Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
paying rapt attention, and piling more questions on top of my own. There were 330 mil-
lion gods, I was told, with Krishna on top. He had created the others. But then a bunch of
Krishna devotees
would
say that, wouldn't they?
They told me about Krishna. They told me about his life in Braj. They told me about
Shiva turning into a woman so he could join the milkmaids and watch Krishna dance. And
they told me about the love between Krishna and Radha, always about Krishna and Radha.
I asked them about attachment and self-denial. Why renounce worldly pleasure when
Krishna had himself been such a playboy? This provoked an extended melee about whether
Krishna had been a sadhu, and whether, perhaps by dint of successful sadhu-hood, through
which he entered into godliness, he had earned a kind of free pass to enjoy himself as a
young man in Braj. They were still debating when I left.
Later that night, as all the sadhus slept, I crept out of my tent and walked to the nearby
woods, for “letting,” as Mahesh would call it. On my way back, I stopped in the patch of
herdland behind the camp.
The full moon shone clear and cool and magnificently bright. It was a perigee
moon—the closest, largest full moon in twenty years. The landscape shimmered in mono-
chrome, the silent forms of cows and buffalo lying like dark boulders on the packed dirt. A
cowherd rustled under a blanket.
The puzzle of Krishna and Radha flickered in my mind. I had found it hard to distinguish
which of them the sadhus were actually worshipping, or if it was the relationship itself that
commanded the deepest veneration, a love affair that was somehow a deity in its own right.
“Two bodies, but single body,” Ravinder had said.
The love between Radha and Krishna had been no mere love. It was a love that had
created the human love for God. It was the ideal connection between the human and the
divine, embodied in the eternal romance of two young deities.
Eternal, but it didn't last. The time came when Krishna left the hills of his youth and
went to fulfill his destiny as a warrior and lord. It is said that without Radha to animate his
music, he laid down his legendary flute. Later, he married and had children with a princess
in Dvaraka. I don't know what happened to the milkmaid Radha.
