection. In the circle, between each gopī and the next, another Kṛṣṇa appeared, holding them by the hand and looking alternately at one, then the other, as though following the steps of the dance, though each gopī was convinced that he was there for her alone. The yellow cloth wrapped around his loins was always the same, but the color of the skin varied, from dark blue to hyacinth. These were the many Kṛṣṇa, while the one Kṛṣṇa remained in the center of the circle, where the gopīs could see nothing at all.

Is the love of Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā, or of Kṛṣṇa and the gopīs for that matter, svakīyā (legitimate, conjugal) or parakīyā (illegitimate, adulterous)? It’s a theological question which cleaves the centuries like a flaming sword and over which scholars have argued vehemently and rancorously. In 1717 they hastened in their scores to the court of Nawāb Ja‘far Khān to confute the positions of their enemies. They came from all over Bengal and Orissa, but likewise from Vārāṇasī and Vikrampur. They debated the matter for six months, to the point of total exhaustion. Pale and haggard, they argued over the greater or lesser intensity of Kṛṣṇa’s erotic games with Rādhā, and their celestial consequences: if the līlā that briefly occurs at Vṛndāvana is no more than a feeble replica of the one perennially performed in the celestial Vṛndāvana, does that then mean that adulterous love is sovereign in the sky as on earth and offers itself as a model even to the gods? And must what is a model for the gods by that very token be one for men too?

Then there were other questions, less lofty perhaps, but just as thorny. If the sixteen thousand gopīs were all married, what went on in their homes at night while they were dancing the rāsalīlā with Kṛṣṇa? How was it that those sixteen thousand husbands never complained — perhaps never even noticed their wives’ absence? Would one have to subscribe to the theory according to which sixteen thousand gopī simulacra stayed calm and quiet in their legitimate beds while the bodies of the real gopīs wrapped themselves like parasites around Kṛṣṇa.

The controversy was violent in the extreme, and over those months of debate at least six centuries of war were echoed. In the end the disciples who upheld svakīyā conceded defeat. They underwrote a document in which they accepted as correct the doctrine they had always abhorred. But what were the decisive arguments that sealed the triumphant sovereignty of the illegitimate? parakīyā is that which brings the metaphysical element in love to the point of incandescence. And what is that element? Separation. Never is the “flavor” (rasa) of “separation” (viraha) so intense as in illegitimate passion. Furthermore: whatever is parakīyā is denied the permanence of possession. It is a state in which one can only occasionally be possessed. This corresponds to the essence of every relationship with Kṛṣṇa. Finally: the woman who abandons herself to a love that is parakīyā risks more than other women. To violate the rules of conjugal order is to deny this world’s bonds and abandon oneself to what calls to us from beyond the world. Such love does not seek to bear fruit, and it never will. Whatever seeks to bear fruit will consume itself in that fruit. While that which disregards every fruit is inexhaustible. This is pure preman, liquid, diffuse “love,” unsatisfied by the obsessive arrow of kāma, “desire,” but absorbing it into itself and keeping it circulating there, the way Kṛṣṇa’s seed continues to circulate in his body without ever bursting forth. He who follows kāma wants nothing better than for the arrow to strike its one target, pleasure. But he who follows a love that is parakīyā must always take his pleasure mingled with fear, indeed with a twofold fear: the fear of separation and the fear of punishment. Both weigh on him, constantly, surrounding every sensual delight with a livid and thrilling aura. Yet it is only that twofold fear which gains us entry to the “sweetness” (mādhurya) which is Kṛṣṇa’s ultimate nature, the trait revealed when a lover’s being has, little by little and ever so slowly, been stripped of all its clothes. She who reaches that point will feel Kṛṣṇa’s hand grip her wrist, as though to help her place her foot on the stones of a stream before launching herself into him on the other bank. Thus did the theologians and ascetics set off on their ways, once more having accepted a doctrine whose very name boasted a flagrant and glorious contradiction: the parakīyādharma, the “law of the illegitimate.”

“Heart thief and butter thief,” Kṛṣṇa was called. Or again, “thief of the heart’s butter.” But when his favorite, Rādhā, doubts him and demands to hear every one of his names, she doubts each of them, for they could each refer to someone else, except one, that is “butter thief.” It is the only epithet that identifies Kṛṣṇa beyond all doubt. Even when he was exploring Yaśodā’s kitchen on all fours, the little boy was drawn to those terra-cotta jars and their inebriating, creamy contents. Soon Yaśodā decided to keep the jars hanging in the air so that Kṛṣṇa couldn’t get them. But nothing was beyond his reach. He climbed on beams and windows. Sometimes Yaśodā would catch him with his hands in the butter. “I’m chasing off the ants,” Kṛṣṇa would say at once. Butter was the element through which he communicated with other creatures, with all women, with his mother, with Rādhā, with the gopīs.

Kṛṣṇa means “Black,” “Obscure.” The first creature the word was used to refer to was the antelope, who was also the first among creatures. It was in the black pelt of a skinned antelope that the loins of the sacrificer were wrapped. And sacrifice is the perennial second act, the act that extracts an essence from the first, an articulation that then allows us, through the third act — ordinary life — to move on to every other.

As a lover Kṛṣṇa did not look black but blue, purplish, or sometimes even lighter: mauve. Often his skin resembled the big bluish stain on Śiva’s neck where the ocean’s poison had concentrated, the stain his partners loved to lick. When he fought and cut off heads, Kṛṣṇs might go back to being black again. Then a yellow fabric would arch up from behind his shoulders and, like the whites of his eyes, gleam out against the dark.

One night when the moon was full, in the month of Kārttika, the gods got together in a circle to watch the dance of the perfect lovers, Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā. This time Śiva sang an accompaniment in a voice that was rarely heard. Gazing at the two twining bodies, the brilliant colors mingling together, the gods fell into a gentle swoon. When they awoke, the lovers had melted to become a spring that flowed silently into the Gangā.

Kṛṣṇa left the forest and meadows of Vṛndāvana for the city of Dvārakā, where he was united in wedlock to eight queens. The gopīs now roamed in silence. Accustomed to the emotion of stolen love, when they were alone they would sometimes say the words “you thief” over and over, but without getting any response. Life went on as though Kṛṣṇa had never been with them. Separation, emptiness, absence: this was the new emotion, and the only one.

Shut away in his palace, his eight worthy, pompous queens orbiting around him with implacable precision, Kṛṣṇa was getting bored. Occasional relief came in the form of conversations with the old Nārada. Born from the neck of Brahmā, condemned by Brahmā to wauder forever without respite, Nārada had been through so many stories, seen so many places. Old now and cunning, curious, part pander, part court counselor, a great musician, a great teller of tales, deceitful, voyeur. flatterer, intelligent. malevolent — who better than he to distract one from melancholy? thought Kṛṣṇa. They spent the nights playing chess and talking. Then Nārada would play the vīṇā, as masterfully as ever. Kṛṣṇa enjoyed teasing him too. Once he said: “Now tell me about the life when you were a worm and tried to avoid the chariot of that king.” “Of course, we are always attached to our bodies, even when we’re worms…,” said Nārada. He smiled, but somewhat nervously. The stories Kṛṣṇa liked most were the ones about the two lives when Nārada had been transformed into a woman. “Even though you have lived as a woman and borne dozens of children, before climbing over their corpses that time to pick a mango, you never understood anything about women…” “You might be right,” said Nārada. “For example, I don’t understand how you manage with all these queens…” “But these are not women,” said Kṛṣṇa, suddenly gloomy, and he went back to staring at the chessboard.

One evening Nārada realized that Kṛṣṇa was shivering, his eyes glazed. “What is the matter, my Lord?” he asked. “I’ve got a fever,” said Kṛṣṇa. The next day. Kṛṣṇa didn’t get out of bed. “He’s delirious,” whispered the serving girls. Days went by, and the fever was as fierce as ever. Nārada sat alone in his rooms, already thinking of setting off on his travels again, but worried. A doctor knocked on the door. “Lord Kṛṣṇa is still delirious,” he said. “He has but one wish. He says he will only get better if someone brings him the dust stuck to the feet of certain women. We were wondering if the wise Nārada, who knows the world better than anyone else, might be able to help,” the doctor finished, embarrassed. “Of course,” said Nārada. He had never refused an assignment that whetted his curiosity. And he was curious about everything. “I’ll do what I can,” he added.

His first move was to ask for an audience with the eight queens. He spoke with his subtle, supple eloquence, as though advancing a noble and solemn request. The queens looked at each other for a moment. Then the first spoke for all: “How could we? Our feet are perfumed with jasmine. We spend our time making sure that every inch of our bodies is pure. We couldn’t offer our Lord Kṛṣṇa anything that wasn’t perfect. We’ve even forgotten what dust is.” Nārada was taken aback. Kṛṣṇa was still delirious. Nārada went to the most noble ladies of Dvārakā and repeated his request, at once urgent and uneasy. Nobody would agree to it. To do something the queens had refused to do would doubtless be an unforgivable indiscretion. They didn’t say as much, but they feared for their heads.

The despondent Nārada went back to the palace, where he found a message from a doctor: “Lord Kṛṣṇa asks whether Nārada, who seeks far and wide, has also sought in Vrndāvana.” No, Nārada said, he hadn’t been to Vrndāvana. He set off. Leaving the city behind, he came across some huts and animals. The countryside was ever more lonely and enchanting. In a meadow surrounded by tall, dark trees, near the waters of the Yamunā, he saw a patch of dazzling colors. A herd of cows were grazing. It was silent. Getting closer, he saw that the patch was made up of a number of crouching figures, who now started toward him. “You are Nārada, you have seen Kṛṣṇa,” said a sharp-eyed little girl as the others gathered around. Nārada was looking at the ground. He saw all those small, bare, dirty feet. “Lord Kṛṣṇa is ill,” he murmured. “He needs the dust stuck to certain women’s feet.” The gopīs didn’t even answer. One took off a blue rag, and all of them shook the dust from their feet into it. They even scraped dust off with their nails. Then the first gave the rag to Nārada. “Here. Give it to our playmate. If this is a crime, we will face the punishment. We are ready. We are always ready. Kṛṣṇa is everything to us.” Nārada said not a word. He put the rag full of dust on his shoulders, like a bundle, and set off again toward Dvārakā. He walked deep in thought, head bent. He looked like a pilgrim now, or a beggar. All at once he stopped and caught himself saying out loud: “Kṛṣṇa, you were right. Now I understand.”