‘Radha, my child,’ Yashoda murmured soothingly, at once amused and worried. ‘The sun and the stars, the universe and us—we all have our own paths. Don’t fight the laws of nature, for the sun that snugly cocoons us from cold, faraway skies can just as easily turn into a cruel fire that burns to ashes those who dare to go too close.’
Radha smiled, her eyes shimmering with unshed tears. One errant drop broke free and rolled down her cheek. Kanha stretched out his palms and caught the tear as it fell.
‘Look at him,’ his mother said softly. ‘I have never seen him so grave before. As if he understands all about women’s woes!’
Radha stretched out her arms and pulled the boy close to her. Then she turned to Yashoda. ‘Could I take him with me when I go to fill my pitchers tomorrow?’
‘Yes, by all means. At home, all he does is get in my way,’ laughed Yashoda.
And so it came to be that for all of spring, a playful little boy and a plaintive young woman spent their mornings by the riverbed.
‘Why do you always have black rings around your eyes?’ he would ask, circling them with curious fingertips.
‘Because I cannot sleep,’ Radha would answer gravely.
‘And why not?’ he would demand, puffing out his chest and crossing his arms over them. When in response Radha only smiled, he would climb on top of a wayside boulder to put his podgy arms around her. Sometimes she laid her head in his lap while he rocked her back and forth, like his mother rocked him to sleep at night. ‘Sleep, sleep,’ he would whisper, agitated when she could not.
‘Perhaps I need your flute,’ she finally said one day, taking his unhappy little face in her palms.
At that, his eyes lit up. Lifting his flute to his lips and closing his eyes, he began to play. As the smooth, honeyed notes trilled forth, the sky rippled and trees danced in joy. Rabbits cocked their ears, birds paused mid-flight and tigers halted their chase to sit demurely by the little boy’s side. Even the Yamuna slowed down, enchanted. And Radha, for once, rested her throbbing head and slept for hours.
When she woke up, she saw Kanha staring at her. ‘What is it?’ she asked, rubbing her eyes. ‘Struck speechless by my beauty? Have you never seen a woman before?’ she teased, rolling her eyes.
Kanha scowled. ‘You too will be left speechless by my beauty one day!’ he shouted, before pinching her hard and running away.
As the verdant greens of vasant began to give way to the arid browns of an inevitable grishma, it was time for Radha to return to her husband’s home.
‘Who will I play with after you are gone?’ Kanha asked, his kohl-lined eyes glinting.
‘Why, there are so many pretty gopis in the village. Go play with them.’
‘But you’re the prettiest of them all,’ he sobbed, while she burst into laughter.
‘Then you’ll just have to wait for me to come back,’ she said, smiling at the boy who had crept into her room the previous evening to hide all her clothes just so she could not leave.
‘We’ll see who waits for whom,’ he said, before running away in tears. When she followed him to his house, he went into the pantry and locked himself in. ‘Go away,’ he shouted.
The summer worsened after Radha left. The sun raged across the sky, scalding skins and fraying tempers. Cows lay listless in their sheds, their liquid eyes drooping. Sweat trickled down in slow rivulets and babies cried. The earth broke out in angry blisters and the Yamuna threatened to dry up.
‘Why is it so hot this year?’ children asked their mothers.
‘Don’t worry,’ came the reply. ‘Varsha will soon be here.’
Days slipped into months and months into years, till many more fertile springs and famished summers had passed. Then, suddenly, without warning, came yet another varsha—the rains. Nights became inky blotches shot with streaks of light and sound. The sun was a shallow puddle and the skies dribbled endlessly through the day. The smell of wet earth perfumed the air. And news travelled from near and far that Radha was back.
‘Do you remember Yashoda’s naughty little boy who became speechless when he saw you and clung to his mother? That Kanha who used to trail noiselessly behind you on the banks of the Yamuna? He is now a strapping young man, and all the gopis fancy themselves in love with him! He only needs to play his flute and the girls swoon,’ laughed one of the village women.
Radha was thoughtful. ‘I remember him. But many seasons have gone by. Perhaps he does not remember me.’
That night it rained ceaselessly. When morning came, the sky was swollen and moody. ‘The river is in spate. Stay away from its banks,’ everyone warned. But Radha had to go. Somehow, she knew. Her tread was as light as her heart was heavy. Turn back, something in her kept saying. Yet she walked and walked, till she reached the muddy banks of the Yamuna. It was nothing like the Yamuna of her memories. That river of her past had flowed light and clear, it had sparkled with water lilies and lotuses, its green banks had been dotted with egrets and its flowery blossoms had held love. But this Yamuna of the present was an angry violet, and it curled and frothed and hissed. This river was as alive as it was dead. For a moment, her heart sank. And, then, just as she was turning back, a dark shape caught the corner of her eye. It was Krishna! Oh, this Krishna looked nothing like the child Kanha who had held her hand, yet Radha would have recognized him anywhere. He stood against a rock in the river, almost birdlike in his quiet grace. In yellow silk, a garland of wild flowers around his neck and with a peacock feather adorning his head, his dark form glowed. Radha stared at him, spellbound. One day, I too will be beautiful. One day, you too will stare at me. The clouds gathered again. As the rain started falling thickly, Krishna turned to smile at the beautiful woman whose clothes were plastered wetly to her body, whose hair was a waterfall and whose eyelashes shone with a million silvery drops.
‘You have come,’ he said softly.
Radha nodded, unable to speak. He held out his arms. She walked into the river in a trance. He held her at arm’s length and traced the outline of her face with his flute.
‘I hear you play the flute even more beautifully now,’ she said.
He nodded.
‘Will you not play it for me again?’
‘Not now,’ he replied. ‘You will have to wait for the rains to end.’
‘Oh, but I have to go back in autumn.’
Krishna smiled and traced her cheek with his finger, the way he had as a child many moons ago. But this time, he was no more a little boy. She closed her eyes, not trusting herself to speak. When she opened them, his gaze held hers.
‘Stay,’ he said.
It was, and always will be, impossible to grasp the true nature of love. Is love that which causes a pain so intense it splits open the heart into a hundred fragments, or that which gently soothes away all pain to make the heart whole again? Is it love only when it battles the world to declare itself, or even when it fills up the countless stretch of days and months with an easy, unspoken familiarity? And what of hate? The seething anger when one’s beloved forgets, or even the absolute rage at one’s own vulnerability. If there is no hate, can there be love?
These thoughts haunted Radha again and again in the months of sharad, when her days and nights were filled in equal measure with the agony and the ecstasy of Krishna’s love. The agony was that he did not love her at all. The ecstasy was that he loved her too much and like none other. The agony was that there were women so numerous that she often lost count . . . Beautiful women, with many beautiful gifts to offer. Women young and old, who sucked in their breaths and waited for Krishna’s magic flute to ring out through moonlit nights. And they would leave their homes and hearths far behind and trail out breathlessly, eyes alight and hips swaying in abandon to dance the rasa with him under the starry autumn skies. Afterwards, he would love them, scorching their skin and searing himself on their minds forever.
Later, they would remember and rejoice. And he, of course, would forget and move on. ‘I am the wind,’ he once whi
spered to her. ‘I am doomed to be timeless, formless . . . I cannot be still. Then how can I be captured by one heart? For that which binds is not love . . .’
When Radha complained that it was she who was doomed because she loved him, who knew not what love was, he just laughed and gathered her close into the night.
‘Sometimes I think I am like your flute,’ she said, drawing away teary-eyed. ‘Your flute—a dull, lifeless object that must lie in its dark corner and ask you for nothing. Yet when you pick it up and touch it to your lips, it bursts forth in a fresh spate of music. But I am not your flute, I am alive, I feel, I want, I cry . . .’ Radha’s large eyes spilled over.
With the tip of his finger, he lifted a solitary teardrop off her wet cheek and gazed at it in wonder. Then he ran his hands over her forehead until she felt the tight knot of her grief ease.
‘I am yours, my Krishna, forever,’ she said, laying her throbbing head on his chest.
‘Radha, Radha,’ he murmured, against the quivering arch of her neck.
He never says I am yours forever, warned a small voice inside her head. But still she went willingly into his arms, knowing that she had to make memories to warm her through a string of empty nights. Nights when she would know him to be with the others. Yet, when she met Krishna again, after an agonizing wait, she would once again burn in urgent, infernal ecstasy. The desire that had smouldered on the banks of the Yamuna since they met as man and woman, or perhaps even earlier, from the first heady days of vasant, was endless, infinite, all-consuming.
But when did desire turn to love? Was it on their first night together, when having nowhere else to go, she had turned to him and he had cradled her in his arms and kept all her sorrows safe from the world? Or was it when he had understood, without judgement or condemnation, and let light into her monsoon days—was that when she began to love him? Or was it when they finally made love and he whispered into her ears: ‘I miss your hair when I’m not tangled in it’? That night, he had held her close while she slept. At the crack of dawn, she crept back home, hugging her secret to herself. She, who was often too much in turmoil to even sleep at night, slept like a child in the din of day. Only when the sun was high up in the sky did she wake up, light and free and with a song on her lips. She smiled. She lived. When the sun dipped low and the skies started turning crimson, she waited for the magic flute to play. And then she went once again, into the dancing shadows of night. He brought her necklaces of ivory and conch shells, and sulked till she laughingly let him put them around her neck. He ran his fingers through her long, long hair and adorned her thick braids with fragrant strands of champa. He fed her little morsels of food with his own hands and refused to eat on the days that she fasted. And when, unable to suffer any more his closeness with others, she held back from him, he suffered too. Those were the times when Krishna, lover, God incarnate and ruler of the world, broke down and wept.
‘No, he feels no remorse,’ Radha would say to those of her friends who carried the message of Krishna’s grief. ‘He does not understand love. Go tell him he can be with any woman he wants. You don’t know me till you know my pride. I neither love nor want him any more.’
But they shook their heads in disbelief, knowing how warmly he coursed through her. And sure enough, she would be with him again, long before the Yamuna spilled over with either of their tears.
They say love is a song of seasons, a song whose rhythm slows down with time. Through all of autumn, Radha drank her fill of Krishna. And then came winter with its bands of chilling wind. Of course it did not happen in a day. As varsha gives way to sharad in snatches of colour, and then sharad slowly bleaches white to hemant, so did their love give way slowly and intermittently. In the beginning, Radha did not even notice when Krishna no longer lingered on to fasten her girdle or braid her hair after they made love. And if something seemed slightly amiss in the night and he held her briefly and then said that he must go, she tried not to dwell upon it. But it became impossible for her to pretend any longer the day she began to excitedly narrate to him how one of her pots had broken into six perfectly symmetrical shards, and he stared emptily at her, almost as if there was something larger looming beyond her which held his gaze. Her words stumbled into each other and she stopped in confusion, a sudden chill settling upon her heart.
‘Krishna,’ she whispered.
He snapped out of his reverie and gave her a pat on her shoulder. And then his perfect bee-stung lips mouthed that now-familiar refrain, ‘I must go.’
As winter wore on, a dark shadow settled upon Krishna. ‘What is the matter,’ she would repeatedly ask, haunted by his silences. In response, he would bury his head in her bosom.
‘Radha, Radha,’ he would murmur while she cradled him, tears in her own eyes. In these moments, little bits of tales once heard would waft back through time to trouble her—tales of the infant Gopal being carried through a turbulent Yamuna by Vasudeva and being sheltered from the rains by none other than the serpent king Sheshnaag himself, tales of him conquering the mighty demons Vatsasura, Bakasura and Aghasura, tales of miracles big and small that the gopis would often swear to . . . And Radha would wonder who Krishna really was. But she did not ask him. Instead, each time shadows flitted across his handsome face, she would cup it with her palms and kiss his tired eyes, willing for sleep to come to him, just as he had once willed it for her.
And then one night—a night so black no stars peeped out from behind the curtain of clouds, a night so cold it froze the Yamuna into a sheet of ice—he uttered, once again, his old words, ‘I must go.’ And Radha knew that this time he spoke of greater distances, and of never coming back.
What else remains of the story to tell? Only that a few days later—some say it was when hemant turned to shishir and some say it was not—a chariot came from Mathura to take Krishna away. As word began to spread, a huge crowd gathered in Nanda and Yashoda’s courtyard. Every heart was skipping, each eye fastened to the door of the puja room where Krishna was offering his prayers. The crowd was waiting to scold, berate, cajole—somehow convince the beloved son of Gokul that he belonged here, with and only with them. And when he emerged, resplendent in yellow silk but without his flute, they looked into his hard, hard eyes and realized that he had already left them for Mathura. Fathers were silent and mothers cried. A dozen gopis swarmed around him like angry bees.
Krishna smiled at everyone, hugging the children to his heart and touching the feet of elders to seek blessings for what he knew was to be a long war. Then he prostrated before Nanda and Yashoda, asking for forgiveness.
Tears streamed down Yashoda’s cheeks as she looked at the future king of Mathura, regal in the robes of a raja, and saw instead an impish little boy who stole butter from the neighbours’ kitchens. Images from his childhood flashed before her eyes, of Kanhaiya tugging at her aanchal when he was hungry, of him laughingly wagging a podgy little finger at her to mimic her own actions of scolding him, of him running to her to be scooped up in her arms so he could touch the sky. Once he reached Mathura and was reunited with Queen Devaki and King Vasudeva, his biological parents whom the evil King Kamsa had kept imprisoned in the palace’s dungeons for many years, would he remember Yashoda and Nanda’s humble hut in faraway Gokul? Yashoda, blinded by the past and frightened of the future, hugged Krishna and wept silently. You will always be my son, won’t you? her sobs seemed to ask.
Krishna looked tenderly into her eyes and nodded. As he walked to the chariot, his eyes quickly skimmed the crowd. You don’t know me till you know my pride. ‘I will go to her one last time and then no more,’ he promised himself, motioning his charioteer to wait. Then he began to walk through the groves to reach the sandy banks of the Yamuna. She was nowhere. For a moment, his heart sank. And then, just as he was about to turn back, a dark shape caught the corner of his eye. It was Radha! She stood against a rock in the river, almost birdlike in her quiet grace. Krishna stared at her, once again. In the meantime, a smattering of winter clouds had gather
ed and the skies had begun to rumble. As rain started falling thickly, an almost familiar scene began to unfold. Krishna smiled at the beautiful woman whose clothes were plastered wetly to her body, whose hair was a waterfall and whose eyelashes shone with a million silver drops.
‘You have come,’ she said.
He nodded. She held out his arms. Slowly, he walked into the river. She held him at arm’s length and traced the outline of his face with her finger.
‘Where is your flute?’ she asked.
Her question jerked him back into the present.
‘My flute, yes . . . I don’t know. Did I drop it somewhere?’
She smiled sadly. The flute’s time is over, she wanted to say. Instead, she asked him when he was leaving.
‘My chariot is waiting. I have already bid farewell to everyone.’
She nodded, raising her face to his. ‘I am yours forever, my Krishna,’ she said softly.
‘And I yours, my Radha,’ he said then.
She closed her eyes. ‘Stay. Please stay,’ she pleaded with him at last, her heart pounding, her pride spent.
There was silence. Suddenly afraid, she opened her eyes. He was gone. And she threw back her head and laughed and laughed.
Radha, old woman, madwoman, crouches on the banks of the Yamuna. If she lays her ears against its shifting sands, she can hear whispers from many years ago. Look at her. Kulta, adulteress. Throw her out. Shame. Shame. Shame! She squints, and sees ghosts from yesterday. Her shrunken husband shuffles past. The women at the well turn away from her. The neighbour’s child hurls a stone at her. Sometimes Radha is young and she cannot understand why they think her crime is greater than his, how they can hate her while still loving him so. And sometimes Radha is old and she understands too much, understands that in the dark histories of humanity the woman’s crime is always greater than the man’s.
Some say it is her fault because he was unattached while she belonged to another. But she knows they would have blamed her even if the roles had been reversed. Some say it is her fault because he was just a young boy and she older and wiser. But she knows it would have been the same even if she had been a young girl, and he older and wiser. The woman’s crime is always greater than the man’s. That is why Krishna could forget, while she was forever condemned to remembering. That is why Krishna never returned to Vrindavana. That is why he could move on to conquer kingdoms and become king, be hailed as the virtuous killer of Kamsa, and take a hundred, a thousand, no, 16,000 wives. (Of course, she knows it all. Word travels.) He is a man, and they say men are destined for great things, so they worship him. Tomorrow they might forgive her and worship her too, but what good would such worship do? What would change? Men would still love and leave. And women would still be women, and forgive the men while piously condemning each other.
Finding Radha Page 19