Chaitanya and Mira

Act One — Aspiration

1510 A. D. Evening. Sachi Devi is seen performing her daily devotions before her cherished Ishtadeva—a marble image of Lord Vishnu who was incarnated as Sri Krishna and later, as she believed, as Sri Chaitanya. Her worship over, she offers flowers at His feet when Sri Chaitanya enters hesitantly and waits in silence. His mother turns and gives an involuntary start.

SRI CHAITANYA
Mother, I...

SACHI

Yes, my son?

SRI CHAITANYA

I have been thinking.........

SACHI (anxiously)

You are not unwell, I hope?

SRI CHAITANYA

Oh, nothing: be not alarmed.

I only meant: I wished I were in that mood

Which lights on you when you are gripped by an ailment

In which your inmost soul flowers out in feeling,

Although the worldly-wise shake their great heads.

At such bloom-bursts and call them sentimental.

SACHI (heaving a sigh of relief)
I am glad you are well. How you did frighten me!

SRI CHAITANYA (forcing a smile)
Ah, that is why I said ... but never mind.

SACHI (drawing near and scanning his face)
What is it ails you?

(She pauses/or a few seconds expectantly)

And why this hesitation?

SRI CHAITANYA

Because ... one dreads to hurt those one adores ...
And I adore you. Mother!

SACHI (alarmed)

But what's all this?
And how could such a strange thought cross your mind?
Do I not know you too well to believe
Or even imagine you to be capable
Of hurting me — you, who never could hurt a fly?

SRI CHAITANYA (giving a quizzical look)
But are you sure?

SACHI

I know not what you mean.
You are so ... far away I... I almost feel
As though I never knew you truly, Gora,
You — whom I have known these four and twenty years!

SRI CHAITANYA (smiling ironically)

Ah, there you are! And yet do we not claim
A mother knows the inmost thoughts of one
She has borne and nursed even as the honey-bee
Must know the shiest murmur of the bud
Which opes at morn to greet her humming lover?

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SACHI (gathering herself together)

I implore you, Gora, not to alarm me so.
I am only a common woman who understands
The simplest things — the things all women know.
I have only claimed I knew you as a mother
Who bore a child and reared him day by day
Could not help knowing, seeing him slowly grow
Under her eyes toward the skies of Gods
From whom she got him — a boon and sacred trust;

And there my claim ends ...

(Her voice quavers)

For... do I not know
Who you are, son, and who's the thing that calls
Herself your mother? Could I help but know
That I am a mere lamp whose flame you are,
A dim frail stem whose one mission is to help
The hundred-petalled lotus to bloom in light?
I never claimed a lamp could understand
The flame ... no more than a stem could understand
The bud it bears till it has blossomed out.

SRI CHAITANYA (bowing his head)

Mother ... forgive me, pray... I stand rebuked.
But will you not believe — I never intended
To hint I was superior as the flame
Is superior to the lamp? Nor am I sure
That any flame that ever shed its dimmest
Spark-glint upon the dark would dare disclaim
Its native kinship with its source and haven,
Sundered from which it never could realise
Its self of gleam — no more than could the lotus
Grow to its full-blown beauty baulked of the stem.

(His voice becomes thick with emotion)
To you I owe not only this my body
Which naught but a mother's angel tenderness
And mysterious overawing solicitude
For a thing unmet — for a refugee from worlds

She had not even glimpsed — could ever dream
Of offering her hospitality,

An enduring shelter in her blood, her heart-beat,
To fashion, out from an amorphous speck,
A being of sentient beauty and answering
Its helpless, half-inconscient cry to be born
With a vow born of an equal mystic hunger
To sustain, augment it, throb by throb, with all
Her fabulous patience — nourish, vindicate
With every spasm of her nerves and flesh
And the holiest sap of her being's virgin core...

(His eyes glisten as he meets her eyes .......m
Yes, I owe you mother, not such a body alone,
But even how much of what I call my will,
My moods, my mind ... and what else — do I know?
Can ever one know a thing down to its roots,
The Ultimate Purpose — working as a leaven,
Transforming momently, relentlessly
This multitudinous hurtling play of life?

(He shakes his head ruefully)
And yet we claim we know and act from knowledge
Not even knowing what knowledge signifies!
And who knows ... maybe it was so intended
That this our mysteried play of sparks of peace
At war with oceans of eddying, roaring passion,
Of love-sprouts lashed by blasts of demon hail
And yet surviving ... (a grim spectacle
Of inconceivable grandeur — a miracle
Wrought by Krishna, the Wizard!) ... this mighty drama
Of the Timeless unrolling on Time's wheeling stage
Of the fathomless Sphinx who pilots us through this
Our inescapable maze of paradoxes
That face us, dog us even as our own shadows.

(He lifts his eyes to hers)
Or ... may be ... we do know something after all
Even when we strive in vain to voice it, mother!
Why else do we go on participating

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In this lila of bubbles, this cosmic dance of hues,
This kaleidoscopic may a we hug as Life!

(He goes on abstractedly as though in a muse)
Why else do we uphold it, new-create
Symbols and sounds and words... why else, when baffled
At every turn, do we still probe, explore!
Or can it be: we give to the deepest things
Some names or labels that through these we may clutch
At a momentary respite from despair!
Or that through their perfidious picturesqueness
We may escape from the abysmal pain
And shame of our ignorance!

(He suddenly comes to and meets his mother's anxious eyes')

Forgive me, mother!
I ought to have known — only I know no better.

(He gives an ironical smile of self-pity)
But it's an ill wind blows none any good.
So you do see at long last, do you not,
How ignorant I am — your idol, whom
You exalted now?

(He heaves a deep breath; his irony changes into bitterness)
And yet they will proclaim:

I am a great pundit drunk with the ruby wine

Of knowledge!— Knowledge indeed! Do I not know

How little is the difference, in the end,

Between my knowledge and the multitude's

In the eye of God in Heaven? Is not the tallest

Peak and the lowliest cottage equidistant

From the sun on high?

(He gives her a look of deep reproach)

But do you know, good mother,
Who came to spoil me most?— Your doting heart.
You turned my head, even more than did the others.
Insisting I was a deep initiate
In the primal lore of light and wisdom born
Of the summit vision given but to the giants.
But I tell you it's all futile, futile, futile:

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My scholarship, my learning and my knowledge
Even as a painted flame which apes the fire
But sheds nor warmth nor light. And that is why
I come to you tonight to ask you — something.

SACHI (beads of perspiration breaking out on her forehead)
I am waiting, Gora!
(A slight pause)

Why do you not speak?

SRI CHAITANYA
Because ... I quail to ask you ...

SACHI (tilting his face up with trembling hands)

Look up, my son!
You quail to ask me — me, for anything?
Or am I dreaming?

(She hugs him, drowning his face in her heaving bosom)

Know you not, my child,
Who — what you are to me — my life and heart
And the hub of my universe? ... How could you, Gora?
Can I deny you anything on earth?

SRI CHAITANYA
You can ... and that is why I said: I quailed.

SACHI (with an involuntary shudder)

Oh, keep me no more in this agony of suspense.
Better the storm released than this pent hush.
Come, speak your mind ... Or do you take me for
A sentimental woman whose only strength
Lies in exhibiting her tears and sighs?

SRI CHAITANYA (desperately)

Then, mother, listen: I want to leave my home
To sing the name of Krishna, my Beloved,
From door to door — a wandering mendicant.

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SACHI (stammering)
You ... you will... what? ... I... I... what did you say?

SRI CHAITANYA (avoiding her eyes)

Mother ... I long to leave my all for Krishna
Whose call I have heard. And He enjoins on me
To beg henceforth for food from day to day
And to become a beggar in His name.

SACHI

You mean ... you will... leave ... me ...
(Tears choke her voice as she stares at him)

SRI CHAITANYA (nodding ruefully)

You see why now
I said I quailed... knowing how this must come
To you as a dagger-thrust from a loved one
To whom you opened your dear arms to hug.

SACHI (gazing at him like one stunned)
I... understand ... but oh, what shall I say?
(She steps back and rivets her eyes on the image)

SRI CHAITANYA (placing his hand appealingly on her shoulder)

Mother ... forgive me ... listen, I implore!
For what can I say either — if you look
So lost and broken-hearted? You know
I cannot go without your sanction and blessing.
But... mother mine! Oh, take it not so hard.
Listen: I know — you are one in a million,
By nature brave ... but now you must be braver.
I know you are love itself... I know you love me
As the breeze loves blooms ... adore me even as skies
Adore the sun ... cherish me as the old
Cherish the thrill of youth that is no more,
Depend on me like the acolyte on faith,

Or the initiate on his Guru ...
2

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(He pauses and heaves a sigh)

Have I not felt,
Since the day I uttered my first infant cry,
Your eyes of steadfast tenderness around me
Even as the budding blossom feels the tender
Circumambient greeting of spring with all
Its native welcome — generous, unbargaining —

(halting again and shaking his head)
But no — how could one limn with similes
What a child owes to its mother? Can such debts
Be ever repaid?

(He looks at her and drops his voice)

But then who'd dare repay
One's breath with breath-born thanks? I only pray:

You may not deem me an ingrate, a pitiful

Renegade who would shun his faith for lucre,

Or a lover who loves for the thrill of drama it brings?

(He lowers his voice)
I voiced my inmost feeling now because ...
But how shall one explain the inexplicable?
Can one ever know how sound breaks into song,
Or anguish at its peak dissolves in bliss?
I only ask you, mother, to plumb my pain
With the pain I know I must occasion you now,
When I desire release from what I have grown
To count as precious day by day ... I know
You are a noble mother, and so, today,
You are called to be nobler still, and understand
What I find hard to explain — being impelled
Now by an urge I fail to fathom myself.
For although I hear my Beloved calling me,
I know not whither, through what devious paths,
He is leading me — to which last gleaming Goal.
I only know: my yearning to my heart's
One Lord is authentic even as the mother's
For her child she worships and adores, and so
I adjure you, mother mine, to ... let me go

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(A silence intervenes during which Sachi stands staring at
him unseeingly ... Suddenly her eyes are drowned in
tears and she turns round again to face the image and
covers her face in her hands.)

SRI CHAITANYA (moving up to her and drawing her to him)
O mother! ... Listen, it's this I dread most:

Your tears ... You do not know how weak I am.
I cannot bear to see you cry in pain.
O mother!

(She disengages herself/row his embrace and wipes her eyes)

Can you not understand why I
Feel thus constrained to eschew all I have cherished,
You who have known what is the call of God?

SACHI (passionately)

And child! Can you not understand why I
Feel even as a stalk whose flower is gone
And how I have long forgot my Gods in Heaven
For the one and only God who is — my Gora?

(She turns round once more upon the image of Vishnu)
Forgive me. Lord! And be not hard on me:

For you must know, 0 Resident of my heart,
How a God-believer you yourself made Godless
By giving her one who has usurped your place
Till she thought you were a projection of himself
And yet feel nor a qualm of shame — compunction!
Strange are your ways, my Lord, that you, a God,
Should suffer a human form to overshadow
Your Divinity itself and make it grow
Till the deputy seems taller than the King!

(She gives an involuntary shudder)
But what am I saying? Forgive me, give me strength:

I must not make a scene nor beat my breast,
For I am not a common woman — I
Who have given the Ethereal to earth and borne
A human rival of yourself who, strangely,

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Means more to earthlings than your Unborn Self!

(She turns to her son)
You said, son, I must understand. Believe me:

I am not blind but — frail and weak. For listen:

I'll tell you what I have kept, as a fearful secret,
Even from you. 'Tis not imagination
That fails me now: 'tis only the irony
That cuts so deep into my derelict soul.
For I knew always: I would be a naught
And stay a naught without you all my life,
And my one mission was to bring to birth

(indicating the image of Vishnu)

His God-stuff that's your soul and breath and self.

In my dream I saw Him when I was a virgin.

He said: "You shall give a birth to a son who's one

With Light and Bliss derived from my quintessence,

Descended from a world but few have glimpsed .

Rear him until he comes into his own.

His kingdom of Love Divine — when he will come
To implore you, his one guardian, to let him cut
The chains that will have bound him to his mother
And wife and friends and what men call the world,
To redeem the world. On that great fateful day
You shall unyoke him from his obligations
That he may fulfil the mission of his life:

To bring to men the message of my Love
They grope for, blind, in their egos' primal dark.
This, by his selfless life, he'll show to all
And prove the Eye of Light to humankind.
Your sight you'll then be called to sacrifice
For others, 0 blessed virgin, who are chosen
To accept a pain to deliver the world from pain."
And then, as hushed the deep-toned Organ Voice,
I woke to find my pillow wet with tears.
A fear then seized me — I cried out in pain:

"Why must you. Lord, ask those to carry your banner
Who cannot bear its weight for a moment? How

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Can you expect a heart to behave like stone?
The mother in me will never, never be able
To rear a son and then bid him farewell."

(She half closes her eyes)

Just then, I visioned a strange Face: 'twas human,
And yet 'twas made of something that was in essence
Pure light. Its eyes, dark with reproach, met mine,
I felt overawed and, as the Face drew near
And nestled in me, time stood bewitched. I hugged
It close till it broke out in a cry of pain.
Startled, I looked when lo, I saw you Gora:

Just as you looked on the day you saw the light:

That exquisite, unforgettable face and the self-same

Timbre of voice that was a mystic thrill!

And then, as you, my child, clutched at my breast,

Milk spouted — 'twas no fancy I tell you, son!

Since, when I woke, I found my bed was drenched

With the milk that had outflowed for my dream child.

But no, it was no dream, for nothing I ever

Have seen in my waking moments has seemed more

Vivid, nor sounded any human voice

More real than yours I heard on that dread day,

That fateful day, when you, my child divine,

Appealed to me, a mortal mother, in pain:

"I would be born from out your holy womb:

Will you not have me, mother?" I kissed your Face

And cried: "I will, my darling! I'll defy

Aeons of torture if I may but hold

And nurse you at my breast for a single hour.

I will hail you and promise, in return,

I will not falter now in self-love nor

Claim to possess you and will let you go

When you, to companion those who have need of you,

Will consign me to my utter loneliness."

(She looks longingly at her son's face)
And abide I will now by my word — if I
Be blinded by the tears, I know, I'll shed,

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Abandoned by you. For know I not that light
Cannot consort with gloom, nor truth with falsehood?
Who hails from the world of beauty and bliss must fare
To his kin and counterparts. For only they
Can claim you truly and not I, a woman
Who, strangely, bore to earth a starlike soul!

SRI CHAITANYA
Oh, speak not in this strain. You do not know ...

SACHI (giving a melancholy smile)

But it is true, son, as I told you now:

You were given to me as fire is given to flint. ...
A myth incredible which yet came to pass:

An Emperor as guest in a beggar's hut!

But a guest is not a resident: he comes

Only to go. ... When the brief blessed hour

Shall pass as must all interludes divine

In this our world which cannot house such bliss

For long ... then what? I know not... for, alas,

I am but an ignorant... a common woman;

I cannot see, child, what will happen when

You, my one world, will leave me, wandering back

To your great worlds — leaving no world for me.

SRI CHAITANYA

Mother, how can you wail you are a common
And ignorant woman? Could unconsciousness
Give birth to a soul of dauntless aspiration?
A timid heart beget celestial courage,
A dead sun flash out from the mirror of moon?
Could a common woman feel as you have felt?
And then, how could I ever abandon you
Who nursed me with your milk of tenderness?
Release I seek not to fare far from you
But to come nearer — through your own deep pain
And the pain of all who need Sri Krishna's Grace.

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No love that joins a soul to soul on earth

Can ever be mocked. And is not bliss our birthright?

We were not tossed into this our world of pain

To deepen its gloom with our unending sight

But to transfigure it with the touch of One

Who writes love-letters with the alphabet of stars,

Whose Lustre redeems frozen ash with fire,

Whose Flute ever echoes in the heart of rocks

And laughter makes our tears outgleam in rainbows

As the mystic Force in the seed transforms the mire's

Dark anarchy into a kingdom of radiant blooms.

(He smiles beatifically and embraces her)
You bore me not to have but a brief reprieve
From an arid living. Krishna visits earth,
From age to age in guises few can guess,
Nor as a chance guest nor for a passing whim:

Everytime He comes to set the stage
To produce a new play deep with His own Purpose.
I know not what is that last denouement:

For which the Lord puts on a human mask:

But this I know that His great Cosmic Lila
Has not for its end an epilogue of sighs
Preluded by a phantom harmony.
I know, for His Flute sings in my heart of hearts:

"No pain is fortuitous, nor a revel mood

Of a ruthless Devil — still less of a lunatic

Omnipotence toying with sentient puppets,

Who cannot help but act like marionettes

Or sinners who will cringe to Him for pity

And even thank Him for His lunacy."

This too I know: no sigh that once has waked

In an aspiring soul for Krishna's Grace

Can fall asleep again: He never comes

To plough the soil of human destiny

But He leaves behind a Trail when He withdraws

Which survives in the sunken world of memory

Until He visits with a new downsurge

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To create a deeper furrow in our lone
Vale of despond. And that is why His Flute-call,
Stronger than destiny, now wrenches me
Away from you and all I cherish still.
I have heard the Call: I know not yet the Goal.
But this I know that you (who have given me
To earth that I may bring to her His Love)
Losing your claim on me, would hold me closer
Than ever you could by clinging fast to me
For the little world of worldliness and clamour
To which I have been an alien since my birth.
So weep no more, I give you my solemn pledge.
You shall see me whenever you'll call to me.

(He falls prostrate at her feet... She stoops and hugs
his head to her bosom)

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Act Two — Conflict

Next morning. A bathing ghat in the river Ganga of Navadwip. Two pundits, Keshav and Murari, are seen bathing close together, and a young woman, Romasundari, a few feet from them. Keshav who owns a 'tol' (Sanskrit school) is reputed for his scholarship. A man in the early sixties, with a flowing white beard and of an imposing appearance, he has a high opinion of himself. Murari, in the late forties, owns a similar 'tol' and is gifted with a sense of humour. Roma is a young widow of about twenty-five who, though poor and ekes out a bare living by spinning, comes of a good Brahmin family and was brought up in an atmosphere of culture and learning for which Navadwip has always been famous. But although intelligent and gifted with spiritual insight, she fears equally the Divine and the Devil.

KESHAV (with the Ganges water in his hands formally intoning a hymn)

O thou, red like the hibiscus, born of the Sage
Kashyapa, O vast Glory, who tirelessly
Dost with dark Night thy mystic battle wage
Redeeming all our sins! — I bow to thee.

MURARI
But have you not, sir, mispronounced a word?

KESHAV (nettled)
What?

MURARI

I only mean sir ...

KESHAV

You need not, I say.

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For nothing that you mean has any meaning.

MURARI (ironically)

But you behave like a judge who has gone deaf
And hangs the witness taking him for the robber!

KESHAV (furiously)
You dare —

MURARI

But sir, in daring who can beat you?

For if I have affronted a sombre human,
You insulted the hoariest God in Heaven,
Although the wicked sceptic may indeed
Ask if the Gods live not too far to notice
Your grievous accent you now flaunt so boldly!

ROMA (scared)

O Lord, my Lord Gouranga! Were you here
Ganga would ripple again with happiness.

KESHAV

Stop mumbling, woman! nor invoke a human
When nothing less than the Lord of thunder and lightning
Can blast the irreverent, as the Gita says
And when He'll come to relieve the earth of sinners,

(turning to Murari)

You shall be hauled to hell with your foul tongue
Reduced to silent ash. So shudder, fool!

MURARI (unperturbed)

There I'll obey you willingly, for once,
If only to swell the choir of Gods aghast
And shuddering, sir, at your pronunciation.
For it's for priests like you the Chandi wrote:

(He starts reciting in mock solemnity)

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Smile thou on me, O Goddess of Gods,

If my breath, unwittingly,
Has missed a vowel while I sang

Of thy Divinity.

Or if my tongue has mispronounced

A consonant in between,
In thy deep Grace, O merciful

Mother, absolve my sin.

KESHAV (contemptuously)

Yes, such implorings suit the philistines
Like you and those you teach, the lisping infants,
Who will stay lisping infants all their lives
Even as there are some others ...

(smiling proudly)

it's not boasting,
But truth is truth — although the blind, alas,
Never can see and so shall never know
That a few there are who stand out like to peaks
Whose greatness is thus hymned by the greatest Poet:

He who is master of himself

Will laugh to scorn his chains:

The thunder's boom and lightning's flare

His high-born soul disdains.

MURARI (bowing in mock humility)

Your high humility does, sir, overwhelm.
But even the high peak is laid low by earthquakes,
And that is why you stumbled over a word,
Let Nimai Pundit, the great, adjudicate.

KESHAV (sneering)

A mighty authority, indeed, this green
Infant of yesterday! And pundit! Tut!
Who knows not even the rudiments of grammar!

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ROMA (shocked)

But what are you saying, sir? Our Lord Gouranga
Was reputed as a prodigy of learning
At the age of twelve — when he had read through all
There was to read on earth. They say once came
A fearful scholar whose voice was like a gong
And this blood-curdling giant interpreted
A holy couplet faultily which he,
Our Lord Bishwambhar, pointed out and proved
In a great consistory of priests and poets:

And he was only seventeen at the time!

KESHAV

Oh, hold your wagging tongue, wench! How I loathe
This purblind hero-worship, bred by gossip!
At seventeen to be reckoned a great scholar!
Pooh! Have I not been poring over the great
Panini from the day I learned to lisp,
As everyone knows, and still — behold me, woman!
I have but just won through to the initial status
Of a fool!

MURARI (clapping his hands)

And how I applaud your judgment, pundit!
For the first time in my life — with all my heart.

KESHAV (frowning)
What do you insinuate, sir, may I ask?

ROMA

O sirs! I pray to you with folded hands:

Let not the little light of peace there is,
The little friendliness that still survives
Be blurred for nothing, as says Lord Bishwambhar —

KESHAV
You say it's nothing — when this idiot

Impugns my reputation as a pundit
Saying I mispronounce — I, who, a diver
In the oceaned wisdom of Panini —

ROMA

But sir,
I am a simple woman: yet I wonder ...

KESHAV

You may — and gape, too — since your starless soul
Will genuflect to dismal humans knowing
Naught of Panini's godhood.

ROMA (diffident)

But I, sir,

Was given to understand that your Panini
Was the author of a grammar, was he not?
How then could you, a mighty scholar, worship
A mere grammarian as a Sage of wisdom?

KESHAV (scandalized)

A grammarian? Woman! utter a blasphemy
At your own peril, I warn you! For the great
Panini was a Sage of sages who delved
Into the mysteries of the three worlds.
Only the morons fail to appraise his greatness.
His masterpiece is, even as the Vedas,
A compendium of all our human knowledge,
An apocalypse of life and destiny.
So prattler, beware! — I warn you once again.

ROMA (nervously)

I meant no harm, sir ... I... I... only wanted
To plead that our great Lord Gouranga is
Not a common man, but a holy Avatar,
A God incarnate in the human mould.
And may I humbly add: he too can lecture

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On the three worlds and the mysteries divine.

KESHAV (infuriated)

O hush, I tell you! I have come to worship
The Sungod in this holy river, Ganga,
And not to hark to dire obscenities.
What! Shall a human walking on two legs
Assume the status of Godhood? Oh, fie!

ROMA

Oh be not angry, good sir, I implore you.
But what do we know of God's ways after all?
We may indeed be versed in human things:

But the things divine, because they are divine,
Can hardly be ... I mean ... within our reach.
So how can you presume, sir, to assert
That the high Almighty could not for His own
Lila accept a human mould on earth?
The other day, while singing in ecstasy,
Our Lord Gouranga danced as though on air
And as he cried: "O Krishna, art thou come?"
His body did become self-luminous
As countless witnesses will testify.

(Her voice trembles)

And then. ... Oh, how can I with human words
Portray the superhuman miracle?
For as he went on singing, we saw a halo
Girdle his shining brow and all fell down
Prostrate at his twin feet acclaiming him
As an incarnation, in one human frame,
Of Radha and Krishna in mystic union!

KESHAV (touching his sacred thread in rage)
O horrible blasphemer! You are doomed
For ever: you shall be roasted in black hell
On a frying pan in the stinking oil of sharks
And the dread demons shall belabour you

With red-hot tridents burning all your hair
Till you'll be bald as — as this fool Murari
Who will insult me and yet bend his knees
To a callow youth and call him my superior.
Yes, he too shall be haled to Hades with you.

ROMA (scared)

I crave your pardon, sir. I will not say
One word more, nor ever dare to pitch
My poor opinions against the learned wisdom
Of a great pundit who has touched the bottom
With the plummet of reason lent him by the mighty
Grammarian Oracle.

KESHAV (propitiated)

I may forgive
If you will eat your words.

MURARI (interjecting)

But that's unfair.

If you would have her abjure what she still
Believes as true, then sir, you must not thus
Intimidate her with God's own fear of hell
Thrust into her feeble head. And what a terror!
For shame! A blusterer might sometimes behave
Like a gentleman for a change.

KESHAV (stammering in rage)

You ... you infamous

MURARI (smiling blandly)

Sir, tremble not in wrath. For say, how could you
Have the heart to freeze her timid, feminine soul
By the pathetic prospect of dire baldness?
Fancy, a woman whose long flowing hair
Rippling even as a sable waterfall,
Is envied of the Apsaras in Heaven —

Page 25

ROMA (blushing)

Pray laugh not at a girl. For it's, I tell you,
No laughing matter — but a dread nightmare
For a woman to be bald in hell or heaven.

KESHAV (chuckling)

I like that, Roma, and so will forgive you
This once: nor baldness nor hell need you fear.

(He looks upward and recites a Sanskrit couplet invoking absolution)

O Goddess, whose unfailing Grace

Redeems all sinners who cry in pain !
We bow to thee, we bow to thee,

We bow to thee — again and again.

ROMA (with folded hands)

And I too bow, in deep relief. But then, sir,
May I just tell you one thing — but... I mean ...

KESHAV (encouragingly)
Oh come, speak out — now that I have forgiven you.

ROMA (undecided) I'd rather not, sir. For I dread offending
The pitiless agents you just conjured up.
I hope and pray they may not visit me
In my dreams tonight — a poor and helpless wench
With not a friend in the world save mother Sachi,
The one and only neighbour who enquires
With her kind smile if I'm alive or dead.

MURARI (in mock solemnity again)

But I can tell you what she wished to say
But dared not, scared by your prognostications:

She wanted to return the compliment

To you, my pundit, when you recommended

Page 26

Her soul to hell and pate to perfect baldness.

KESHAV

You dare again crack such foul frivolous jokes
With me, your elder both in years and wisdom!
To hell you shall be consigned for this grave sin.

MURARI

God bless your tongue, for there I'll meet the youthful
Like Roma and not the senile erudite.
For 'tis not age gives wisdom. Look at Nimai
Who can defeat you in an argument
On anything — from Panini to Vishnu,
And he has lived but four and twenty years
While you are ancient as the barren hills.

(He chuckles mischievously)
Ah, that reminds me, sir, of something priceless.
The other day he gave a merry twinkle,
And said: "Age is a visitant strange like pain
Whose contact makes the wise into oracles
But the fools it matures into imbeciles."

KESHAV (foaming at the mouth)

I — I — curse you ... be doomed to deep perdition
And, solemnly, I challenge you and him
To a public debate where I'll expose you both:

And show you up as a witless ass and him
For a circus clown, a mountebank, impostor.

ROMA (stopping her ears)
Oh, utter such words no more, sir, I implore you:

For hell or not — I will not bear such base
Slander against my heart's one Lord and Guru.

MURARI AND KESHAV (almost simultaneously)
Your Guru!

3

Page 27

ROMA (defiant)

Yes — and my life's one peak and plinth
And none shall ever supplant him till I'm dead.
Yes, that was what I wanted now to tell you:

That my heart and soul had bowed to him, first and last,
As a being divine to whom the revealing light
Is native as is warbling to the cuckoo,
Depth to the ocean and wideness to the spaces,
Rustling to leaves and irised hues to rainbows,
Bloom to wild flowers and innocence to children.

(She warms up)
No wonder he's hailed by those to whom he comes:

Lone men and women robbed of joy by Fate,
For 'tis with such souls he consorts, our great
Lord of divine compassion, who will not bow
To the pride and pomp of haughty royalty.
And so he shunned not me, my King of Grace,
Nor ever withheld from me his angel smile,
The unfailing friend of every pauper in this
Our land of empty claims and clamours where
Book-lore banished the One the books have sought,
And resonant slogans came to enslave the mind;

Where the pedant priest talks glibly of things that slake .

No thirst of soul till we faint from pain and drouth,

Or else but mumble, half-deliriously,

Faint airborne rumours of the Ultimate

Ocean of nectar taking these, alas,

For the deep of Krishna sung of by the wise!

But we strive to fill the heart's void with vacuum,

Wooing the flitting shadows for the Form

And echoes for the Song .... Yes 'twas my Guru

Gouranga who has taught me this and all

I know, although 'tis little I have learned.

But what can a woman like me ever imbibe

Through her uneducated understanding?

I only know of one thing, my good sirs

And that's enough for a girl born ill-equipped,

Page 28

Who never was by fortune favoured, nor

Marked from her infancy by any gift

Or intellect, who lived through her lonely life,

A childless widow spinning from dawn to dusk

To eke out a bare living. 0 tell me what

Could such an ignorant and feckless creature

Hope to achieve? And yet, sirs, 'twas to me,

A flotsam on the crests of Time, a puppet

Of many moods that the Avatar of Grace

And Light and Bliss and Knowledge and Glory came

Unasked to give me a swift and everlasting

Asylum at his dawn-rose feet I kiss.

Everyday, in my waking hours, and nightly

In sleep or in my dreams I am cradled now

In an abiding peace I never knew.

And so a hope was born that even I

Might reach the Haven beyond my wildest hope.

It's God's truth — all I say, though you may smile.

MURARI

The pundit, mother, may — but I believe you.
For something upheaves in my breast and whispers:

Such miracles may happen even in this

Dark age of little living you described

As one inspired. I feel within my heart

A nameless beat of hope ... an exaltation...

A sudden wing-waft of a Bird of Fire. ...

A momentary glimpse of a mystic Truth

Through some chance opening ... rending of the curtain ,

An adventitious vision through a fissure

In our granite wall of jealous Ignorance.

I fail to account for what I see or why.

But this I know: it's something rich and living

Which is at war with its antipodes:

The phantom falsehood which yet seems more real
Than the great Reality while it holds out.
And so I too have lived a citizen,

Page 29

Even though sick of its hollow make-believes,
Of words, words, words — of soulless pendantry
Till it has grown now into a deafening blare.
No wonder we hear nought else but words today
In this our age of din. No wonder we
But grasp at shadows letting slip the Form.
No wonder Krishna has to be born on earth
Again and again and wounded by our arrows
That He may heal our wounds with his own blood:

To simulate our blindness that He may

Deliver us from our blindness grown so dear.

Who knows — our Nimai might be He Himself!

How can they who have not once glimpsed the King

Depose He has not come incognito?

So have no fear of hell nor listen, awe-struck,

To our arrogant friend, but follow your heart's one leading.

KESHAV (taunting)

The Sage never made a brighter observation
Than when he said: "A fool shines at his best
Until he breaks out into speech." And here
A mad fool, harnessed to a doting gossip,
Will be driven to doom, goaded by blasphemy,
Condemning the words of wisdom of the Scriptures
By ravings bred by suicide lunacy,
Little suspecting, while they wag their tongues,
That learning is only mocked at one's own peril.
But, as the Gita says: "Dark ignorance
Must babble true to its own inspiration."
No wonder night holds up to ridicule
The sunbeams when they hymn the bliss of light.

(His mounting wrath now gets the better of his sarcasm)
I pity you both who fail to reverence
The greatness of one who deigns to talk to you
Of sober sense to save you from yourselves.

(grandiloquently)
I am the son of Ramgopal the great

Page 30

Philosopher who taught me from my cradle
To lisp in Sanskrit, made me read Panini
From cover to cover when I was barely twelve,
At twenty I lectured on God's ways to mighty
Assemblies of the elect and erudite.
And you dare flaunt before me a simple swindler
Who has mastered only one art in his life:

How to impose on credulous men and women
And be adored of them as an Avatar
Of Vishnu Narayan — a modern Krishna!

(contemptuously)
An Avatar indeed! — a lachrymose
Day-dreamer who, with sentimental tears,
Has won the hearts, I wager, of a few
Gullible housewives! — Oh, what idiocy
Is this, I ask you: to hoist an earthly creature
On the altar of God Himself! No wonder we,
Blind Hindus, are now in full decadence.
No wonder aliens hold us in subjection.
It serves us right: you cannot perpetrate
Criminal heresies and yet stay moral!
I wish I could but once meet this Pretender
Who dare stand on the pedestal of Vishnu.

ROMA(stopping her ears)

0 hush, please — I implore you — or I must
Come here no more to bathe — ah, there he is!
Oh hail, my Lord! Deliver me from this —

(Sri Chaitanya''s voice is heard. ... Presently he comes
into view. He descends the steps of the ghat, singing)

Why will men say they know Thee not

When Thou still callst them so ?
How can the tree its roots ignore,

Or the river its seaward flow ?

Page 31

The eye wails: "Light's a myth, alas!"

The night weeps: "There's no dawn /"
Wherever I look — in diverse forms

I only see the One.

We win no peace because we love

The eddies of desire;

We cleave to darkness and then sigh:

"Why must the sun retire?"

No bud outpetals but opens her heart

To the blue's imperial call;

No bliss that visits but leaves a trail

Of Thy joy's carnival.

We hear not for we will not hark,

We would outlaw Thy Light
And then sob, exiles from Thy Gleam:

"Why reigns on earth the night ?"

(Roma ascends a few stepsof the ghat, weeping and falls down at Sri Chaitanya'sfeet. He blesses her. Murari salutes with folded hands. Even Keshav - moved in spite of himself - gives him an involuntary smile of greeting.)

MURARI
Oh, why do you pause? Sing on.

KESHAV

Yes, do my boy!

SRI CHAITANYA (bowing to him)
But, sir, my songs are simple.

KESHAV (somewhat off his guard)

True. But this

Page 32

I will concede: your voice has a pleasing timbre.
Can you sing a Sanskrit song — or even a couplet?

SRI CHAITANYA

Just a hymn or two. But I would rather not
Venture to sing before Your Eminence:

I may mispronounce some word. Before a pundit
Of your great altitude, who will not quail?

KESHAV (pleased and complacent)

But I'll correct you. Ignorance is no crime,
Unless, like mist, it clings to its native blur.
It's never too late to mend, my boy! And I
Am ready to give you lessons in Panini
And, through his medium, knowledge of Heaven and Earth.

SRI CHAITANYA

I am grateful. But, sir, I want only one
Knowledge — of Krishna, the One who is the home
And country of all knowledge, divine or earthly.

KESHAV (sententiously)

But that is wrong. You cannot, says Panini,
Attain the skies save on the wings of learning.

SRI CHAITANYA
But I love Mother Earth more than the skies:

It's here my Krishna lived and not in the clouds.
So I will now to Brindavan whose dust
Is hallowed by the touch of His feet divine.

KESHAV (smiling superiorly)

But this is spurious, sentimental gush.
For Krishna could at will defy the skies
And span the void as He revealed to Arjun.

SRI CHAITANYA
I know that, sir: or rather, shall I say,

Page 33

He has made me know that I know naught of His
Deep ways. I only know that Him I need
To adore and love more than to plumb or measure.
And even Arjun was overwhelmed, remember,
By what he saw — and, dismayed, supplicated:

"O Blaze of Fire, with suns and moons for thy eyeballs!
Thy multitudinous, universal Form
(With a myriad mouths and orbs and tusks and bellies
And maws which darkle even as the abysms,
And stature which fills the sky and chokes the spaces)
Makes me dizzy with terror dark as doom.
Lo, into Thy gullets rush the mighty heroes,
Even as rivers streaming to meet the ocean
Or moths which enter the flame of their destruction.
0 tell me who Thou art, I bow to Thee.
Discover Thy lone apocalyptic Self
Whose ways are vast beyond imagination."

(He smiles cryptically)

And who was the great suppliant? A giant whom
Krishna Himself assured in His pledge of Grace:

"Thou belongst to Me, 0 Arjun, even as I

Belong to thee: whatever is Mine is thine

And whoever hates thee must My essence, hate

And whoever loves thee shall grow dear to Me."

So when the mighty Friend of God himself

Was baffled after having known and loved Him,

How could I hope to score where he had missed?

I am not made of his great heroic stuff

Or yours, sir. To each his Eden. Nor would I venture

Beyond my depth.

KESHAV

But what then do you want?
A man must be a man and act like one.
Worship is not enough: you must win knowledge
Even as love — unless you hate true vision.
Suppose your Krishna came to you, what would you

Page 34

Ask of your Lord, my boy?

SRI CHAITANYA (his eyes filling instantly)

What would I ask

If He, my Krishna, came to me. His slave?
Could there be any asking then? But no,
I would ask something. Shall I say it, sir,
In a Sanskrit song — since you invite me kindly?
(He breaks out ecstatically into song)

Renown nor wealth nor a paragon

Of beauty. Lord, I crave
Nor even the Muses will implore:

I long to stay Thy slave.

Through countless births this boon unique

I sought, may Thou approve:

My heart be surrendered at Thy feet

In an unbargaining love.

KESHAV (once more moved in spite of himself)
This is... not bad. But who was the composer?

SRI CHAITANYA

Why ask the human author's name when all
That thrill our souls derive from Him alone?

KESHAV (with asperity)

If a son is born one wants to know the father's
Name — and the mother answers if she's chaste.
A straight and simple question calls for a straight
And simple answer.

SRI CHAITANYA (smiling sadly with a tinge of irony)

Sir, you walk in light
And I do envy you and yet... I wonder ...
For a question may seem straight to a simple child

Page 35

But not to an adult. The one infers the gold
From the outer glitter: not, alas, the other
Who has been disillusioned. And yet how oft
Have I not vainly searched for an answer — when
The Lord of Life has put the question straight:

"If thou hast loved Me more than all the world,
Why dost thou still hark back to siren life
When My Flute calls to thee to leave thy all?"

MURARI

Oh, do not say you are called to leave us all:

Our only light in this dark Navadwip,
The only minstrel in this mart of clowns
And the only poet in this hive of pedants.
None but yourself in this benighted town
Could ever compose the lovely song you sang.

ROMA (enthusiastic)

You guessed aright, sir. Who else but our Bard
Could make such a song divine?

KESHAV (curling his lip)

Impossible!

The song's in flawless Sanskrit. Tell me, Gora —

ROMA (hotly)

But I am telling you: it's he himself,
And he has composed many more as flawless.
Oh, listen, sir! Some seven years ago
A famous poet came with a bunch of poems.
But when he read the poems of our Lord
He sighed and said: "Oh, who will read my stuff
After such lyrics as these?" And then our Bard
Just laughed and flung away his sheaf of songs
Into the Ganga that the other might win
The fame he coveted.

Page 36

KESHAV

But that was wrong.
As said our learned poet, Kalidas:

"Pearls never woo men but will be wooed by them."
And the pearl of pearls, the laurel of laurels, is learning.

(reproachfully)
Mother Saraswati is fastidious
Nor visits all and sundry but demands
That those she favours set store by her boons.
Woe betide the philistines who will not
Welcome her smile of Grace.

SRI CHAITANYA (with a smile of sad irony)

You are her favoured
Beneficiary and therefore know, sir,
What is right action and what is the reverse,
Being virile of conscience and enthroned in science
Of the erudite. Only, I never have sought
What you, the pillars of society, crave.
I wrote my poems nor for fame nor lucre:

I wrote them, sir, because I felt like giving
Voice to an urge that clamoured to be born.
And, as I sang now: even from my childhood
I have but longed for one boon and no other
Whose name is Krishna. Him alone I have loved.
And yet I have craved other things as well.
(Not for nothing I feel now too bewildered
To answer a straight and simple question simply,
Nor can I claim my nature is consistent.)
But as time passed, a nameless melancholy
Deepened in me and with it my one yearning
For Him who plays His haunting Flutelet hiding
Behind a veil ... and with my years there grew
In me a strange averseness to our earth
Of shadow and fire and evanescent gleams...
I felt I was being weaned from all I once
Hailed as the most desirable of God's gifts.

Page 37

I was dismayed and strove to temporize ...
To dally with what they called life's greatest boons.

(He shakes his head sadly)
But alas, when one is seized with a mystic passion
One cannot help but let oneself be taken,
Even as a ship caught in a violent cyclone,
When naught avails — helm, rudder, stars or compass,
And I must now wend — whither His gale will lead.

KESHAV

Oh, come my boy, all this will never do.
You must not throw away the tangible
For something which no real prudence can
Ever approve. Beware of the mood of folly
Which hankers after the moon — as say the poets.
The Flute of Krishna is a myth, a legend,
An ignis fatuus no wise man would chase.
Come, I now offer voluntarily
(A thing I seldom do — but one must strive
To save one's fellows from dire suicide):

You come to me: I will take you in hand
And wean you from this perilous fantasy.
I confess I judged you harshly from reports.
For I see in you potentialities
Rare as diamond. If a trifle wayward,
You are lovable and gifted and endowed
With humility: I was unfair to you.

SRI CHAITANYA (with a bow, smiling)
O utter not, sir, such a monstrous thing:

For surely you and unfairness could never

Hive together. Can error and erudition

Live locked in love — the sun and morning mist?

KESHAV (taken in)

You are ripe in judgment, dear boy. But, sometimes,
Even mountaineers may stumble on level land.

Page 38

However warily one marks one's steps,
Our human mind, like flesh, must come to grief
On occasion, though the wise grow taller in wisdom
Even through pain. And 'tis in this true wisdom
I offer to initiate you, my son!

SRI CHAITANYA

Your Grace is overwhelming sir, I own.
But I regret 'tis too late now: tonight
I leave my home and all for Brindavan,
A mendicant in His name.

ROMA (stifling a cry)

What! You, my Lord!

MURARI

It is incredible, Gora! For you are
The only pledge of sun in our deep night,
The only thrill of song in our wrangling din,
The beloved of all, the hope of Navadwip,
Whatever a few benighted fools may say,
Who do not count.

SRI CHAITANYA (heaving a sigh)

No more than do the others
Who will acclaim me or extol my gifts.
For only one thing counts on our dismal earth:

The loving approbation of Sri Krishna,

Beside whose one sun-smile of welcome pales

The whole world's chorus of applause or jeering.

KESHAV (impatiently)

But what, in the name of sanity, are we here
Debating now? What is this approbation
Of Krishna, Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma or Indra?
And how can a human consciousness be sure
Of the Gods' approving smile or deep or pale?

Page 39

It seems to me, this, stark midsummer madness!

(He fixes Us eyes on Sri Chaitanya's)
You do not claim, I hope, that Krishna plays
His Flute for you alone in this big world?
So I infer you are joking.

SRI CHAITANYA

Never have I
Been more in earnest, sir. Last night my mother
Gave me her sanction that henceforth I may
Put on the ochre garb of a wandering beggar
Living for Krishna on the alms of others.

MURARI

You mean: you will forswear the obligations
You owe to her and to your —

SRI CHAITANYA (nodding)

— wife and friends
And what men in common parlance dub 'the world'.
For I heard Him calling: "Stake your all for me."

(He turns to Keshav)
You may, sir, deem this, too, midsummer madness;

But he who has heard even once that hauting call
Can to another hark back nevermore.

(He shakes his head ruefully)
But no, 'tis futile striving to explain
What happens to one's psyche when one hears
His mystic Flute so soft and yet imperious.
One might as well, sir, strive to put in words
What love's eye sees in the beloved's face.
And so, may I suggest: you put away
My madness, as you call it, from your mind.

KESHAV (insistently)

But this is serious, since your mind, my son,
Is a trifle unhinged; for when you claim that Krishna

Page 40

Is weaning you from this our world of Karma,

You indulge your fancies. For no God-note ever

Calls one away from the world of fact to loll

As a lotus-eater in a hanging garden,

Nor sanity desires to drift away

From its cherished moorings toward a meaningless

Life of the parasite — the mendicant's.

Come, come, my lad! You are a green youth still

Who cannot tell the right move from the wrong;

And men of wisdom will unanimously

Tell you: "This giving up the world for God

Springs from a wrong escapist urge — an impulse

Calamitous because it makes one end

In the stagnant bog of a purposeless existence."

SRI CHAITANYA (animatedly)

But what use is this existence we eke out
From day to day, sir — drifting, drifting, drifting
On the crest of circumstance? You talk of the world
Of fact: but what is this world as we see it?
Is it not an aimless round of pointless squandering
Of our most precious energies on — what?
Building on the plinth of hopes a house of dreams
Our dismal wakefulness makes tumble in ruins:

A legacy of tears and questioning sighs,
Composing raptures' overtures that end
In desolate finales of frustration.

KESHAV

Come, come, you are no country innocent
Who fails to understand that two and two
Make four. It is too mad by half, it's senseless,
This ideal, long outmoded, of leaving all
One's given by God Himself for God! My boy,
I adjure you not to barter away the real
For mere moonshine. Besides, where would you go?
To Brindavan? For what? Sri Krishna's Light?

Page 41

But as a God He must pervade all space:

How could He live a prisoner king in one
Small hamlet? Come, a householder must keep
His own dear house in order first and last.
Frustration? Can one stave it off by being
A lone escapist, a recreant? Furthermore,
How can a son his duty shirk to his own
Parents who ushered him into this world?
How can a man desert a faithful wife
And, once a father, cease to love his children
And rear them till they grow to their full stature
As men and women? Each has his own dharma
Assigned to him which he may not disclaim.
In the Gita did not your own heart's Lord say:

"Even death accept to fulfil your native dharma?"

SRI CHAITANYA
He did, sir. Only who will tell me now:

What is my native dharma in this world ?

KESHAV (with a superior smile)

Oh, I can answer that. Yours is to be loyal
To your worldly duties which, as a man of the world,
You owe to the world. Had you been born an orphan
Reared by homeless vagrant mendicants,
You might perhaps have roamed the woods and scaled
The hills and gone on begging from day to day,
Knowing no better — living an otiose life.
One could forgive these. But when one has been
Born to a family of birth and breeding,
One cannot even plead one's ignorant;

And so, my son, I'd solemnly remind you
You cannot chase and cull a skyborn bloom,
Nor turn your back upon a useful life
To accept a parasite's whose only claim
To our compassion is that God made him.

Page 42

SRI CHAITANYA

You are a seer and prophet — whereas I
Am born unarmoured for this alien world
Of high-sounding responsibilities.
The Gita says: "One cannot flout one's nature,"
The wise see from their wisdom's aerial towers:

The fool from his abysm of folly and blindness.
One cannot achieve a stature not one's own.
We are born we know not why, and ask in vain:

Why we comport ourselves like helpless puppets,

Driven by unseen forces, lured by strange

Urges — like foams on tides of chance and fate.

We hark at every turn to invisible prompters,

Swayed often against our will this way and that!

We voyage on but rarely come to port,

And what we coveted but yesterday,

Find, when we grasp it, but a thing of shadow.

Like rockets we zoom to return to earth — mere ash.

We are haled by life but our souls stay baulked of peace.

This is the ancient tale of human fate.

It seems a riddle to the outer eye,

A chimera calling the more as it recedes.

The householder reads great sermons on life's march,

Hugging his chains that cause his feet to bleed,

With no destination set — far less a goal!

He cites sonorous phrases from the books

To prove that our hearts' Ever-living Beloved

Is regnant allwhere when, alas, his own

Heart mopes unsated — ignoring the simple truth,

Life's stark experience, that until one loses,

Through loving Him, the last trace of one's ego,

One hunts in vain for a trace of His Omnipresence.

But one who has not loved Him never can know

How the pilgrim soul yearns to the faintest echo

Of the past and through its self-lost concentration

Can work the miracle and resurrect

A frozen cadence into a living Presence.

4

Page 43

How shall he know that love's great magic can,
Through symbols, touch the One they symbolize?
How can stone feel with the heart-beat of the bud,
Or mind see with the eyes of lovelit soul.

(He looks straight into Keshav's eyes and smiles)
But undivining what it has not glimpsed
Nor doubting its own reason's sanity,
It trudges on like the camel who only knows
The load of sandal-wood but not its scent!
The multitude accept this blindly — claim
That the bale he weds must bring forth ultimate bliss.
But does it, sir? Does life fulfil its pledges?
I hope 'tis a question straight and simple as well?

KESHAV (embarrassed)
I know not what —

SRI CHAITANYA

. If you will pardon me,
I'll make it simpler still: have you, sir, ever
Stood before a mirror and scanned your face?

KESHAV (awkwardly)
A mirror? ... What a question? ... I decline—

SRI CHAITANYA
I beg you'd answer. Have you ever looked?

KESHAV (at bay)
Well, yes, I — but — this is preposterous —

SRI CHAITANYA

But why sir? — since Panini never enjoined
On his devotees to shun the mirror like hell?

KESHAV (dignifiedly)
I must resent such childish levity —

Page 44

SRI CHAITANYA (smiling)

I apologise. But suffer me to explain:

When I formulated this my simple question,
'Twas nor irreverence nor levity
Prompted me, sir! I only meant to hint
That if you scanned your own eyes in the glass
You would agree they were not radiant
With bliss nor light that came from self-fulfilment
Nor even the certitude that one was treading
The right path and no other.

(He pauses and holds the other's eyes)

And I will hazard:

Even so rayless are the eyes of all

But a tiny handful. Listen: by chance last evening

I saw a mendicant with a begging bowl

Come to my door. I gave him a plate of rice.

He blest me and then fastened his eyes upon me.

I stood like one bewitched. Then something strange ...

Oh, it was wonderful! ... For as I gazed

Into his eyes effulgent like twin stars,

I felt they sprayed deep bliss into mine own

And a rapture I experienced never before

And a peace of which there is not even a hint

In your great eyes irradiate with learning.

Why must I then, sir, for this famished learning

Come to your door a-begging? What can you give me

Who are at heart a pauper for all your wisdom?

And what is the worth of this your worldly knowledge

Which, for all its opulence, cannot even compete

With a beggar's fortune? A tree, sir, shall be judged

By its last fruit. The tree of human achievement

May be dense with the greenest leaves and rarest flowers,

But never till now has it been known to bear

The fruits of peace and bliss and harmony

Which we must pine for and could never rest

Until we found them. Something deep within us

Must goad us sleeplessly and make us lose

Page 45

Our sleep till the dream of sleep be realised,
And the worldly wisdom is not this last dream
Of our restless aspiration which, as a seed,
Must sprout and grow till it attain its zenith
Fulfilment which is Krishna —as the eyes
Of this strange mendicant reminded me,
Stinging me last night with the peace they shed.
Oh! do not glower at me in indignation,
For I came here not to argue but to bathe:

'Twas your own harangue on my worldly duties,
Your castigation of the beggar's bowl,
Evoked my comment. I would only beg
To submit — science nor art nor worldly wisdom
Can furnish groping life with the clue to life's
Inscrutable purpose, the clue we seek in vain.

(He smiles quizzically)
You did, sir, take my measure when you said:

I was not the fool I looked. I know the Scriptures

And the philosophies with all their commentaries.

You will forgive me if I claim I am

Versed in Panini and the Vedic lore,

And can declaim on entire Brahmasutras,

Lecture on metaphysics and improvise

On these like pundits till the insomniacs

Shall doze off into sleep for weariness.

But I confess — such wordy feats have never

Led me to the Home my homesick, orphaned heart

Longed for in vain — till, last night, in a flash,

The veil was rent and, overwhelmed, I saw

That for that beggar's simple happy heart

Throned in the love and bliss of the King of kings

I could barter all my learning away for good

And the fame I have won as a great scholar and poet

And the envied self-complacence that accrues

To a burgher of respectability.

(He warms up)
And this is no mere fancy of a fool,

Page 46

A sentimental dreamer. For I have drunk
Deep at the fount of worldly bliss as well:

I have known how precious is the mother's love,
How sweet the embrace of a loving wife,
How beautiful a pupil's loyalty,
How delectable the sympathy of true friends.
But still our life, as I feel more and more,
Is a quest ever deepening, through all that attend us,
For something that, starting as a nameless ache,
Grows even as a tree until its every rustle
Dissolves in a dirge, a questioning: "Whither, Oh! whither
Shall wend my Radha-heart to find her Krishna
Who plays at hide and seek, I know not why!"

(He lowers Ms voice somewhat abashed)
I came here not to be theatrical,
Far less to read you a tedious sermon, sir!
How could I, an ignorant, who only knows
That he knows not even what he once believed
He knew infallibly. I speak not of the great,
The elect, who commune with the heart of Krishna.
I cannot even claim I saw my way
Clearly through the maze of wrestling forces
Till 'twas relentlessly borne home to me
That so long as one probes with human eyes,
One cannot even tell an avenue
From a blind alley, and that, when in one's groping,
One takes a forward step — one seldom can
Be sure one will not land in a fatal pitfall.

KESHAV

I take it, you are highly-strung, my boy,
And so imagine ghouls in every bush.
For I wonder if you grasp the implications
Of what you now contend in your deep doldrums.
'Tis true that to be wise is to be wary,
I'll even concede that sometimes one may find
It hard, at life's cross-roads, to know which path

Page 47

Will lead to the heights and which to the abyss.

But even when one owns one's apt to err

Through ignorance or inexperience,

Surely it would be folly to assert

One never could move a step avoiding pitfalls.

Ah no, my alarmist, sentimental pedant!

Only the blind can say: they see no light

In their hearts' caves to guide them to the Goal.

SRI CHAITANYA

But what's the Goal? For unless this were known,
How would the guiding light reveal the Way?
With no sun how would you tell the east from west?

KESHAV (pouncing on him)

Ah, there, my boy, I have got you at long last.
For the sun is there on high and even so
There is in every heart that breathes a sun
Assuring our nights that daybreak's not a myth.

SRI CHAITANYA (with an ironic melancholy smile)

I am defeated, sir. I knew I would be.
Could it be otherwise? Could a humble spark
Prevail against an avalanche of wisdom?
But I too knew the sun must still exist
Even when the ruthless logic of night disproved it.

(with a deep sigh)
Only, my soul now traverses the night
Whose shadows make light dim as a dream-glimpsed face.

KESHAV (triumphantly)

I know, my lad. Man's life can never be
Like to a child's who has no knowledge of death.
To err is human and none can win wisdom
Except through tribulations. And the highest
Knowledge is only born through a painful travail.
And that is why to the learned you must turn

Page 48

And hark to the oracle of experience:

The wise you must consult, and they, our saviours,
Said with one voice: it's folly not to want
To be circumspect — marking one's every step.
None can be reckless with impunity,
Part never, my son, on an impulse of the moment
From the harbour men have built against the fates
With infinite pains and courage and vigilance,
Nor give your ears to Voices of the Night
Which lead men to the abyss with the pledge of Heaven.

(He pats him on the shoulder)
Wake up, sleep-walker! it's high time; remember:

You have a loving mother, a doting wife,

Loyal disciples and admiring friends.

God's all very well: I know the mystic longing;

But He is not ensconced in the skies alone,

A rootless Presence. "All", say the Vedas, "is He,

The Brahman." Also, the Sage of Katha said

Vibrantly: "What is here is there as well,

And what is there must here on earth be traced."

So deny Him here at your own peril, son!

For never then shall you find Him anywhere.

But find Him here and then you'll sing with the Saints:

"Krishna is on land and water and mountain peaks."
One should be sane and normal in one's seeking.

SRI CHAITANYA

Ah, now you are caught, sir, by your own words' snare.
For words are faithless, sir, and will betray us
Alas, too often, conjuring up a world
Of utter unreality and hoist us
On a phantom throne with no sign of a kingdom;

And, constantly invoked, they will induce us
To take chimeras for the flickerless beacons,
The shadow for form and make us home in voids
Of perfidious fantasies and make-believes
Which are worlds away from soul-experience.

Page 49

(He shakes his head sadly)
And so the great Acharya Shankar said
In his own peerless vein of irony:

"You may discuss the boon of a medicine,
But no cure's for you unless you take it, friend!
Even so through great discourses none shall win
What's only by experience attained."
And so be not offended if I tell you
That all you say is true and yet false, false,
Like love or death enacted on the stage,
Whose aim is to perpetuate the Maya,
The great Illusion, which is cosmic life
Espousing compromise to breed perversion.
Forgive me if, when I applaud your thesis,
I flout it still as null — as when you quote:

"Who finds Him here must find Him everywhere."
But what if you miss Him here for all your seeking?

(He heaves a deep sigh)

I too once mouthed these words of hollow wisdom
Of the Sun in the soul, the Guiding Voice in the heart.
But they speak to me no more as once they did
When I, like you, sailed on their nomad crests
And went on drifting, coming never to harbour.
I blame you not, sir. How can I find fault
Who am still unsure of everything but this
That I must burn my boats and may not tarry
A moment more?... My die is cast. I know not
Why this great yearning has possessed me so
That I cannot choose but yield to it — surrender
All, all my cherished lights and preconceptions
To its imperious call and take the plunge.

(A cryptic smile flickers round his lips)
Not that I love life less, sir, I assure you;

Nor even that I am grown too blind to see:

I have a lovely wife who may, in the end,
Die of heart-break. I saw my mother crying
And sobbing till I felt her heart would split.

Page 50

But still I may not linger here although
I long to cling to the painted shore of life
With all its magic gleams! But something stronger
Than destiny will sunder me now for ever
From this our siren world of tears and laughter;

Of voices that ring like sweet familiar bells;

Of eyes that shed caressing love-warm light;

Of dear old footfalls that bring shivers of joy;

Of chequered plains I have explored in rapture;

Of the very dust hallowed by memories

Of ancestral feet; of temple-carillons

That wake me athrill at morn; of chirping birds

That greet me day by day; of loyal cows

That yield me milk so sweet; of faithful dogs

That jump at me in a frenzy of delight;

Of purring cats that woo me for caress;

And not the least, this rippling, purling Ganga
Whom even in dream I hear reproaching me
For leaving her for a nameless far-off phantom....

(His voice grows thick)
All, all have grown into a part of me,
My being's core, the marrow of my bones.
And yet I cannot stay... I know not why,
Or whither I am going. I only know:

I must find Him who, for His mystic Purpose
First tethering me Himself to alien roots,
Will now uproot me thence once more for some
New rhythm of His deep dance to manifest,
Wrenching me from this magic world of beauty
He made me love so dearly. So bid I must
Farewell to you and all: I have no choice.

(He smiles again cryptically)
But take it, pundit, I am sane and normal,
For the hearts of all I still feel with my heart-beat.
I have lived intensely, loved with all my passion
And fire and can still answer love with love
And touch with touch.

Page 51

(He stifles a sigh)

And yet my all I must

Stake for my All-in-all whose haunting Flutelet

Calls to me in my wakefulness and dream:

"Oh come to Me, my Radha-heart, delivered

From thy last anchorage: put out to sea,

The shoreless Deep accept, cutting away

From thy dear moorings set thy bark adrift

To founder, if it must, in My bourneless Bliss."

(He throws his hands up and goes into a trance, Murari
and Roma fall at his feet. ... Keshav gazes fixedly at
him with folded hands as tears trickle down his cheeks.)

Page 52

Act Three — Illumination

A year has passed. Sri Chaitanya has just returned to Navadwip without apprising his mother and wife. He has toured far and wide preaching the message of Love. He now intends to call on his wife and mother though he has to stay elsewhere, in the precincts of a temple of Vishnu.

It is evening now and Vishnupriya, the beautiful bride of Sri Chaitanya, is seen in her private temple praying before the image of Lord Vishnu. She offers flowers, lights a few incense-sticks and then starts the 'arati' ceremony (moving a censer with lighted candles round and round the face of the image) singing in a moved
voice.

VISHNUPRIYA (sings)

O Thou, my father, mother and mate,
My friend unique! to Thee I call:

Who art my heart's one knowledge and wealth,
My God of Gods, my All-in-All!

(Then she kneels before the image and, with folded hands,
prays half-aloud)

They say: Thou art the Resident in our souls

And knowest all we do and feel and think,

Thy touch alone heals all the chronic ills

Afflicting human destiny and redeems

The anguish in our minds and lives and hearts.

So I appeal to Thee: Oh hark to one

Who feels herself a derelict in mid-ocean,

Mid hurtling colossal waves, like pitiless demons,

Which shatter her hopes of ever coming to port.

The asylum Thou, Lord, builtest once for me

Page 53

Now looks far-off even as a lovely dream

Which grim reality has dissipated.

Oh, why must all our roseate dreams thus founder

In a fortuitous storm — when these dreams flowered

In the heart's garden Thou thyself hadst fostered?

Why must Thou sow the seeds of tenderest blooms

In the virgin soil of our aspiration

If these will wither swiftly leaving a bare

Memory that but deepens the lone sigh

Born of the pining of what might have been?

I came here. Lord, Thou knowest, as a bride

Of twelve. For only seven years have I lived

In joys that pass all human understanding,

Inarmed by my one friend and guide and mate

Thou thyself gavest me in thy compassion.

The more I knew him, the more I found him elusive;

The more I loved him the more I found my love
Flawed by my inescapable self of clamour;

And the more he gave himself to me the deeper
Yawned the chasm that sundered him from me.
The more I won him the more I feared to lose him
Even as fears the arbour, when the breeze
Brings music to her heart, lest he, alas,
Retire anon when all will be again
A silence of the sepulchre ... and so
Her branches wave their arms to the skiey guest
To lure him back to her music-hungry bosom.
Yet I grew to love him day by day, a witness
To his growing Godly stature which overawed me,
And yet I hoped against hope, supplicating:

He might abide with me as my one stay.

But why hast Thou my guileless prayer shattered

By a cruel blow which filched from me my all ...

All I had hugged in rapture — treasuring

The very sound of his footfall in the vault i

Of my maiden soul to feed for ever on

Its echoes when he was not by my side?

Page 54

Was it because he made me pass Thee by?
But how could I help that? O Thou who, knowing
The deepest trends of the woman's doting heart,
Must know why when she loves she will forget
The whole world for the one who makes her world.
Man is a hunter butterfly chasing flowers:

Woman's a lotus affianced to one sun.
Madest Thou not this heart of hers Thyself?
Why then wouldst Thou now punish it for its native
Dharma? After making rivers flow
Why wouldst Thou scold their waves for billowing seaward?
The pilgrim Thou Thyself hast fashioned. Lord,
And the goal, as well, which calls so hauntingly:

Then why rebukest Thou the deep nostalgia
The goal induces in the aspirant's breast?
Why wouldst Thou take such infinite pains to mould
Thy handiworks agleam with loveliness
If their very loveliness becomes a cause
Of suffering for the ache it must engender?
0 Thou who art merciful! How can Thy mercy
Be harmonised with the anguish it ordains?
Why didst Thou give me one so beautiful
An incarnation of Thyself, if Thou
Wouldst wrench him from my pining heart for ever,
In whose one image I have day by day
Learned to conceive Thy Self of (lawlessness!
Why has he moved away from me, his loyal
Servant, who only dreamed to serve and tend him
With all I have and am?

(Tears course down her cheeks now)

'Tis not so hard
For those, 0 Lord, to journey through this life
Joyless who never once have known the taste
Of joy — as it is for those who have.
And I am one on whom Thy bounty squandered
Not only the quintessence of deep rapture
But in this Thou didst hourly make me dive

Page 55

As in a sea of bliss which, strangely, drowned
Me not to suffocate but make me swiftly
Eligible for Immortality,
As Thou must know, being the Knower of all.

(She covers her face in her hands)
And yet why wouldst Thou never answer when
I ask why Thou ordainest thus ? Oh why
Had he, who radiated but light and bliss
On all, even as the sun, to set for ever
From their horizons — leaving a legacy
Of gloom to those who had been born as natives
Of shadowless light and thornless flowers in bloom?
They tell me: others need his love and so
He was called, to live and serve them, to disclaim us
Who had penned him in our prison circumscribed
By our demands. But what were these demands
Which stifled him, and why? And how did we
Cabin him, — we who only yearned to spread
Our hearts of love beneath his dawn-rose feet
That not a thorn might wound him even once?
Why in this cruel world must one for ever
Give pain to some that one may confer joy
On others? If Thy great world has been built
To manifest Thy heavenly attributes,
Why must then even a Godly act entail
Suffering here on those who have but longed
To serve God through their daily aspiration,
And minister to the happiness of all?
How have I erred except through my engrossing
Devotion and fidelity to one

Whom Thou Thyself didst in Thy pure compassion
Assign to me as my life's sun and moon?
Why comes he not back even once to us
On whom thy daylight falls as the pall of night?

(She closes her eyes and presently goes into a trance)

Page 56

(In her trance she sees a strange clairvoyant vision. She
sees an open space on the bank of the Ganges, about a
furlong away, where a group of devotees surrounding
Sri Chaitanya sing with him.)

Oh when shall. Lord, our tears out well

At the mention of Thy name.
And, living in Thy truth, shall we

The illusive world disclaim?
When shall our body's every atom,

Partaking of Thy Grace
Become Thy holy temple agleam

With Thy love's loveliness ?
When shall our questionings and doubts

Dissolve like shadow clouds
At the advent of the new Sunrise

Thy cosmic Maya shrouds ?

(Suddenly she sees Roma and Murari and Keshav who
take up the refrain.)

The day will come, 'tis not afar

Since He is born again:

The Avatar of love and light,

In our dark world of pain.

(Suddenly a hubbub breaks in upon the singing and the
singers stop. The onlookers grow restless when stifled
cries are heard just as Jagai and Madhai, two notorious
roughs and terrors of the neighbourhood, dash through
the crowd in a drunken fury.)

JAGAI {in a shout to Sri Chaitanya)

Ah, here, at long last, are we face to face
With you, my precious, who will draw good men
And spoil all...

(He turning to Madhai, his moving spirit)

Page 57

... what shall I say?

MADHAI

Not much to say.

Though we have a lot to do - to bring him back.
To his senses.

SRI CHAITANYA (amused)

But how will you two compass that,
Since what you call light is dark night to the wise?

JAGAI (showing him his fist)

We are come to teach you that — and you shall learn
Which is God's gleam and which the Gorgon's gloom,
So that — what else, Madhai? You are not helpful.

MADHAI
You are wrong, for look —

(he suddenly spits on Sri Chaitanya's face and gives an
exultant guffaw)

— my help begins like this.

ROMA (with a piercing scream)
O Lord, my Lord divine! How could the fiends ...

SRI CHAITANYA (reproachfully, as he wipes his face)
There are no fiends on earth, my little mother!

MURARI (impetuously)

I say there are — Oh hell-fiends! Now take this —
(But as he rushes forward to attack them Keshav res-
trains him by coming between)

KESHAV
But wait — remember what he enjoins on us:

Insult and praise we must equate to naught.

Page 58

SRI CHAITANYA (pleased)

You are right: but let me know first why they feel
Infuriated with me.

ROMA (stingingly)

Oh I know that:

Hell knows that Heaven wants to heal all pain.

MADHAI (with a growl)

Shut up — or you will know what's hell, my girl!

(he turns to Keshav)

You did your friend, the sycophant, a good turn.
For he would have learnt a lesson he badly needs.

(Meanwhile the hum behind grows louder and he turns

sharply round.)
Wag not your tongues, you jabberers! Stand aside!

(He brandishes his heavy-knobbed stick: the humming

crowd falls back timidly. Then he turns back fiercely upon

Sri Chaitanya.)

Now come, you knave! Give me, you must, your word
That you will pose no more as a saint — or I —

(He suddenly picks up from the ground a stray broken

piece of a pitcher with a sharp end, which he lifts up

menacingly.)
Will give you something — see?

JAGAI (clapping his hands)

That's it— the thing!

SRI CHAITANYA (smiling indulgently)

But you are wrong, friend, for it's not the thing
That can correct me into the shape you want.
The only thing that beats one into shape
Is His rod of All-will, which, curiously,
Is a rod made not of something hard, but soft
Even as cream and that is why it made me
What I am — a tender minstrel of His name,

5

Page 59

Vowed to singing from door to door, proclaiming
That His All-will is love and only love
Which made us see the light of day on this
Our beautiful earth sustained by His compassion.

JAGAI

A truce to ranting — and posing as oracle.
Nor are we here to be improved by sermons.
Rather we came to improve you, my false prophet,
Till you know better than to confound and wreck
Good citizens of respectability.

(He brandishes his bamboo stick)
And this is what will put sense into you,
So either mend your ways, fool — or — beware!

SRI CHAITANYA (smiling)

Beware of what, my chastiser and mentor?
I am no more afraid of ought on earth,
For I told you a little while ago
That Krishna's love is soft like cream although
It can be, on occasion, tough and hard
As an armour of steel that laughs at such frail weapons
You are now flourishing in ignorance.

JAGAI (a trifle uncertain)

Why are you silent, Madhai? Shall we start?
Or will you exercise your eloquence?

MADHAI ,

Oh, that is not my line. For I mean business,
Nor can I talk the hind legs off a donkey
As this mytho-maniac can. But I say, fool!
I ask you for the last time: will you mend
Your ways or will you force us to bring home
To you some lessons your folly needs so badly?

Page 60

SRI CHAITANYA
I only need, my friend, one lesson on earth:

The lesson of love which I am learning daily

Through His great Grace which makes now everything

I experience reveal a mystic truth,

A truth that frees from fear. And so I know

That you, my brothers, are come as messengers

Of this one Truth which the more I know the more

I thrill to know — for you can never drink

Too much of my Beloved's nectarous love.

JAGAI

Hey, Madhai! What does this impostor mean?
We come to him as messengers of whose love?
Why are you silent now? You should say something.

SRI CHAITANYA

But what can he say to help you, since he knows
No more than you? Suffer me to explain —

MADHAI (interjecting)
But I have no patience — and I tell you this:

That you give up this high-faluting talk
And go back to your family.

SRI CHAITANYA (laughing)

But one can
Hardly go back to what one never left
Even for a moment — since Sri Krishna's Grace
Has made me see: that I live in my own
Family of brothers and sisters everywhere.

JAGAI

But what is all this nonsense? One is born
You live on the streets, you sleep out in the open
Under the trees, hobnobbing with filthy beggars

Page 61

And vagrants such as no man in his senses
Would choose to live with cheek by jowl and yet
You talk of brothers and sisters everywhere!

SRI CHAITANYA

I do because 'tis true, because I see
What He Himself has made me see, by opening
My eyes that once were closed and so, alas,
I failed to see the all-revealing Truth.

MADHAI

O hold your tongue — or — or you shall regret
For wagging it.

SRI CHAITANYA

There you are wrong again.
For 'tis not I who wag my tongue today
But He, the Lord of speech, who makes me -now
Speak what I speak and sing what I do sing:

And 'tis but on one theme I improvise
At His behest I cannot disregard —
No more, my brothers, than I can my heart's
To inhale His air so fragrant with His love.

JAGAI
Fragrant with His Love? What rigmarole!

SRI CHAITANYA

But you would sing a different song, my friend,
If only you would cast off from your eyes
Your ancient blinkers. You would then see His love
Dripping dripping dripping everywhere,
And 'tis not difficult I tell you, brother.
For all that is exists by His one love,
That's one with light. The suns and moons and stars
Are but pale beams of His self-luminous love.

Page 62

The seeds that sprout, the buds that blossom forth,
The rivers that flow, the birds that sing in springtide,
The dews that glisten in gladness, the worms that crawl,
The cows that graze and even the desert void
Of interstellar space are all sustained
By His invisible sap which is His love
And it stays invisible since your self-will chooses
To disown the Vision you could have for the asking.

JAGAI

I say, Madhai! Why not leave him alone?
For surely he is gone stark staring mad,
Too raving now to count?

MADHAI

I beg to differ,

My brother! For what he says is dangerous.
And madness too is infectious like the fever.
The other day my own dear nephew left
His home and school to roam the streets with him
Swelling his troupe of vagrants. There he is.

(He glowers at a boy who slinks away hurriedly)
Well — you wait. Your turn will come, boy, in due time.
But the trunk of the prison-tree must first be felled
Emitting such infectious, noxious fumes.

(He turns fiercely to Sri Chaitanya)
Look you, my sharper! We are not taken in
By this your abracadabra and so insist
We have come to teach you: not to learn from you.
And here's our ultimatum: we demand
You give up this your pose of saintliness;

This folly has gone much too far and must be
Or brought back here and now to sanity,
Or else stamped out of existence — once for all.
So will you promise to behave yourself
And leave off souring honest milk with curd?

Page 63

SRI CHAITANYA

But what is honesty and what is milk?
The only honest man is he who will
Own the one allegiance — to his heart's Lord,
Krishna, who is the milk of tenderness.
Who knows him not has never known true milk
Which He still offers, in His great compassion,
To all who thirst but still prefer, alas,
The stale curd and stay hungering all their lives.
But He, being Love in essence, will not force
His love on those who elect the lesser loves,
For love being of a piece with perfect freedom
Must be accepted voluntarily.

(He gives a sigh)
I only pity you, my friend, since you
Choose to be drunk not only with vicious wine
But what is far worse — with these fatal fumes
Of pride which blind you to Sri Krishna's love,
The love I have come here to pledge — announce.

MADHAI (enraged)

How dare call me drunk, you insolent fool?
Let me then teach you what is God's sobriety.

(He strikes Sri Chaitanya on his forehead with the sharp
end of the broken pitcher; blood spurts out; the group
of his adorers who so long stood as if bewitched now break
out in a loud outcry and pounce in fury on Jagai and
Madhai who, sobered now by the realisation of personal
danger, struggle helplessly in their grip till they are over-
powered and flung on the ground.)

SRI CHAITANYA (rushing into the fray)

Oh, for the love of me, let them alone!
Who deals them a blow has never accepted me.

(They set the two brothers free who totter up cowering,

Page 64

the bullies transformed in a moment into abject cowards.)

JAGAI AND MADHAI (simultaneously)
O help, help—murder.

ROMA

It's you, hell's own henchmen

Who have come, disguised as men, to murder Heaven.
Look, he is bleeding! Oh, what shall I do!

(She tears off a part of her sari to bandage him)

SRI CHAITANYA (waving her aside and smiling)

A little blood has spilt out since I had
Too much of it, as my Lord doubtless deemed.

(He turns to the two culprits who are now at bay, sur-
rounded by the mob)

Draw near, my brothers! You have nought to fear.
I stand security for you. I hope
You are not hurt?

(He addresses the group standing near them)

O run, give them some water.
Look, they are groaning!
(They are given water)

Now you come to me.
I will take you home. But wait, my brothers, first
Let me embrace you. Have no fear: none will
Lay hands on you now that you are armoured in
My love my Lord gave me to soothe and heal
All suffering souls who cry, for they are blind,
Alas, to His compassion. Come, you both
And claim from me but what belongs to you:

Sri Krishna's Love, the only refuge and harbour
In this our derelict, unhappy world.

(He embraces his stupefied assaulters together and then
turns on the equally stupefied onlookers to whom he
sings in ecstasy while the blood streams down his face
freely.)

Page 65

Your ways are strange, my Lord, You come

To play in ever new guises.
You fail us in our gala shows

And gleam in life's dark crises.
The light of day acts like a pall

On stars that shine on high,
The sun hides what the dark reveals,

Through storms Your barks You ply.
You lie in ambush when in pride's

Gay pomp in the world we move,
When life's rich lamps all flicker out,

You flash Your moon of love.

(Here the crowd take up once more with him the refrain)

The day will come, 'tis not afar,

Since He is born again
In His deputy of love and light,

In our dark world of pain.

(As the song goes on, the two rogues' eyes are seen drowned
in tears till they fall prostrate at Sri Chaitanya's feet
and cry out.)
Forgive us. Lord, our sins — we cry from Hell.

SRI CHAITANYA (singing ecstatically)
And what is hell and what is sin,

We ask and ask in vain
Until we, fools. Your love repel

And know the answer of pain.
And yet when we disown You, Lord,

Your Grace still sings on high:

"My heaven to hell I barter away

For but one price: a sigh."

(During the trance Vishnupriya felt very faint, espe-
cially when she saw Chaitanya attacked. Tears rolled

Page 66

down her cheeks as she saw him embrace his assai-
lants and heard him sing the last quatrain. Then the
vision fades out. She opens her eyes and gazes at the
image of Lord Vishnu in a heave of emotion.)

VISHNUPRIYA (with unshed tears glistening in her eyes)
O Lord, my Lord! Forgive a doting woman
Who worshipped the very ground her idol trod:

Since it was this excess of adoration
That made her blind and sad. But could one ever
Reconcile oneself to a loss so great
And sudden which did sound to my scared heart,
Rendered desolate in my fool blindness,
As the trump of doom. And so I failed to see
That the one thou gavest me I could not claim
As my sole possession for all time on earth.
I see now by Thy Grace which opens my eyes
That he was vouchsafed to me but for a spell,
A magic interlude, which I shall cherish,
Across the sad, bleak years that lie before me,
As the greatest boon conferred on me by life.
I see now I received far more than I
Could ever hope to claim — far less retain
For my own puny world which does not count.
The lonely oyster nurses the pearl of pearls
In the blind void of her heart; even so,
The pearl of his love was ensconced in mine.
But how could he let it be housed for ever
Where it had never belonged? The beggar receives
The light of the sun and moon but still remembers
That their light's gift is meant for all and not
For a single hut to which they bring their blessing.
I see now. Lord, as never before, that he
Is even more than a sun and moon to worldlings:

Sun of thy joy and moon of thy compassion.
For what is joy but the bliss of freedom born
Of the last emancipation from our craving

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For a little living? And what is thy compassion

If not the all-forgiving sympathy

Which, at its peak, accepts to hug the blackest

Sinners whose sins its very touch absolves ?

And this forgiveness I need most today,

For surely my indictment of Thy Grace

Is graver far than all the insane acts

Of violence of those pitiful criminals

Who shed the blood of the holiest of Thy saints

Because they knew no better, and having never

Harked in their lost hearts to Thy saints' heart-beat,

Their hearts have stayed the playground of the demons

Whose puppets they become unwittingly.

But how can I, Lord, plead for mercy when,

After having savoured Thy immaculate Grace

Through the love of one Thou madest with the stuff

Of Thy pure love's quintessence, after having

Lived and moved in Thine own being of beauty,

Whom to see is but to know — experience

The incredible: that the drop could hold the deep,

That a human heart could beat in unison

With Thy heart's primal throb and ultimate breath:

Yes, after having kissed the dust he trod
And felt myself redeemed — I still have failed
To appreciate Thy great Compassion's boon
Which made me, a wick, glow with Thy mystic fire
And yet be not reduced to pitiful ash.

(A noise is heard outside. She hears a familiar voice,
starts and, putting her hands on her heaving breast,
rises up trembling with an uncontrollable emotion. Sri
Chaitanya enters. She looks at him for a moment,
then falls down at his feet in a swoon. He draws near
and places his hand on her head and remains still for
a little while, his eyes closed, only his lips moving, re-
peating the name of his heart's Lord: "Krishna,
Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Krishna...." She comes

Page 68

back to consciousness after a few minutes, then rises
and bows down and kisses his feet. He looks at her
tenderly and places his hand again on her head and,
when she rises, gazes into her eyes steadfastly.)

SRI CHAITANYA (tenderly)
Do you now see?

VISHNUPRIYA (in a low voice with bowed head)
Yes...

SRI CHAITANYA

Then why are you sad?

VISHNUPRIYA
You know my prayer... Why then do you ask?

SRI CHAITANYA

One prays not to enlighten Him, but because
Through prayer one offers oneself more to Him.

VISHNUPRIYA
But can one offer more than what one has?

SRI CHAITANYA

Yes: what one is, and that is always harder
And this is why He smiles on prayer — because
It delves down into the heart's invisible core
Where the hidden sap of strength still waits untapped
Without which none can ever fare to the Lone.

VISHNUPRIYA

That I have learnt, my Lord, to my bitter cost.

SRI CHAITANYA

But bitterness, my love, is not approved
Of Him. We ask for bliss which is our birthright,

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But in ignorance we knock at the wrong door

Of desire. And those of us He would call sooner

To the right door He would sooner disenchant,

Denying us nothing but the alms of pain

Which would have been our lasting heritage

If the wrong door had opened to our knocking.

And so has Krishna said explicitly

In the Bhagawat that those He would in Grace

Accept for His own He will untether first

From their last moorings of home and wealth and glory.

One must accept and not presume to judge,

At least till one knows more.

VISHNUPRIYA

I stand rebuked,
And yet what answer shall I make today
Especially when one knows one has been weighed
And found wanting?... Because, in my ignorance,
I asked for the moon.

SRI CHAITANYA

Brood not over the past.
The Dance of our great Lord is executed
Through rhythms whose deep import we fail to grasp,
For they sound like false steps to our human scanning:

But the Artist knows how His art must evolve
And even a discord He, our Great Composer,
Weaves regally into a richer harmony.

VISHNUPRIYA

I accept it all with bowed head even when
I fail to grasp it fully. But my Lord —

SRI CHAITANYA
Yes? ... Why do you pause?

VISHNUPRIYA

Because ... I know not what

To say. So may I only add, my Lord,

I wait upon your wish: will you not tell me

What you attend from me from now on earth?

SRI CHAITANYA

I will, my dear beloved, with all my heart.
I only know of one path in this life:

The path our heart's one Guide calls us to tread

His marvellous love-songs to manifest.

The only thing He attends from us, in Grace,

Is that we be conscious of the jarring notes

We bring in through our self-will and false pride,

And ask sincerely that we may not wish

To assert them and so mar the symphony

He will compose for His last diapason.

At any given moment He is at work

To build out from deep warring elements

An edifice of beauty and perfection.

'Tis not for us to inveigh against His planning,

Because our human eyes, alas, being blinkered,

Can never appraise His divine architecture

In the right perspective. From the niche of Time

Can one even glimpse the total Dance of the Timeless,

Each step entailing endless repercussions

Of Karma redeemed by Grace? How shall the mind

Conceive what is beyond the mind? And yet,

Such is His lila that 'tis given to us,

Infinitesimal specks of life, to joy

In His cosmic multitudinous play of life

And offer all we have that He may build

With human things a masterpiece divine.

VISHNUPRIYA

I see this more and more, my Lord, and so
I assure you, I will aspire more and more
That I may offer more and more my self-will
To the Master Architect, that He may use

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This useless life of mine too for His mansion,
May I surrender at His feet what little
I have to offer and without demur
Accept what He ordains. My only prayer
Now is that I may not in ignorance
Lend my being to forces which impair
His harmony: that my self-will, I repeat,
Be sunk ever more and more in His All-will;

And since, O my heart's Pilot and Dictator,
You are pleased, in your great mercy, to appear
Before my twin eyes, hungering still for thee,
I would implore you for one boon of Grace.

SRI CHAITANYA

My dear beloved! Know you not that all
I have and all I ever shall win are meant
For all — since now I see in all but the One
Whose utter slave I am and whose Compassion's
One touch has made the whole world kin to me
By revealing His one Self in the forms of all
Though they, being blind, hold soul's last vision suspect
And eyelessness alone beyond attaint.

VISHNUPRIYA (her eyes glistening)

My Lord, address me not so tenderly,
Not only am I unfit to be loved by you,
But what my heart has come now to dread most
Is lest your love for me pollute your soul
By even so much as a chance proximity.
For you yourself have opened my eyes to what
They in deliberate blindness would not see,
So I pray to you today: Oh give me strength,
Not love — which please bestow on the deserving.

SRI CHAITANYA

Be not so sad, my love! and above all
Say not such foolish things. For how can you

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Conceive Love as a judicial patron who

Will visit only those who are deserving?

And what is more, whom do you call the deserving?

'Tis time you realised that those who deemed

Themselves as worthy of His Love Divine

Must, by that very claim forfeit the title

To being adjudged as worthy. No, my dear!

The Love Divine looks not with our human eyes.

If pick and choose it must, it will invite

First those who are more conscious of their flaws

And undeservingness to claim its favour,

Rather than those impeccable, upright souls

Who preside in their world of self-complacency.

For Krishna will not greet the opulent

Highbrow of arid fame and fiery pride.

Remember you not His fling of irony

In His talk with Rukmini against the rich:

(He hums)

A pauper am I and so

To the paupers alone I wend,
For them as loyal I know

Who call me their one Friend!

'Tis the low lands that yield the richest harvests
And not the highest peaks which stay for ever
Barren and gaunt hugging their haughty glare.
The great saints will nor flare nor dazzle like these
But sparkle even as grass athrill and bowing
With divine humility. If you I call
'My dear beloved', 'tis not from a mere
Impulse to shower an empty blandishment,
I hold you dear to me as my heart's breath
Because I have cherished you for what you are:

A thing of beautiful humility

Which made you glimpse in pain the apocalypse

Of His Grace conceded but to the pure of heart.

Page 73

VISHNUPRIYA (rivetting her eyes on him)

But what else could one be, my Lord, but humble
Who claims but one asset: sterility?

(She gives a melancholy smile)
And can you wonder why I now implored you
To address me nevermore as your 'beloved' ?
And shall I tell you something else — a thing
I kept from you so long — yes, even from you?

(She clears her voice, now thick with tears)
Lord, when I saw you first, seven years ago,
My heart and soul upheaved and I surrendered
All I possessed: my pride and gift of beauty.
But one thing still I could not give away:

My yearning that you would remain for ever

My own and only mine. I worshipped you

With every drop of my adoring blood

But even then I dimly saw, although

I strove to close my eyes to what I had glimpsed,

That I gave my all to claim your all: I loved,

To win your love: I dreaded even the thought

That others might come to claim your love and so

Curtail the quota that was due to me.

I failed to see, nay, I declined to see

That you were made not of the common stuff,

Nor destined to stay mine alone for ever

And I was vowed to an unconfessed desire

To reserve your love for my poor love alone.

I stifled my deep agony, for I knew,

And this knowledge only grew with passing time,

That all the time I deified you, I was

Deifying but my arrogating self,

Entering like a servant of the King

To grow into the status of his mate

And ministering angel and guiding star.

I wanted to make a God of you because

I longed to be the beloved of a God.

This deep low voice of conscience I did stifle

Page 74

with loud reasons fabricated to kill my qualms.

Yes, to be absolved from this my sense of shame
I vindicated all I did and argued
That you I served to joy in your sole glory
And not in the mirror of my doting self
Which shone with the bright lustre it reflected.
And 'twas for this my sin of sins I lost you
My light's last fount, one sun to my pining moon!

(She covers her face in her hands and sobs disconsolately)

SRI CHAITANYA (placing his palm gently on her head)

Oh, be not over-repentant, my beloved,
For a failing that is an adjunct of our egos
Whose blind desires dog us ever on earth
Branding us with self-pity and pain and sorrow,
Nor lash yourself too hard for what may well be
Likened to spots that are born with the leopard's birth,
A heritage of our terrestrial life.
Who ever was born immaculate on our earth?
The One who over broods his creatures knows
Their natures' flaws which chase them like their shadows.
And being the soul of patience and compassion,
He sets us tasks but not as a task-master.
For even when we fail Him signally
He knows why we all fail — impelled by forces
Of sceptred instincts that have ruled for ages
Through a long line of births in diverse forms.
Nor is He fain to judge us by our lapses
Nor by our lamentations of remorse:

He takes our measure by our aspiration
And our hearts' sincerity and deepest dreams.
And, seeing all from His last peak. He knows
We are seldom as responsible for our deeds,
Far less for our impulses and thoughts and feelings,
As the moralist proclaims omnisciently
Menacing us with Hell's dread chastisements,
In the name of God he conceives in the image

6

Page 75

Of his high moral and judicial self.
And least of all can one in the realm of love
Hope to comport oneself as one aspires.
For in love's intense ambit the ego derives
The fiercest joy from finding the freest play.
So 'tis in this realm desire reigns supreme,
The fulcrum whereon Nature's mechanics rest.
And life's desires being self-regarding
Must war for ever with true love which is
In essence a deep urge to lose one's self.

VISHNUPRIYA
` I know, my Lord, or rather, shall I say:

I came to learn through bitter experience.
But you will pardon me if I confess
I cannot stifle a sigh when I feel thus
Humiliated — lost in my own eyes ...
Nor is the anguished question answered yet:

Why are we born under one flag on earth
If we must disclaim it driven by suffering
To seek the aegis of another? — Oh why?

SRI CHAITANYA (smiling indulgently)

To answer this I must repeat, my love,
What I hinted at a little while ago:

That the human mind can never truly plumb
The primal Purpose which brought into being.
The evolving architecture of the Master
Architect. And may I add that this
Our human mind behaves still like a child
Asking deep questions without understanding
Even the import of its curiosity,
Far less the answers of the soul.

(He smiles abstractedly)

Our mind
Has yet to know how little it can know
With all its loud pretensions. And this I came

Page 76

To realise anew in Orissa

Through a strange tragedy. She was a Princess.

Her father, vowed to make his daughter happy,

Insisted on her having for spouse a Prince,

A handsome youth of twenty, who was smitten

By her mystic elusive beauty. But she loved

Krishna alone and swore she never would marry.

The rational father, a born sceptic, laughing

To scorn a legend, wished to harness her

With a youth afire with passion and large as life,

And the wedding bells rang out at his command.

The daughter, in her desperation, swallowed

Some fatal poison. I was summoned when

She lay in the palace, gasping. But as I

Drew near her bed she opened her eyes of trance

And gave me a smile dripping pure ecstasy!

I was amazed: for her frail body writhed

In agony hard to see and harder to bear.

Yet she calmly said: "Please bless me that I may

Be havened at the feet of my Beloved."

I prayed as her frail frame quivered in the grip

Of the deadly poison. But, to the last, there passed

Not a shadow of regret across her face

Radiant with the beatific smile,

And her eyes a picture of ineffable bliss,

Even when her limbs were twisted in the throes

Of dire convulsions the like of which I never

Have witnessed heretofore! Before the end

She gave me a last look and then smiled. "My people,"

She said, "are cursing Krishna; they call him cruel

For ordaining such a horrible fate for me!

But how dare they judge the high Omniscient —

They, who fail so pitifully everytime

To take the measure of pigmy men and women?

How can they render unto the vast Divine

What is due to Him when they cannot even render

The little that they owe to His puny creatures?

Page 77

Can those who never have delved down to the simple

Genesis of a single grass-blade's birth

Hope to elucidate the mysteried

Passion Play of multitudinous Life

And the fathomless role of human aspiration

And the birth of Beauty in the sphere of Pain?

And lastly, how can they divine His Love's

Import who never have hearkened to His Flute-call?

I tell you I can feel my heart's Beloved

Breathing into my heart when this my body

Is tortured in the pitiless clutch of Death.

I marvel at His great stupendous lila

As you too must oft marvel in your heart,

0 Master mine, who, havened at His feet,

Call shipwrecked souls to the harbour you have reached,

Even as the tree, inspired by the example

Of clouds with their cool retinue of shades,

Invites for a like protection from the sun

Pilgrims on their way to the holy haunts.

So you too smile at them, the prudent fools,

When, solemnly adjudicating, they

Decide: I am a thing for pity's grace

And those alone are God's own darlings who

Pass goalless days, starving in an isle of plenty,

Ringed round by darkling waters of destiny,

And the ones who outsoar this Valley of False Glimmers

Escorted by His light are lost for ever!

Lila ... lila ... a magic word! To think:

That all the bliss of earth or paradise

Should have in a moment lost its gaudy glamour....

And who could rival my beautitude

Whom He, my mystic Prince, to claim and own

Had made a pauper Princess but to change me

Into a faithful slave of His and show

The difference between the moon and marsh-light:

He lured me with a phantom opulence
To countervail it with His mystic Flute-call

Page 78

And lead back to His Bliss for which He made me
Draw my last breath in pain." ... She gave a smile
As in a trance, then heaved a sigh and murmured:

"But how can the worldlings' hooded eyes even glimpse
The iridescence of His rainbow Grace
Which shows me an exit into the Life Divine
Through the dark portals of death-agony!"
And she hummed a song of mine she had heard me sing,
Of Radha's everlasting pledge to Krishna,
And, improvising with a rare emotion,
Her virgin soul she poured forth as she sang:

(breaking out passionately into song)

Whether He tramples on me, my Lord,

Or hugs me tenderly: .
My life is given to Him alone

For all eternity.
Whether He spurns me from His door

Or will abide with me:

My thoughts will dwell in Him alone

In pain or ecstasy.
Whether He courts me or consorts

With the fickle frivolously:

My heart will bow to Him alone,

None else my King shall be.

(His face flushes with emotion and his eyes fill. ...He

pauses for a little, then fastens his gaze upon her and

clears his voice tremulous with tears.)
Her eyes took on a hue unknown to light
And then a strange thing happened: I felt a Presence
I know so well... and ... thrilled, I sang with her
When, lo, on a sudden, oblivious to us all,
She stood up from her bed and faltered out
In ecstasy: "My Lord, my Lord, my Lord!"

(Vishnupriya wipes her eyes. He goes on)
Her people thought she was delirious

Page 79

And rushed to her side to put her back to bed

But she eluded them and fell down forward

Prostrate upon the floor — when I too saw Him,

The Kings of kings in person, aureoled

In a blue light. His eyes deep with compassion,

And the magic smile upon His magic lips!

I lost all count of time ... And when at last

I came to — He was there no more, nor the virgin

He had come to take back home to His Vaikuntha.

(He pauses and holds her eyes)
Her parents could not see what she had glimpsed
And so dubbed Krishna a fiend or else a myth.
But, as she said. His smile is lost on those
Who will not win to the deeper vision, and so
When I left my all they said, unanimously,
That I lost everything when I lost only
My chains and blinkers. And yet such is His
Inscrutable Maya that we fail to see:

He leads, how often, to His Heaven through Hell....

(He smiles ironically)

No wonder we quail to answer His dangerous call
As I too once did, summoned to cut away
From my old moorings I so dearly loved "
But none can ever attain the summit bliss
Until he bid farewell to the lower strands;

And nowhere is renunciation more

Imperative than in Love's deep domain.

For though nought can ever rival true love's raptures,

Yet nowhere else can pain be paramount

As in the empire of what we call love.

But when we will not do His will through joy,

The initiation is taken in hand by pain

Which visits not to make us derelict,

But to spur us ever onward, onward till

We find a harbour lovelier than our last

From which nought but the storm of pain could wean us.

(He looks at her tenderly/or a few seconds, then puts his

Page 80

hand on her shoulder, very gently)
But since you ask me to enlighten you
I will say only this: trust not your heart
Too much to the keeping of that wise fool. Reason,
Whose glimmer, at its best, is like a glow-worms'
Which cannot quell the gloom that dogs our lives
But only shows its girth and density.
I would advise you to accept on faith
What mental reason cannot reach: that we
Are born to a nature with two diverse urges:

One would cajole us to stay where we are,
The other goads us to climb ever higher,
Leaving the stagnant bogs we grow to cherish.
And every joy on earth becomes a bog:

Every haven save the one pledged by the highest.

And nowhere holds this truer than in the realm

Of human love and nowhere is the prison

More stifling than where lust is dominant,

For lust can never win to lasting bliss

Because its rhythm falls out of step with love's.

For lust by its very nature will exult

In its instinct of possession whereas love's

One impulse is to give away its all

Without reserve or fear or thought of the morrow:

Ever squandering, never garnering,

Ever offering, never questioning.

But this movement, being essentially divine,

Is dreaded by us, humans, till we learn

To see with wisdom's eyes the limitation

Of each impulse acting on the human level.

But to see clear and far one must discard

The stained glass of desire, and this occasions

Often a pain so great to its votary

That he would even smite His hand of Grace,

(Which can alone wipe off desire's stains,

And lead us to the vision that gives salvation)

He even would curse the hand that comes to bless

Page 81

Rather than hail the boon of bliss it offers.
(He holds her hand tenderly)

And that is why you suffer misconceiving

The message of true love which, in its essence,

Is a message of surrender unbargaining

Which whispers in the heart: "Give all you have

And are to Krishna and never in return

Ask even for the meed of His answering Love."

But, alas, it sounds like madness to the wise,

And so I sing now only for the crazy

Whom I adore today since none but they

Will respond to Folly's message which declares

(Reversing the prudent values of sanity):

"None but the fool who squanders all he counts

As the most precious of this earth-life's boons

Shall win to His last pinnacle of Bliss

Through Love which, starting as a flickering flame,

Must grow till its apocalyptic sun

Will burn away the dross of our desire

And this shall be achieved when we will learn

To merge, like moths, in Krishna's Fire — of Love.

(Vishnupriya falls prostrate and kisses his feet. He puts
his hands upon her head in a half-trance and goes on
repeating: Krishna ... Krishna ... Krishna ... Krishna
... Krishna ...)

Page 82

Act One

Full moon night of Jhulan Purnima. In Miras temple at Brindavan she is singing before her Image of Gopal. On the right of the altar her Gurudev Sri Sanatan Goswami is seated beside the temple-priest, Pundarik. On the left, four sombre, whiskered pundits are watching intently. Behind her sit, with folded hands, a motley crowd of pilgrims, come from far and near, drawn by her name, music and holiness.

MIRA (singing in a mystic ecstasy, standing before the Image):

Friend, shall I tell you how I wooed

And won my Lord Gopal?
How the One for whom pine mighty saints
Responded to my call?

I knew but one code, trod one path:

Alone to the Alone.
They worship Him as the King of kings:

I claimed Him for my own.

The sages seek Him far and near

And still sigh unfulfilled:

I searched for Him in my yearning heart

And there He stood revealed!

I conned no books nor performed feats

Of high austerities.
I gladly hailed what He ordained:

My joys and miseries.

The learned fail to fathom Him,

The Vast and Mysteried:

He answered because I prayed to Him

My way lost soul to lead.

How can I ever, friend., plumb His ways ?

Can a bird span the space ?
I only fell at His lotus-feet

And He smiled on me, in Grace.

I cried for Him as for the mother

The child cries in the night,
And compelled. He leaned like sky to earth,

In love's divine delight.

{In tears of ecstasy she sang, describing

How Krishna, her one blue dream in desert life,

Delivered her from the underworld of Night

To boon her with the freedom of the sky,

Calling her His own child of dateless dawn

And she sang how she had groped for years for Him:)

MIRA (sings)

I sought Him in idols, temples, shrines,
Woods, hills and dales, alas, in vain!
With mantras and rites I worshipped Him
With lights and incense, time and again.

Till the saints revealed to me — how one
Must love the Lord one yearns to see
And I sang: 'I know I am dark and flawed,
Still I am Thy child and cling to Thee.'

So Mira, the derelict. He redeemed
And gave asylum at His feet
When, lo, in a flash, the ages' chains
Fell off— as He came her to greet!

(Her voice rose in a resonant crescendo

And, as she sang and danced in a mystic fervour,

The devotees acclaimed and kissed her feet;

Men bowed down to the ground; the women wept

Page 88

And even the children stared, bewitched — as she
In simple similes delineated
How the Blessed Lord installed her lowly slave
In His tender heart of evergreen delight.)

SANATAN (in a moved voice)

Oh you are bless ed, blessed Mira, my child!
For surely 'tis He, your Gopal, who inspires
Your ecstatic songs and dances, raining His Grace
On our earth's heart of drouth. Your mother is blessed
And blessed are all -who come to your holy feet.
0 lotus of light, flowering on darkness' stem,
Who have grown into a legend in your lifetime,
In this our world of din how shall we hail
You, minstrel of Gopi-love, to whom our Lord
Of bliss and loveliness, comes to reveal
His inviolable self of harmony,
Beauty and bliss, music and compassion
To manifest His soul of dream delight?
How through your voice He sings, day after day,
In ever-new lilts. His deathless melodies,
And visits the temple of your soul to seek
Your pure love's hospitality! 0 daughter
of divinity and stainless purity!
Sing on ... ever on ... dispense His nectarous ruth's
Lavish bounty...

(Thickly)

In this our world of greed

And gloom you come, missioned to teach us, misers,
How to win all thro-ugh staking one's all for Him,
To grow blue wings, with the sole power of faith
And make love's rose bloom on a mantra's stem,
The love that defies the wisdom of worldly prudence!
O incarnate audacity, who abandoned all
You cherished — to attain the viewless Peak
By dint of your one yearning for the heights!
We salute you who have come to initiate

7

Page 89

Our storm-sky lives with the dare of your star-poised soul!

(With a sigh)

We are, indeed, fool cripples who still prefer
Crutches to wings — we, realists, who applaud
The testimony of those who have not seen
And scotch the rapturous evidence of the seers!
The mud-lipped worms are real, but not the eagles
That pierce through clouds to revel in stratospheres.
The ghostly shadows are true because they abound,
But rainbows are pointless because their angel glances
Are few and far between! We indict Heaven
As heartless because none can have for the asking
Its endless riches! A few do, indeed, sing
Of the blissful Brindavan of selfless love
They come to know through the Evergreen Lover's Grace;

But nay, we must have a Grace on our own terms,

Build a religion of stark power and greed

And impose it as the unique real gospel

That can make us all happy on this earth!

Oh, when shall we accept the heart's lead of love

And aspire to see light where we see today

But a kingdom ruled by hatred's gloom or half-lights

Of transient pleasures which fail even to please?

So we appeal to you, O His beloved

Minstrel maid, you sing ever on — uncaring

Whether we, fools and dotards, respond or not.

You sing on and — who knows — you may achieve

With your unearthly voice and moving songs

What Pandits, priests and pulpit-preachers have

Striven in vain to bring home to our minds:

That faith and love are the twin angel wings
On which we all can soar to His Vaikuntha.

MIRA (falls, in tears, at his feet; then rises and, standing
before the Image with folded hands, starts singing again)
We home in His love's own domain,
Love is our heart's one refrain:

Page 90

When for love we lose our all,
We know all all we'll attain.

In love, in rapture, we sing,

Drink at love's pure virgin spring;

Come joy or come deep pain,

We'd live and die for our King.

Love-intoxicate are our eyes

Which strain but for love's sunrise:

We, minstrels of Brindavan,

Love His Face in our soul's dream skies.

We chant His one Name all day,

Consigning our lives to His sway
And, enthralled by His call, we dance

When He starts His flutelet to play.

We reck not of virtue nor sin,

Knowledge nor wisdom serene,
We hymn but His beauty and thrill

In His laughter's lilts evergreen.

Sings Mira: "We are love-mad, friend:

On love alone we depend:

Like love-lorn moths, in His flame

Of love we will merge in the end."

PUNDARIK (rises and folds his hands)

O mother, how you do transport our souls
With your angel voice, celestial songs and dance!
A time was when I did wonder at heart
If what you claimed you had seen were true! I felt
At a loss ... because I myself never had seen
In all my wanderings a saint who had
So swiftly attained the Goal: His lotus feet.
But your incredible personality,

So radiant, strong and yet so flower-pure,

Whittled away my crust of scepticism

And helped me glimpse in you the Lord's own maid.

As Gurudev so aptly said just now.

The Gopi-heart of Brindavan is yours

And so it is you can, in a moment, unveil

The starry secrecies of our great Lord's

Love and compassion through your beautiful songs

And heavenly dances of pure ecstasy.

(His voice grows husky)
And may I tell you something? 'Twas because
You blessed me with your Grace that I caught, at last,
The contagion of your vision creating faith
Which laughs dark doubts to scorn. For 'twas this faith
That fostered within me the Eye of Light
Which can see into the heart of things. And so
My doubts gave place to a deep reverence
For all that you stood for. Thereafter, oh!
Your every message and dance and song and smile
Did give a fillip to my aspiration.

(He bows his head and drops his voice)
I wanted, mother, to confess to you;

But a fear held me back lest you renounce me

If I owned that once I had dared dismiss

Your vision of Him as mere hallucination

And your claim to have compelled Him to descend

To dwell for ever in your heart as a sad

Delusion if not sheer pretension. Thus

I had deeply sinned because I had refused

To listen to the dictates of my heart

Which would fain have me bow to you at once

As one whose even anklets showered sweet lilts

Of Gopi-love that comes in this dark age

Only to a few, the blessed elect,

Whom His love, like a ruthless hurricane

Wrenches off their anchorage to be granted

Eternal refuge at His lotus-feet.

Page 92

(He heaves a sigh)

But something within me sought refuge in
My recalcitrance when your deep Grace had gripped me,
Till, slowly it dawned on me that those who spoke
Like your inviolate self, from summit-vision
(Attesting what we, on the plains, alas,
Can never glimpse) must first be venerated
Before we could presume to verify
Or scotch their findings, as the Gita says:

Shraddhavan labhate jnanam

For
How could one judge of what transpires on peaks
When one wallows in abysmal ignorance?

(With a sigh)
But even this is not all. He says in the Gita:

"Disclaiming all commandments, codes and dharmas
Take refuge in me alone. Have no misgivings:

For I undertake to deliver you from all sin."

I waved aside even this breath-taking pledge

As fabricated by His unscrupulous priests.

"For is not He," I asked, "the peak and plinth

Of spiritual life which must be grounded in dharma's

Inviolable codes? If so, how could He

Thus lead us astray — sundering trustful souls

From their eternal moorings: the moral codes?"

(Smiling a bitter smile of self-pity)
But the great Lord knows that fools cannot help but adore
Their folly and so must resent if His
Light comes down to deliver them from their blindness.
So little wonder that I saw the Gita's
Profoundest truths distorted through the haze
Of my idiot conceit.

(After a brief pause)

'Twas then you came,
Like moon on her golden chariot, cleaving my dusk
And, singing your way to Heaven, carried my dark,
Doubt-weary, peaceless soul to the very gates

Page 93

Of the Paradise of certitude — the eternal
Brindavan where the Evergreen still plays on
His haunting love's flame-flute. 'Twas only then
The meaning of love's surrender dawned on me,
The love which, once attained, we overpass
All moral codes, commandments, formal rites —

FIRST PUNDIT

Halt, fool yokel! A truce to blasphemy!
It is stark, staring lunacy!

(Bitterly)

To think

That you an old and sober priest should thus
Take leave of your senses — genuflect like this
To a woman, hailing her as your eye-opener!

(Snapping his fingers in contempt)
But you are but a stooge. 'Tis she who is
Responsible — the prime mover, chief offender
Against Divinity — His will and fiats
To which all among us must bow, or be
Excommunicated by Manu's law.

(Consternation among the devotees. A stifled outcry

ripples through them)

PUNDARIK (bridling)

How dare you, sire-

SANATAN (putting a restraining hand on his shoulder, in a

whisper)
Hush, Pundarik, my son!
There is no need. Mira can hold her own
Against them all.

PUNDARIK (surprised, in a subdued voice)

But still, must you allow
Insolent fools to insult our holy mother?

Page 94

SANATAN (smiles )

Can insolent rockets ever insult the star
By merely hissing at her diamond gleam?
I have an object. Let us witness His lila.

(Meanwhile the First Pundit has been answering back
excitedly at a dissident colleague in a low voice. At the
very moment he finally shakes his head and bursts out.)

FIRST PUNDIT

No, no! I will not listen. For I do feel
The call is urgent : accept her challenge we must.
Did you ever hear the like — a gospel of love
Gone mad! She must be told now some home-truths,
And made to see how grotesque seem her claims
When mirrored in the good sense of sobriety.

MIRA (smiling sweetly)

Forgive me, sire! For what I sang was not
The gospel of madness but of the sober Soul's
Discovery of the last Reality.
Whose other name is Divine Love. And when
This is borne home to our Radha-soul, she sings:

"Austerities, virtues, learning, genius, pomp,

Scholarship, prudence — these move not the heart

Of the world's Unique Beloved, the Evergreen

Swain for whom the eternal Radha-bride

In the soul of every one of us lives. And

He can be only won through simple love's

Petition and the ultimate surrender

Of all one has and is; my Gopal being

Pure love — He's best propitiated by

The offering of the guileless heart's deep yearning.

FIRST PUNDIT (his glance ranges the baffled faces of his

colleagues)
Did I not tell you? She is unrepentant

Page 95

And it is serious — I warn you all —
Because there is a method in her madness.
She has a way with her and so infects
Effusive women and simple rustics like
This senile priest who, in his turn, will start
Recruiting similar half-wits, calling trustful
Yokels to gather under her banner. So,
It is high time we put her in her place ...

(Turning hotly on Mira)
You do have a tongue which you know how to wag
To draw the credulous with your swift allure.
But you shall never take in those who can
See through your ruses. Humph! How can sobriety
Endorse your version of Lord Krishna's ways
And coming and going? It sounds all too quixotic!
You glibly mouth a string of hyperboles,
Feminine and absurd! Do we not know
How unattainable is our Lord, Sri Krishna?
Did not even the resplendent saints and sages
Apostles and Messiahs find the Path
To Him, the Lone, strait, difficult to tread
As the razor's edge? Is He not far-off like
The galaxies, elusive like the sky,
Vast like the sea, ineffable like Om
And, above all, is He not hard to please?
And yet you, garrulous maid — who are not versed
In the Vedas or philosophy, who know not
A word of Sanskrit, the alphabet of the Gods —
How dare you arrogate the Sage's status
And brag you are cradled in "your Gopal's" Love!

(He makes a grimace of contempt and turns his eyes upon

his colleagues}

Do use your brains, gird up your loins, friends!
I appeal to you: be scandalised and shocked!
To think that such an ignorant babbler should
Expect us, learned pundits, to believe
That the Omniprevalent, One-without-a-second

Has deigned to descend to abide for ever with her
And eat out of her hand, her little Gopal!

(He blows his nose angrily)
Humph! do we not know all about His ways
Through our high erudition and Yoga of knowledge?
Has He not over and over again proclaimed
In our hoary scriptures that none ever on earth
Can attain to Him save after years and years
Of stern and arduous austerities:

Self-discipline, fasting, vigilance, meditation,
And last, an intensive study of the Vedas?
Has He not promulgated: "Only the strong
Shall win through to the Self's inviolate light?"
Yet she vaunts — "her Gopal" never once exacts
From her what He imposes on us all!
"Her Gopal", indeed! Humph! The One who is
The Creator of the cosmos, the Absolute,
The immaculate Supreme who ensouls all!

(He takes a pinch of snuff, then jabs his friend seated

next to him)
Oh, wake up, friend! Say something, for God's sake!

SECOND PUNDIT (bridling)

Wake up? How do you mean? Surely, I
Am no somnambulist — nor was I dozing!
Only I wondered if one should in a temple
Flare up into a fracas. But you are right:

Our honour is at stake. We —

(turning with sudden heat on Mira)

Mira, listen:

You are delirious. You know Him not.
Is it not written: we must be pure as light,
Perfect as crystal, thunder-strong and, lastly,
Delivered from the siren Maya's bondage,
Live in the forest, for long years vowed to silence
And comtemplation and philosophy,
Embodied in the Tantras, Vedas and Gita,

Page 97

Before we can glimpse Him? Do we not all
Know to our cost that He smiles never on our
Manifold flaws and foibles of the flesh?
Your puerile, sentimental rhapsodies
And popular songs, I warn you, never shall find
Favour with Him, the Superconscient Brahma!

THIRD PUNDIT (in a tone of raillery)

I applaud you, my self-righteous friend! And therefore,
I also, duly furious, shall take now ...
Ahem ... my cue from you. We must all growl
In a body like a pride of wounded lions,
Maimed and down, but... ahem ... not out. Oh, no!
For lo and behold: are we not bristling with
Righteous indignation? And joy, as well,
Of course ... for is it not in tedious life
Delightful to explode and feel... ahem ...
Superior to a woman? And when one is
As cock-sure as we are (in a body, again)
That one is a paragon of wisdom and those
Who genuflect to other idols are fools,
Does not one walk on air, athrill that one
Is born peer of angels, model of virtue,
Sponsor of dogmas, teacher of saints and proctor
Of morals?

(Taking a heroic pinch of snuff)

So Mira! I say, you are doomed!
For you are innocent of all that we
Have learned through memorising reboant phrases.
Ergo, you have not the ghost of a chance against
Our august selves when you dare claim you see
Light where we ... ahem ... see but silhouettes
For your poor evidence is only ... ahem ...
A woman's, whereas ours is masculine
And therefore ... ahem ... strong, impeccable!

(The raillery becomes more pronounced)
You see, we are so erudite and can quote

Page 98

Torrents of fearsome dicta from the Vedas.

But you, frail thing, even if you have seen

Are out because you never burnt midnight oil,

Cramming on earth blue rumours of the Beyond.

So I ... ahem ... deduce ... I know not what

Follows from this ... but never mind ... for this much

Is certain that the great Vyas knew what he

Wished to convey when he blared like the trump of doom!

Kalena sarvam vihitam vidhatra

paryayayogat labhate manushyah;

Which means, most probably, that as one grows older
With time the present vanishes momently
Into the past, and that, the older one grows,
With the march of dreadful time, one is expected
To grow even wiser till one ripens ... ahem ...
Into an awful oracle, shall I say?
Never mind. Only ... where was I? Ah yes,
It all comes back ... we must rebuke you sternly
For being what you are. So Mira, I, too,
Must with my learned colleagues lash at you
For venturing to have seen what we have never
Glimpsed even once nor dare hope ever ... ahem ...
To see with our mortal eyes till they grow glassy
With cataract or deepening wisdom. Well, well!

(His eyes range the faces of his three colleagues and his

lips curve into a smile)
Is not that just what you would have me say?
I mean ... ahem ... thus crushing her with the weight
Of authority of books and howling down
With multiple frenzied voices that of a simple
Dame who can only sing and dance and thrill
But not overawe as we great pundits ... ahem ...
Do, first and last, and even in the middle ...
Oh, why must you shoot a fire-fly with a gun?

Page 99

FIRST PUNDIT (frowning)
Fool! hold your tongue!

SECOND PUNDIT

Nay, he's a flippant knave,

As we all know to our cost. But we, who are
Responsible guardians of society, must
Take action since it is no laughing matter.

FOURTH PUNDIT
I do agree. But how shall we —

THIRD PUNDIT

— in chorus

Drown with our scandalised tears her sparkling folly?
(A low titter of laughter ripples through the audience)

FIRST PUNDIT (in stentorian tones')

Silence! Good heavens! Is this a temple — or
A circus of clowns?

(To Mira)

I say, you must not mind

What my friend, the buffoon, said just now. I mean

We have no wish to be hard on you. But ... er ...

I mean ... you must learn to bow down to your elders,

Nor presume to ridicule the wise, our Sanskrit

Vedas and Tantras and the holy rites.

We only evolve in light through living in light

And not in the primitive world of our blind instincts

And impulses of the untutored mind.

Besides, an unlettered woman should be humble

And ignorance must never sermonise.

MIRA (placidly)

I assure you all, my venerable elders,
That I luxuriate not in sermonising,
Still less in ridiculing the holy codes.

Page 100

I only dance and sing to my Gopal
And speak my mind. But I do understand
Why you misunderstand me. I subscribe
To your verdict on my humble self. I own
I am an ignorant, unlettered woman
Unversed in the Vedas, innocent of Sanskrit.
Only I cannot help but wonder how
Can an intensive study of the Vedas
Or Tantras liberate us from our chains
Of worldly attachments? How can, sires, a mental
Philosophy lead us to the One who baffles
The mind and senses ? And how shall scriptures
Memorised heal the cravings of the flesh
Or curb the passions that lay us under the yoke
Of what the wise call Fate? And lastly, how
Shall ever learning help one glimpse Gopal
Who resides not in the books but in one's soul?
The sages who have realised Him have,
Indeed, attested: "We have known the One
Stationed beyond the mist of ignorance
And to see Him is to achieve the Goal of goals:

To taste the Nectar of Immortality."

But what have you achieved and known in life?

You merely cite the testimony they gave

With an eloquence more sonorous than convincing.

The saints have seen; you only prate the news

Of their great vision and experience.

But can mere erudite talk that someone else

Has tasted honey help one ever to know

How honey tastes and thrills and fortifies?

Can quoting the experience of a sage

Afford you even a clue to the deep fulfilment

Which he won through direct experience?

(As the pundits, nonplussed, looked at one another
And fidgeted and hummed and hawed in deep
Embarrassment, the loyal devotees

Of Mira, tickled, tittered again. She gave
A beatific smile and her twin eyes
Glistened with unshed tears as she resumed):

MIRA

But one who is touched by His own love, who's called
By His Flame-flute does pass beyond all cults
And the maya of words, words, words!

(With sudden animation)

But what have I

To do with the hollow drum of words — I who
His Presence feel in the adytum of my heart?
I assure you that my Friend and Mate Gopal
Does come to play at hide and seek with me
And sings and dances, too, with me, and daily
Nay, hourly, teaches me the art of love.
He knows, indeed, my countless flaws and foibles,
My sins and lapses, falterings and stumblings;

But He also knows that I do cling to Him
As my one and only life-line to salvation.
I count the world well lost for Him and draw
My every single breath from His love's breath
And see at every step by His eyes' light
And lean on Him and Him alone in life:

So He told me: I am His and He is mine.

(A hint of raillery creeps into her tones)
I do know, sires, how limited is my knowledge;

I know I am weak and frail and helpless. Only
One thing I know which you are yet to know,
Which may I tell you in all humility?

FIRST PUNDIT (cuts in sarcastically)

Humility, indeed! One who presumes
To bandy words with her superiors,
Erudite elders versed in the mystic lore
Of the Vedas! We will leave you to your fate
And visit your temple nevermore. You are

Page 102

Beyond redemption.

SECOND PUNDIT (indignantly)

You are right. Why cry
In the wilderness ? Come, friends, it is a sin
To hear her denigrate the hoary wisdom
Of our sacrosanct Vedas — we must ostracize her.

MIRA (folding her hands, deprecatingly)

I have said I plead guilty to the charge
Of being untutored, unsophisticated.
But how can it be a sin for one who is
Not learned to talk of what one has, indeed,
Experienced with one's every pore and cell?
Besides, why must I retire into silence,
Like guilty souls in torment, when I have
Known and seen, day after marvellous day,
What few have glimpsed in life? Sires, why must I,
Who have been in the clasp of my Gopal,
(The end and aim of even the greatest sages)
Disclaim such an apocalyptic vision?

FOURTH PUNDIT
But the Vedas —

MIRA (with a deprecating smile)

Woe is me! the old, old story!
The Vedas speak of what was seen by the sages
Who lived the Truth and so was authorised
To testify to what they had realised.
But those who never have glimpsed Gopal, alas,
Fall only into the snare of make-believe,
A maya of words which weaves a pitiful veil
Of noisy pride to get one reconciled
To a life of grievous gloom or phantom half-lights
And still — such is the maya of grandiose words —
That one who's domiciled in a land of dearth

Page 103

Unwittingly becomes its advocate,

Until he forgets that the soul's deep thirst

Can never be quenched by resonant quotations.

I claim I was answered by His Grace because

I did not seek Him in the world of words,

In overawing tomes of holy books,

Which our great forbears penned to help us follow

In their footsteps, but you prefer, alas,

To memorise them to mouth void shibboleths.

(with a sigh)
But from my childhood, I yearned for one thing:

The Raasa Tryst with my one dream: Gopal,
The savour of His love which no scholastic
Can ever know through books. I was impelled
By my deep thirst to seek His love's caress
With every breath and throb of my lone heart.
And so I only appealed in derelict tears
To my one Beloved whose love's Flute I had answered,
Who had wrenched me off my moorings, made me homeless
Till I found my home in Him and, to my joy,
Discovered that He can never stay hidden if one
Cries out for His union, staking one's all for Him.

SECOND PUNDIT (a little impressed in spite of, himself)

You mean you really found Him — your Gopal
Whom we call Krishna, the Lord Himself—the One
Who is the Primal Cause of causes, the Lone
Inviolate Light of lights, the One-in-all —

MIRA

Yes, sire, 'twas He, the world's Evergreen Beloved,
Who gave me asylum at His feet. You find
This incredible perhaps because the authors
Of the holy books omitted to put on record
That He comes to ignorant women even though
They have never sought Him in the way approved
Of the Vedas. In life, you hold, the bygone sages'

Page 104

Pronouncements are the only beacons and so
The zones their torches fail to illumine must be
Scouted as undivine and non-existent.

(With a smile)
How grand the verdict of your summit-wisdom:

"What bears not the Vedas' seal is a chimera!"
But can it not be that life has not yet
Been fully fathomed or mapped out by even
The holiest scriptures like your hoary Vedas?
(She draws a sigh)

But I'll bow down to you. Since you dismiss

My findings as invalid, I will not venture

To submit before your bench an evidence

So unorthodox and shocking. If you are loath

To listen — I shall be silent.

THIRD PUNDIT

But I demur.
For I do, mother, long to listen. Let them
Depart in outraged majesty in a file,
I propose to stay on to receive your blessing.

FOURTH PUNDIT (to the others, equally embarrassed)
What shall we do?

THIRD PUNDIT

The answer you'll find in the Vedas:

The frog thrives best in its little world — the well.

SECOND PUNDIT (indignantly)

Silence! ... We might as well give her a chance.
For after all, one should be kind.

FIRST PUNDIT (reluctantly)

As you wish.
(turning to Mira, sententiously)
We decide to give you a hearing. Tell us now

8

Page 105

What you meant when you said you knew one thing
Which we are yet to know?

THIRD PUNDIT

Wait — let me put in

A clause — to safeguard our resplendent status
That we wise men are not committed ... ahem ...
To anything ... and whatever you may urge
Can make no difference to us ... since ... ahem...
We know all there is to know on earth.

FIRST PUNDIT (shaking his fist at him)
You ... you black sheep! You ... you shall pay for this —

FOURTH PUNDIT

Oh, let him be—a chimpanzee will grin,
Dogs bark and insects screech.

(turning to Mira)

Now, Mira, tell us

What is it we know not and yet you know?

MIRA (with a faint smile flickering on her lips)

You know not, sires, that you go to Gopal
As a daughter-in-law goes to her mother-in-law
Who weighs her constantly, relentlessly,
Upbraiding her whenever she is found wanting,
And making an issue of her every stumbling.
But I look to Him as a daughter does
To her own mother in whose loving eyes
A child is to be treasured, never judged
Harshly as a delinquent brought to dock.
The mother, too, desires that her children may
Grow hour by hour into a perfect shape
And would not let them stoop to unworthy acts
Or have truck with the ones who are impure.
She corrects and curbs, but all the time with love's
Charity, understanding. She does, indeed,

Page 106

Chastise her child when it is called for — only

Never in the manner of a martinet

Or a stern judge. And this her daughter knows.

She knows: she never can grow old and ugly

In her mother's eyes, nor would she quail before her;

For she knows that from the moment she is born
She's bound to her mother with the strongest tie:

The golden cord of love, a love that could
Never misunderstand, still less denounce;

Gives but never expects to be repaid.

(The pundits glance at one another, looking somewhat

deflated)

SECOND PUNDIT (uncertainly)
Does it... er ... mean ... do you imply ...

THIRD PUNDIT (chimes in breezily)

Perdition!

SECOND PUNDIT (in a towering rage)
Behave yourself... or we will ostracize you.

FOURTH PUNDIT (impatiently)

Oh hold! Let us now hear her — for a change,
A little tranquilly what she implies.

MIRA

I imply that I approach my Gopal with
Full faith in His all-comprehending love
But you would treat Him — I'm amused to note -
As though He were your mother-in-law and so
You brood or wonder, argue or speculate
What he is like and how you'd cross the hurdles
He poses. I regard Him as my own
Own mother and father in one — I am, I feel,
The child of His dream, the apple of His eyes,
The breath of His indulgent, loving heart.

Page 107

FIRST PUNDIT {flaring up again)

We wished to give you a hearing, but... humph! your ...
Your subtle flings at us ...

MIRA (folding her hands)

Oh, do forgive one
Who is unversed in social etiquettes.
Believe me, I gave this simile not to have
A fling at your deep dignity. I only
Wanted to stress that I should have to act
Utterly out of character were I
To approach my Gopal with deep awe — because
To me He came day after rapturous day
As my Beloved Teacher who taught me only
With His sweetness and His charm that beggar description.
In sum, I submit that He came to greet me
Like moon's kiss on eve's brow. 'Twas so I came
To know through Love the miracle of His Love.
(She shivers and then breaks out into song)

Daily because of thy love. Lord, clay flowers into rose:

Wan water-vapour, soaring, &s a regal rainbow glows,
The dim worm is transformed into a radiant butterfly
And night's dark pain dissolves in sungold laughter of

the sky.

THIRD PUNDIT (in tears')

How exquisite! What music, images,
And, above all, expression!

FOURTH PUNDIT (reluctantly)

I must concede
Music can move our hearts in a way our minds
Can never understand nor reason explain.

SECOND PUNDIT (in a moved voice)
I know not, mother, how, all on a sudden,

Page 108

My heart's subdued with tears of ecstasy!
I sometimes felt of yore that all this vaunting
About high scholarship and formal ethics
Was hollow. But whenever a questioning
Made me uneasy I would look away —
Dreading to face the issue — to come to terms
With my incipient malaise or, shall I say,
Admonitory conscience? I am unsure.
But now something incredible happened to me:

When you were singing of life's night of pain
Melting in the sungold laughter of the sky,
I saw, lo! on your Gopal's lips a faint
But indubitable smile. I rubbed my eyes
And looked again — when this mysterious voice
(That often of old had warned me like a kind
But stern friend's voice before I stifled it
With all my erudition's studied folly)
Aye, this familiar, long-lost angel voice
Came to the fore again and whispered: "Do,
For a change, give me a chance. I want to take
You under my wing, but how can I — if you
Elect to flock to phantom banners and idols!"
And my heart was in a heave and I... I... I...
(He paused to gulp his tears)

FOURTH PUNDIT (after struggling with himself, capitulates)

Well, it's remarkable ... for I, too, glimpsed
Something inexplicable ... I saw her standing
In an aura of blue light!

PUNDARIK (smiling)

And so you have
To regret to own that this old priest before you
Had not taken leave of his senses, after all?

FOURTH PUNDIT (unable to contain himself)
Forgive, ) O mother, this your foolish son!

Page 109

How often have I not lectured on the Vedas'

Dictum that intellect nor learning nor

The claim to having heard deep words of wisdom

Can help one to attain the Lord — but only

The ones who are elected by His Grace

Can know His ultimate Self of Light and Love!

Nayamatma pravachanena labhyo

Na medhaya na vahuna shrutena
Yamevaisha vrinute tena labhyas-

Tasyaisha atma vivrinute tanum shvam

But not till today's revelation could

I really grasp the meaning of this couplet.

So you, the elect of His Grace, do bless me

That I may never again put on my blinkers

Nor let my conceit build a wall once more

Between my soul and the Light I have now glimpsed.

FIRST PUNDIT (theatrically stopping his ears with both his hands)

Sa no buddhya shubhaya samyunaktu

O, Lord, for mercy's sake, do keep me anchored
To good sense!

(to the other pundits accusingly)

Shame, shame, shame on all of you!
To think that all we have been taught since childhood
Should be thrown out to the four winds on an impulse
Of hero — or shall we say heroine-worship?

(turning hotly on Mira)
But 'tis you — you — who are the poisonous flux
Which vitiates the atmosphere. So I
Hold you to blame for all this heresy
And folly that have gone to their heads, alas!
And I warn you for the last time, Mira, now:

Playing with fire is not a harmless pastime!
Beware! Such false claims must doom you, in the end,

Page 110

To irrevocable disaster. You are dancing

On the brink of a dark precipice, nor delude

Yourself that wise men can be taken in

By such transparent ruses. Still less can

The Lord Almighty, be duped by a slip

Of a capering priestess posing as His agent,

Missioned to dower the blind with summit-vision!

(he laughs contemptuously)
Those who live in the Lord are shy, secretive
And, loth to parade the high boons they have won,
They dwell in caves, nor will, like you, set out
With all this cajolery to catch the eye.
Is it not written that one who attains His peace
Is changed into a vast and tranquil ocean
No deluge nor cateclysm can affect?

(sententiously starts declaiming)

Apuryamanam acalapratistham

Samudramapah pravishanti yadvat

(as Sanatan smiles, he turns on him in high dudgeon)
Why do you grin — you who are versed in scriptures
You should know better than to mock at wisdom!
Did not the Gita enjoin on all aspirants
To strive to attain the illuminate's sober poise,
Scorning the levity of charlatans?

SANATAN (giving a bland smile)

My furious friend! Whatever little insight
Has accrued to me at long last, I do owe
To her, the maid of Brindavan, the Eternal
Gopi whom they adore as Mira, the Queen,
Who turned a mendicant in Gopal's Name.
Aye, valiant friend! 'tis she who came to guide
And show me the sunlit path of Love when I
Was groping in the dark of pedantry,

The so-called jnana, waylost in the daedal

Forest of cryptic words. Her Godrapt life,

A canticle of all-surrendering love,

Has served me, in the late phase of my Yoga,

As the ultimate commentary of the scriptures.

So why not ask her — when she can, in a moment,

Untie a knot which takes such scholars as we

Years to unloosen?

FIRST PUNDIT (with a grim smile)

I will take you at your word,
Though I am no heroine-worshipper, I warn you,
Nor susceptible to sentimental gush,
Or the cult of lachrymose love. I can be only
Convinced by real achievement — not tall claims.

(turning to Mira, grandiloquently)
Mira, beware of the vulgar rabble — the fools
Who fall at your feet and blubber through their tears
Because you sing and sway in a trance of joy.
At your peril entertain the gullible,
To be, in return, idolized by them.
We, the wise, demand indubitable proof
That this your grandiose love has achieved wonders.
So hedge not nor mouth cliches: we insist on
A simple answer to a simple query:

If you are what you claim to be, to wit,
One who has met the great Lord face to face,
(The Unborn, Everliving One whom countless
Sages and saints and seers have, in all climes,
Hymned as the last Goal of evolving life,
The Sentinel whose consciousness broods over
The flux of Time and the vast, star-studded Space,)
How can you stoop to sing and dance before
All and sundry, a puppet of your emotions,
Utterly powerless to contain yourself?

MIRA (trying in vain to repress a smile)
0 fabulous omniscience! Have you never

Page 112

Seen how a mountain-stream descends when snow
Thaws on the heights — when gigantic swirling waters,
In a rapturous canter to meet the viewless deep,
Burst all embankments that stand in the way?
'Twas so His Peak Love rushed my love-starved soul,
Flooded my life and swept away all dams
Of social codes and moral interdictions.
picture to yourself, sire, a sudden hurtling
Avalanche of ecstasy shattering all
Tradition-worshipped dogmas and taboos,
And you will not find it in your gentle heart
To condemn me for my uncontainable joy
Which made me ride rough-shod over all man-made
Edicts and bans. Remember Who flashed out
Of the blue to court my hospitality
In a beggar's hovel: 'twas He, my Gopal,
Whose miracle Gleam transfigures oceaned glooms
Into rich rapturous continents of light!
Now tell me, when you meet such a glorious Being
(The touch of Whose marvel feet makes deserts quiver
Into song-gardens of amaranthine flowers)
And are told He has come to stay with you
As your heart's Guest forever, can you still
Refrain from dancing and singing in ecstasy,
To emulate the deportment of the ones
Who nod or frown or doze in sombre grandeur
Or tread the beaten track with faultless steps,
Never once stumbling till they, in due course,
Come to journey's end to merge back in the dark
Of fitful sleep hereafter?
(she rushes on in joy)

And so you see,
Failing continually to conform
To the laws laid down by the sober worldly-wise,
I laugh and sing and dance before you all
Because I have attained my dream: Gopal,
The Evergreen, of fadeless loveliness

Page 113

Whose love, through beauty manifesting, leads
To deathless bliss in our world of pain and strife.

(She points to the Image)
I have achieved the Eternal Light of lights
And housed in my heart as Guest the Primal Host
Of the universe, an achievement envied of angels,
A fulfilment even colossal seers and saints
Have craved in vain for aeons! Thrice-blessed am I
That the God of gods, beyond the reach of gorgeous
Emperors, should have come to stay with me!
How can you, sire, expect me, after this,
To comport myself like matrons prim and staid?

(She claps her hands in glee, like a child)

(As Mira's ecstatic voice rose by and by
In a mounting rush of mystic adoration,
The expression on the irate Pundits face
Underwent a gradual change. His angry eyes
First lost their hard glint, then, as she raced on,
The frown on his face gave place to a startled wonder
And the tension of his face relaxed. He gazed
From time to time at Gopal's face as Mira
Pointed to Him in tremulous rapture. Then,
As she emphasised her blessedness, he gave
An involuntary shiver and stood rapt,
Staring, like one bewitched, at Mira's Face....
Then as her voice trailed off, he faltered out:)

FIRST PUNDIT

O mother, I know not ... how ... it is so strange...
And incredible ... just now as I looked ... His face
Shone with an unearthly lustre. And a voice ...
An inner whisper ... spoke and ... how it, lo,
Tore at my heartstrings ... Now that I know ... at least ...
But no ... I only know that I have been
A pedant half-wit rich but in sterile pride.

(He gulps his tears and resumes)

Page 114

That is why I ... presumed to question your ...
Deep blessedness.

(He falls at her feet. She blesses him, after which he

rises and goes on, in tears.)
Only ... mother ... an egotist never can see
Truth in its true perspective. We all, alas,
See in the measure we grow and so we fail
To realise the crazy folly of pride.

(After a brief pause, suddenly blurting out)
O mother, I saw behind you Radha's face!

MIRA (smiles')
I know you did, my son, you are thrice-blessed.

FIRST PUNDIT (smiling through his tears)

I am, indeed ... because ... 0 mother, she came
To convey to me her blessing ... through your touch!
So the scales have fallen from my eyes at last.
Only you ... who know all there is to know ...
Must know how we grow to hug our folly... and how
Our egos blind us in such subtle ways.
And so, alas, we fail to see how we
Learn seldom from the school of experience!

(with a sigh)

We read, indeed, of bliss but only know
Brief joys which, too, alas, in this drab world,
Are few and far between and have, besides,
To be always bought with some pain or repining,
Because our revels never redeem their pledges ...
We are disenchanted and still... such is the maya
Of pride.... We tell ourselves that all is well
With the world and our blind world-enamoured selves.

(After a pause, with folded hands)
Only, mother, may I ask one more question

To have my darkness redeemed by your light?

(Mira nods and smiles)

Page 115

FIRST PUNDIT (after a brie/pause a/hesitation)

I humbly want to ask: if our great Lord
Has come to stay for ever in your heart,
Then why must you still intermittently
Cry out in pain? ... Why must your ecstasies
Leave desolate legacies of gloom and fear?

MIRA {gazes tenderly at the Image for a few seconds, then

turns back to the Pundit)
Let me tell you a mystic parable, my son.

(After a pause)

Once upon a time, in a far-off village,
A destitute woman begged from door to door.
They gave her alms, a pitiful quota was hers;

But she, poor starveling, somehow subsisted.
Now once, as she returned to her hut, she was
Startled to find a jewel in her sack:

An entrancing thing that sparkled, scintillated!
She loved the strange self-luminous talisman
Which transformed her hut into a paradise.
She hugged it to her bosom, guarded it
Jealously from all alien gaze till she
Began to be obsessed by fears lest thieves'
Should rob her of her one and the only treasure.
For it was not an earthly jewel: it made
Even dark clods and clay irradiant,
As though by a magic as incredible
As thrillingly indubitable!

(She gives a faint smile)

Now, sire,
Tell me: can it be that you have to be told
Why the beggar woman's heart would palpitate
In fear lest a chance robber should pounce on her
And wrest from her the jewel of jewels she had
Received in token of God's Grace!

Page 116

FIRST PUNDIT

I ... know Grace.

MIRA (cutting in, impetuously)

Pardon me, son! It is impossible
For us to know Grace truly so long as
We go on living tethered to happy homes,
Basking in the sunshine of security.
What His Grace is we cannot realise
Save through a shipwreck of our hopes and dreams.

(Folding her hands and ranging with her glance the

faces of the Four Pundits)

Sires, you are leaders of light and knights of knowledge,
Who are served by rich disciples, idolised
By all and sundry for your genius,
Eloquence, strength and personality:

How can you ever understand what has

Transfigured a lost derelict like Mira?

I had no talents to commend myself

To the One on high and yet He came to me!

I often ask myself: "Can this be real?

For suppose it were a make-believe, a phantom

Touch of an angel who, like lightning, flashes

To vanish again! Who knows?" In dread I cry

Lest I should lose once more my nonpareil

Jewel of jewels, the Lord who came to make

His home with me — my dream Beloved, whose

One little smile can fill the boundless Vast

With trillions of stars and galaxies,

Whose one glance can transform the dreary deserts

Into an Eden laughing with fadeless flowers.

(Her voice quavers and eyes glisten, but she quickly

masters her emotion and resumes)
Sires, only those who have trudged on leaden feet
Life's tortuous ways and sloughs of dark despond;

Who have borne the cruel flails of Destiny
And bled through stabs of traitor Calumny;

Page 117

Who staked their all at one throw of the dice,
Then lost all to be jeered at by the world,
And who still can nevermore hark back to the voice
Of calculating prudence playing safe:

Aye, only such paupers know the meaning of Grace.

(She breaks into a smile of irony)
Those whose houses are fenced with fortune's ramparts
Can never know the supreme bliss of His
Deep clasp of tenderness. He who on earth
Has all can never win the One who is
Beyond all. He comes only to embrace
Those who have none but Him to turn to ... Sire!
I cannot speak for others. I can tell
Only of what I know; so I can say
That His help came to me in the midnight hour
Of abysmal helplessness. And then I thrilled
And asked myself over and over again:

"Can it, indeed, be true — the Blessed Lord's
Answering the lone call of derelict Mira
And making her the recipient of His Love?
Was it not, indeed, incredible that I
So recalcitrant to His Light should be touched
By His resplendent Grace to incandescence?
Nor could I believe this till, one day, the heart
Of the hoary mystery was revealed to me.

FIRST PUNDIT (eagerly)
The hoary mystery? Of what?

MIRA

Of His Grace,

His alchemist compassion which brings off
Divine miracles in a human world
With just one touch of the mystic Flame of Love
The all-transfiguring, dross-intolerant Flame;

And this I understood when, one day, I
Witnessed an accidental forest fire.

Page 118

(After a pause for breath)

I saw gnarled, ugly trees and withered grass,

Sere leaves, dead twigs and miserable shrubs,

All came to glow in a moment in the fire

That touched them to its hue of liquid gold!

Even so, came my Lord to me, and then,

By the magic of His Flute's flame-alchemy,

He performed the miracle and kindled in me

The resistless conflagration of His love.

(Mira now paused and then, with folded hands
Upgazed at Krishna's Image, as pearl-like tears
Streamed freely down her beautiful cheeks. Then, swaying,
She chanted in a world-oblivious rapture:)

Mira {sings)
0 Peak of Love, O Deep of Grace,

0 all-transfiguring mystic Fire !
Who dancest thy victorious way

To golden all — clods, murk and mire !

Do I not know that Mira was
A drop athirst and thou the Deep ?
Hail, marvel Grace, who comst at last

To me, thy slave. Love's troth to keep !

(Mira pauses in tears and looks at Sanatan who beckons
to her. She comes and falls at his feet. He places both
his hands on her head in token of blessing.)

SANATAN (in a thick voice)

We are all blessed to have seen what few
Have seen on earth. And even among those
Who have seen how few do truly understand
You who are missioned with the Lord's behest
Inviolate our atheist world with your
Inviolate purity outflowering in
A carnival of heavenly songs! My child!

Page 119

Your life is a baptism of Heaven's own fire
That burns away earth's dusk of centuries
And, like a wizard, turns all obstacles
Into a crystal stairway to His Home!

MIRA (in tears, holding his eyes)
Bless me Gurudev, who led me to Him.

SANATAN (giving a radiant smile)

Oh, need you ask my blessing? Did I not
Bless you years ago — when you were a sweet
Child of delight and even then you sang
And danced to invoke His light — although you knew not
Your stainless self of Gopi-minstrelsy.

(His eyes glisten)

But who am I to bless one who is blest
By the deathless Minstrel-swain of Brindavan?
I only pray: may your great life be a beacon
Of all-fulfilling Grace that outlaws doubt
And initiates us in Radha's Love, revealing
Her everliving soul in each of us,
Singing her way to Him. You flow ever on,
A naming flood that sweeps away all dams
And hales even wan clods to be merged in the blue
Deep of His compassion where all is Light
And Love is coronated on Beauty's throne,
The Brindavan of bliss and harmony!

(Mira rises as all prostrate themselves at her feet; then
they, too, rise, including the Pundits who start singing
with her alternately, as tears course down their cheeks)

MIRA (singing with the others)

All, all, 0 friend, is a play of love

He sustains sleeplessly,
And binding us all with His love's chain,

He dances in harmony.

In love still rise the moon and stars

And the great sun gleams in love:

In love the oceans, rolling, glass

The sky-blue Lover above.

The clouds pour rain in love and the bird

In love in the woodland sings
And the shy buds laugh as smiles on them

Aloft the King of Kings.

In love woos Him the saint, and the sage
Merges in love in Him:

The Yogi renounces all in love

And in love He comes to redeem.

Love is the eternal law of life,

In love begs alms the Queen,
And Mira lost the world for the love

Of her Lord, the Evergreen.

Page 121

Act Two

In her temple at Brindavan, on the full-moon night of Ras, Mira is seen singing before her beloved Image of Gopal. The windows on one side of the temple open on the rippling Yamuna. A number of pilgrims and devotees listen on, in rapture. On her left Ajit, a Brahmin pedant, frowns on her as she starts dancing. On her right sits her Gurudev, Sri Sanatan, and the temple-priest, Pundarik.

MIRA (Sings in a half-trance of ecstasy)

Blessed art thou, 0 soul, to be born,

May not thy days glide by in vain.
Remember: priceless is this life:

Aspire His lotus-feet to attain.

The Vedas are mere words, if thou
Stay blind to His starry secrecies;

The deep of love divine is rife

With pearls of light — dive dive for these.

The austere disclaim the lure of pelf,
And miss the joy of harmony;

So sinks the ego-laden boat

The moment she puts out to sea.

The King broods on, unhappy, in

His royal palace and revelries;

The pundits extol learning, alas!

Nor find in books repose or peace!

Temples can lead none to His feet,

Nor floral offerings to His Grace;

Blessed are those alone who are called

And chosen to meet Him face to face.

Page 122

And they are the elect who sing His Name

In love's one-pointed ecstasy;

For only in loyal, love-lit hearts

He comes to dwell everlastingly.

(Pendant Ajit, a proud aristocrat,

Who loved to flaunt his wealth and erudition,

Looked on and frowned in deep distaste when, lo!

In a swift crescendo of emotion, Mira

Began to dance in a flaming ecstasy.

The simple, reverent rustics who had flocked

To the holy of holies gazed in a trance of joy:

The women sobbed; the children watched, overawed,

And many a pilgrim, who had come from afar

To have her blessing, bowed down to the ground.

Had they not all adored her in their hearts

And sung her songs in their own huts and shrines ?

Had not the name of Mevar's beautiful Queen,

The Queen who had left her palace and throne to roam,

Begging her way and singing His Name in tears,

Become a legend in her brief lifetime!

For a Queen to be a mendicant in His Name !

The song was over; the temple priest, overwhelmed,
Rose to his feet and then, threading his way
Through the hushed throng, dispensed the holy prasad
To the eager devotees of the Blessed Lord.
Lastly, sobbing aloud, he bowed before
The saintly singer and, crying out "Mother, mother !"
Lay prostrate with his brow on her lotus feet.
This was the last straw: the highbrow critic curled
His lips in scorn and cut in mordantly:)

AJIT

Shame, shame! Oh, for a Brahmin, a priest, to bow
Obsequiously to a woman, who — to judge
from her own songs — is a country innocent,

Page 123

Unversed in the Vedas and ] and philosophy,
Nor, by birth, even a Brahmin!"

PUNDARIK (aghast)

Hold, Sir, hold!

Beware of trespassing against the holy!
May I recall you to what Krishna said
To Arjun once — a saying we often quote:

'Ye me bhaktajanah Partha ! mama bhakta na te janah:

Madbhaktaanaancha ye bhakta mama bhakta hi te narah.'

Who loves me alone is not so close to me
As those who truly love my devotee.

Besides, she is — a noble Queen —

AJIT

Halt, fool!

A Queen, indeed, to reject her veil — and go
Begging in the street, hobnobbing with mendicants
And dancing from dawn to dusk in public temples!
And what dances! what songs! — as puerile
As deficient in decency!

(Turning on Mira in anger)

How dare you
Belittle the Vedas adored of all — decry
Our time-old rites and mod( modes of worship praised
By our sages from the dawn of time? You scoff"
At floral offerings. A peerless poet
Are you — turning out only only tinsel verse!
A singer — singing sentimental songs!
A great Queen — catering fang for the vulgar yokels!
A composer trading in cheap metaphors
And obvious rhymes and similes! You may
Deceive the rabble with your sentimental
Effusion — captivate their their simple hearts
Playing on their creduality, revealing

Page 124

Romantic short cuts to the One who stays
Beyond the ken of the mightiest saints and seers
Till after years and years of arduous
Austerities they win to the Eye of Light;

But how can you impose on the ones who know:

The illuminates ? You'll only raise a smile
Asserting that the One-without-a-second
Must come in haste and go on playing His flute
To entertain the ones who can but sing
Trite lachrymose love-lyrics or repeat
His man-made epithets ...

(He halts, then waggling an admonitory forefinger at her)

A truce, I say,
A fool petitioning and spurious fervour!
At your peril play with fire! Beware! For falsehood
Must always, like a boomerang, recoil
On the head of the false prophet. Or, in the words
Of the Upanishad: the head of the blasphemer
Falls severed from his neck down into the pit.

(Drawing a deep breath)
Remember: sages and saints have, down the ages,
Proclaimed that none may gallop to the endless Om
Save on the inviolate steed of meditation,
Disclaiming flesh in favour of the Spirit.
Your delirious bhakti, wallowing in the dust,
Shedding rivers of tears shall not avail
Even if you sang on His Name for aeons.
Only knowledge, propped by the soul's deep strength,
Can serve as the diamond stairway to His Peak.
And then, avoid we must the countless pitfalls,
Straying never from virtue, doing good
To all who have sinned and fallen, helping in pity
Those who cry for our help and radiant guidance,
Compassionately fulfilling our souls with theirs
And lastly, soaring, we must transcend earth's
Downpull of dust on wisdom's aerial wings.
(A silence falls)

Page 125

MIRA (Turning towards the Image she stays silent for a

while, then faces her challenger with a ironical smile)

My learned and stalwart friend! How I do envy
Your splendid infallible knowledge! For I freely
Confess I can lay no claim to the gifts
That made you flower out into what you are
Today: robust, self-righteous and sonorous!
I am sad that such equipment as I have
(Which made me into what I am today,)
Enjoys not your approval. But woe is me:

They can only sigh for the blue who have no wings!
My sole strength and support is He, my Lord
Within, even as without, in the world. And so
I can only cry and cling to Him, my sweet
And unique Guide and Stay, as helplessly
As a child does to its mother and insists
On being nursed and sustained by her love.

(After a pause)

But who ever swam across life's surging main
And reached the other Shore, the Harbour of Bliss,
Relying but on his twin frail arms' strength
And the nickering light of his wistful, feeble eyes
That casts more shades than lustre? Nor have I
Your learning's dazzling Beacon to help me find
My way through the dark cross-currents of desire.
Only His Grace's star and mercy's boat,
Propelled by His love's breeze, can take me across.

(With a quizzical smile)
The Potter did not choose to shape me in
A heroic mould like yours; nor have I wings
To help me defy the earth's downpull of dust.
But then, I love to cleave to earth and adore
To kiss her dust with my lips of clay — the dust
Touched into hallowed jewels by His feet.
My soul's one prayer has been from birth to birth —
(Turning to the Image she breaks out into song)

Page 126

Take me to thy sky — I cry no more;

I ask for strength to tread the Way.
I ache not for security;

To be havened at thy feet I pray.

With thy Name's all-consuming Fire

My dross burn everlastingly;

May my love's longing wane no more,

Were even the air to cease to be.

I fear not pain nor joy desire,

Thrill not to life nor death now dread;

Virtue and sin are one to me,

Ennui and zest for me are dead.

I yearn not for thy starlands where

High gods of bliss and beauty reign;

I only ask: Oh, grant that I

Be born here time and time again

In Brindavan — acclaiming all

That comes my way to sing of Thee:

For the night of pain for Thy sake borne,

Lord, dawns into golden ecstasy.

(The song came to an end but the cadence lingered...

An overawing hush pulsated in

The temple-room. The women wept... and men

Gazed at her as she stood there swaying in trance

Rapt in her heart's one Lord who had come to life

To commune with her and inspire her songs of love.

The breeze stood charmed and time forgot to flow

As a tremulous, mystic beauty's aura shimmered

Around her luminous, ethereal form ...

And then the spell was broken: the pedant lashed out)

Page 127

AJIT

Your empty platitudes and cheap devotion
May take in nitwits; but I know, being wise,
That saintly poses, even as irised bubbles,
Only beguile the gullible credulous.
These, prone to be caught with chaff, take the husk for corn
And idolize all who can flood the earth
With gushing tears that riot like epidemics.
Alas, this bhakti's maya, make-believe,
Leads by the nose the fools, easily tickled
By a nervous joy they nurse as heavenly passion.

(He addresses the crowd in a stentorian voice)
Nay, worship of emotion or effervescing
Ecstasies cannot deliver the goods.

(Glowering at Mira)

I warn you against misleading trustful rustics
With coloured myths and spurious romance.
For only Knowledge and real dauntless strength
Can pass beyond the clutch of Siren Maya.

MIRA (clapping her hands in childlike glee)

Now, now, my good Sir, you are caught at last
By your own ignorance of what they all .
Know — who have eyes to see and ears to hear.

AJIT (bridling)

Silence! how dare you call me ignorant
When I say that only knowledge and learning can
Deliver us from Circean Maya's thrall?
For the stark truth is that bhakti cannot withstand
The onslaught of Siren Maya. So —

MIRA (folding her hands)

You need
Hardly reiterate what was drummed so often
By the valiant souls who trod the thoroughfare
Of masculine Knowledge as against the blind

Page 128

Alley of feminine bhakti. They may all

Be the architects of human destiny,

Rare spirits who know all there is to know

And think that what they know not can be scotched

As suspect, invalid or fairy tale —

(With a mocking smile)
But what can they know who have never known
True bhakti's blessed pain and dream come true,
Nor learnt that they win all who renounce all?
You frown on Maya and claim that only the hoary
Wisdom of the last, inviolable Knowledge
Can be proof against her irresistible charm,
But though Knowledge may be older than the sky
And stronger than the pinnacle — still, I ask you:"
Can a man, however vigilant and learned,
Tell always a woman's mask from her face beneath?
Dare you deny that her allure can swiftly
Take in the wariest of men on earth?
Does not her subtle and insidious
Cajolery, pulling invisible strings, make even
The Titans dance and bow to her like puppets?

(After a pause)

But bhakti, being a woman herself, knows
What Maya, the deep Enchantress, is and how
She can deflect the strongest from their paths
By her heady wine of beauty and honeyed words
Which, wafting Heaven's ambrosia, drag her dupes
Down rose-strewn paths into the abyss of hell.
Friend, bhakti can lead home where knowledge stumbles.
Only a hen knows how hens hatch, and so
I beg to contend that when you dismiss bhakti
As an unreliable guide you only betray
Your pathetic ignorance of how true bhakti
Invokes the Grace of Light from Love's Brindavan.

(Ajit catches his breath and bows his head; the audience,
overawed by Mira's passionate sincerity, gaze in

Page 129

silence at her; then, suddenly, the women titter and men
whisper commenting on the discomfiture of the pedant,
which flusters him and he glowers at his scoffers contemptuously).

AJIT (to the devotees)

You imbeciles! ... who can only cringe and grovel...
And think ... that I... but you are beneath contempt.

(Turning on Mira)

You have, indeed, a glib tongue you can wag
To advantage ... and you do know how to play
To the gallery. But ...

(losing his thread completely in his high wrath)

pert tongues, as we all know,
Can only spew out spittle. Our world today
Needs men who can serve the poor, not merely mouth
Shibboleths and sing sentimental tosh.
We work and achieve — not prattle on to our doom!
We heal our ailing fellow-creatures, help
Redress their suffering! You are parasites
And so can only cater for your ilk,
Living on alms, creating nothing of value
To society. We are the salt of the earth,
Selfless master builders who live to serve
And teach men to hitch their waggons to the stars.

MIRA (holding his eyes and smiling)

I understand, friend, why you divagate.
But do pray listen: Once upon a time
I begged my way along the Ganga's bank
For days and days. I saw how she meandered
On a sinuous course as her sweet destiny
Led her ever purling on. And I saw, too,
That, as she danced along, she made some plains
Break out into a flame of green and gold,
While others laughed as orchards or blue groves
And, lastly, some lovely towns and villages

Page 130

Gleamed out as holy haunts where pilgrims flocked
To sing His Name and attain the last fulfilment.

(Turning to the Image and with a beatific smile)

When the Deep's flute calls: "Come, come!"

I run to Him — I know not why:

I only know — 'tis/or Him

I sing and dance and cry.

They ask: "How can you yearn

For One you never have seen ?"
But I see naught but my Blue

Beloved without or within.

As I ripple on, green fields wave
Their myriad banners to me;

Buds break to blossom and leaves
Applaud in ecstasy:

"O maid of the viewless deep !

Thou follow thy destiny
And fulfil us, answering

His call everlastingly."

(Wiping her eyes)

And then, my good friend, suddenly I heard
A mountain-river vaunt: "The desert, too,
I'll irrigate." And so she was deflected
By her fool pride from the call her soul had heard
In her mystic snow-white trance: the imperious call
Of the blue song of the sea. She hurtled along
The parched and hungry sands and met her doom
In a dismal stagnant marsh — the desert stayed
Famished and burned on glaring at the sky
And the ocean's self-willed daughter sang no more
Her love's resistless, rapturous melody."

(With a smile of irony)

Page 131

Have I, friend, met your question? I exploited
This simile to stress that only when
We live for Him and learn to love Him — not
Among a million fool things we profess
To love from a sense of duty — but above
All other things — 'tis only then we may
Claim truly to live for all, fulfilling all.
And that is why I say: who garners loses,
And who loses all for Him gains all for ever.

(A hum of approval ripples through the pilgrims and
the women heave a sigh of deep relief. Which irks the
pedant; he answers stingingly)

AJIT

It's all very well to concoct similes.
But analogies or popular images
Cannot be surrogates for arguments.
You sing of the far blue song and the dread doom
That waits in ambush for the ocean's maid.
But confound it all! trash poetry is not life!
How can you vaunt: to sing your Gopal's Name
Is to live for Him? And why, in the name of good sense,
Must sober men stake all they have for Him?
You grandly aver that when one loses all
For your great Gopal, one wins back all for ever.
A truce to drivel! Tell me, why must I
Hark back to such delirious lunacy?
Why must I slip my moorings, called by a mad
Urge to a void non-entity — gamble away
The certain for the uncertain, at best a dream,
A fantasy? Only singing His Name how can one
Work the miracle, transcend Name and Form
And win the Primal Om no words can limn?
Last, disavow we must this suicidal
Gospel of penury and self-abasement.
The great Lord never sent us to this wondrous

Page 132

Multitudinous carnival of beauty
To vegetate in a barren isolation,
Outlawing life's romance and rich adventure,
In favour of a grim asceticism.
One must aspire for spontaneity,
Not inhibition; harmony, not din;

Realisation, not renunciation
Of this festal world of senses for Gopal,
Whether with four divine arms in Vaikuntha,
Two human ones in Gokul or none — in Puri.

MIRA (unperturbed)

My furious friend, forgive me if I plead
That you have misconstrued my message. I
Never once claimed that I had, of set purpose,
Wished to renounce your festal world of senses
For Gods with a million arms or angels with none.
I only spoke of loving my Gopal,
Living for Him and doing His will in joy,
As against my unillumined self-will. Also,
Why fight a shadow? When did I extol
he cult of all-renunciation? When
You truly love Gopal you only ask:

How you may best achieve your soul's surrender
At His twin lotus feet and realise
That He's your heart's one Lord to whom you offer
In sheer delight all, all you have and are,
Counting no cost and never calculating
How He will indemnify you for your loss.
Friend, this is no romance, nor poets' irised
Fancy which peters out with the ascent
Of the Sun that brooks no hues. Not once have I
Felt I was renouncing this or that for Him.
I only aver that when I move a step
Toward Him, my Gleaming Orient, my Gopal,
I do, inevitably, put behind me
This westering world of senses you adore

But I find a stagnant bog.

(She halts, then with a sigh)

Perhaps, friend, you,
With your vision of a worldling, cannot help
But look down on all pilgrimage of the soul
And so make out Love's long, lone path as strewn
With roses, roses, roses all the way.
But how can one who stays enamoured of
Life's surface ripples — ever plumb the abysmal
Despond that makes one cry out for a glimpse,
A fleeting touch of the elusive dream Beloved?

(Her eyes glisten)

But believe me, friend, 'tis a despond that kindles
A mystic flame of faith and aspiration
In the heart of despair. I know not how it happens,
Nor can I explain how His Grace steers our frail
Storm-tossed boats through perilous reefs and shoals
Into His harbour of blue harmony.
I only know how it sustains and saves —
But nay, you'll laugh — so I will say no more.

(To the amazement of the devotees the pedant folds his
hands' )

AJIT

Forgive me: I, too, cannot... at all... explain ...
But you ... your voice ... your tears and ... above all
Your unmistakable sincerity
Has touched a chord ... and so continue, I pray.
And believe me, I am not quite what I seem.
A time was ... when I, too, had faith and fervour.
But pride has been my downfall... so go on:

I have found my long-lost mother in you again!

MIRA (with a radiant smile)

You see, my son, how His invisible Grace,
Like the wizard's wand, can transform visible things.

Page 134

The brightest intellect stands stupefied
Before the deep epiphany of His Grace ...
It is a dateless mystery none can plumb ...
Only when one resigns can one begin
To glimpse ... but listen, I will tell you how
My Gopal came to me, the derelict.

(Warming up)

Once, after I had left my palace to beg
My way to Brindavan, a destitute,
Calamities swooped down on me, alas,
At every bend — I had no respite, till
The light before my sore eyes was eclipsed,
And an abscess on my left thigh crippled me.
Limping I trudged along in deep despair;

But how to wend my way to Brindavan
Which seemed now all but unattainable!
All hope had died ... At last, I found a chance
Shelter in a wayside cave when the sun had set.
I lay down utterly spent and closed my eyes.
I thought I would die of sheer fatigue and thirst,
But could not even rise to my feet. I wept
And asked Gopal (who stayed away since the day
I had become a mendicant in His Name):

Was this, indeed, my destiny — the Last Act
Of the passion-play of my love's rapturous quest:

To fail and be lulled to everlasting sleep?
I cried out: "Where are you, my one Beloved,
For whom I staked my all? Can you not see
My desperate plight? Say, to whom can I turn
If you, my sole Sustainer, now desert me
In my zero hour?" But only the echo mocked
My anguished cry when, on a sudden, a deep
Voice from my inmost heart admonished me:

"Has He not all your life with roses strewn
The paths you have trodden blithely, picking your way
By His own Love's light He had lit in your heart."
In a flash, my vision opened and I saw

Page 135

That when the sky is blue and the earth ashine
Like a green carpet under our feet, and life
Is a care-free joy-ride to the rainbow goal,
We all can sing His praises fervently
And thank Him for His endless boons of Grace
Which uplift earth to Heaven and make our days
Flawless like music falling from angels' harps;

Tis only when the skies hurl thunder and lightning
When storms are unleashed and hope's crystal streams
Hurtle and swirl, turbid with eddies of Fate;

When kindness, sympathy, happiness and laughter

Flicker like half-forgotten memories

Or twinkle like wan dream-stars half-veiled by clouds -

'Tis only then our faith and love are tested

And the authentic self-surrender is achieved ...

The vision dislimned, but its cadence lingered

And my black despond dissolved in grateful tears

Then upon my lips broke out an impassioned song,

Of unquestioning acceptance and I sang,

Offering all I had and was at His feet:

"Man bhave jiun rakh, Prabhuji,

Man bhave jiun rakh:

Oh, keep me as you will, my Lord,

Dispose of me as you will."

Then, as I sang on this refrain, in a moment,
My every cell and pore spilled ecstasy
And a new, invincible, death-defiant strength
Rushed into my blood to heal my agelong pain,
My sorrows, heart-ache, questionings — all ceased
When, lo, I saw Him — my Beloved, Gopal,
Wherever I looked! I picked up a grain of sand,
And there, too. He was mirrored! In every leaf
I saw Him nod, through every flower He smiled:

The trance of every clod was broken because
His love outwelled from every particle.

Page 136

In my joy I pressed my swollen thigh, when all

The festering poison oozed out, giving me

Instant relief. Only my thirst survived.

But as I lay down once again, resolved

To accept death, I saw a Shepherd Boy!

'You are thirsty, blessed maid?' He asked and, smiling,

Poured water gently down my mouth. I clapped

My hands like a child and said: 'Come in what guise

You will, Gopal, but even if you tiptoed

Over my grave, I'd know you by your footfall.

You can no more conceal yourself from Mira

Than grim cloud-curtains can conceal the sun.'

He gave me a dazzling smile, blessed me and vanished.

But since that memorable day His play

At hide and seek with me came to an end;

For I saw nothing but Him wherever I looked:

From the infinitesimal dust to the boundless sky.

(Pausing for breath)
His Grace sustains me now at every step
And, as I walk on air, my heart goes on
Singing paeans to His fathomless Grace!
'Tis not a fairy tale nor hearsay: I
Have realised through my trials and tribulations
That His one touch can golden the blackest night
Of agony into a marvellous, deathless dawn.
He veils His Beauty's Face to deepen our yearning
For His loveliness, and suffers the powers that be
To cast us into Hades but to teach us
This supreme lesson that one who has passioned for Him
Can never go under nor need parley with
The little officials of the world — to win
Flowers that fade, laurels that swiftly pall
And mirage that lures but fails to appease thirst.

(She breaks out into an ecstatic song)

They say. Lord, this Thy world is
A carnival of bliss

Page 137

And hails us like the rainbow
Agleam with mysteries.

But they know not what transpires

When Thy Love's Flutelet calls:

How its garish footlights fade out

And the sweetest caress palls !

Then as the gay voices trail off

And joy-bells ring no more,
Mira puts out to sea. Lord,

Athirst for Thy viewless Shore.

The radiant faces she cherished

Now twinkle like fireflies
And she breaks away from her moorings

Led by Thy Love's star-eyes.

Then Thy answering footfall sounds in

Her soul, in a desolate gloom
And Thy Name as the Herald steps in

To take her to Thee, her Home.

"Halt, halt /" — her dear ones plead still,

But they have not heard Thy call:

They find the world's irised bubbles

A marvellous carnival.

Sings Thy Flute again: 'Come, Mira!

Thou chant His Name and be
His play-mate in Brindavan's

Unearthly felicity.'

They entreat: 'Thy palace is splendid

And without waits ambushed gloom'.
But wherever I look, I see. Lord,

Thy tender star-eyes bloom.

What once was my darling palace

Now looms as a prison of pain;

Can one who has winged Thy Love's sky

Wend back to the dungeon again ?

AJIT (With folded hands and in a husky voice:)
O mother, forgive a born fool's antics, I pray:

A fool who knew you not for what you were
Because he was vain and pride had made him blind.
But a sigh awakes: Can ever the deaf know how
Great music thrills or a cave-man's soul respond
To the ocean-rumble of the Vedic verse?

(Brushing away two tears' )
But His Grace, like the wind, bloweth where it listeth:

So she came tonight to touch me with her wand

And opened my eyes to your divinity.

You know what she made me see. Still I'll recount

The revelation as it came to me,

To offer it at your feet in grateful joy.

(Pausing and indicating the Image of Gopal:)
When you were singing of how His Love's Flute came
To wrench you off your cherished moorings, I
All on a sudden, saw your human face
Transfigured ... in an ecstasy ... when like
A rocket it flung out myriad flaming atoms
Which hung in the air suspended like star-dust
And then, while dancing, were condensed ... 0 bliss! ..
Into a face ... 'twas yours, O mother ... and yet
It was not made of flesh but protean sparks!

(After a brief pause, breathlessly)
Thereafter, close to you, I glimpsed a lovely
Cerulean aura which gyred and whirled and danced
Till the overarching heavens seemed to sway
And reel, intoxicate with rapture ... when ...
Oh, blessed am I to have seen what I have seen! ...
Two exquisite, resplendent feet emerged
Of a little boy whose form I could not see

Page 139

... But only His self-luminous contour ... Then
I saw you, swinging with Him as His own play-mate
Who is born from age to age to sport with Him
As His darling Gopi-maid He new-created
To see His own pure love and loveliness
Mirrored in her divine, adoring eyes!

MIRA (with a quizzical smile)

And then — what else? Did you not see and hear
Something still more ... ravishing — though incredible?

AJIT (smiling)

You are pleased to play at hide and seek with me,
Are you not — since you do know what I saw? ...
Still, I'll obey ... Then, as you whirled with Him
My blood, too, whirled inebriate ... as I saw
Blue flowers of light outpetal everywhere
From the hallowed dust that kissed your feet and His!
And lastly, lo! I saw a Flute's outline
Swaying in the air ... but no face, lips or fingers ...
And I heard it calling ... to me ... from afar!

(His voice falters as tears course down his cheeks')
Forgive, O mother, the ... pitiful ignorance
Of one whose ... eyes of flesh can only see
This world as made of dust and din and gloom
And not as His holy playground where His Love
Through Beauty manifesting leads to Bliss.
But we ... poor elfs and dwarfs ... hugging our blindness,
Can only hymn the romance of earthly nights.
We scout as myth His miracle Light (the sole
Lustre that can repeal our global gloom)
And in the same breath flaunt — 0 irony! —
Our Reason's flickering candle-flame which casts
More questioning shadows than certitude's sunbeams,
As the ultimate tribunal of all truth.
I say this, mother, because now I have seen,
Through your Grace, how and where I went astray:

Page 140

'Twas pride and self-complacence, first and last.
So I conned the Vedas, read the saints' lives, scanned
Old chronicles of mystic ecstasies,
But interpreting them everytime, alas,
With my self-sure arrogance and so opined
That this our world of senses and our minds
Are all we have to depend on and employ.
So I aligned with fools who, like me, held
That our intellect alone can be our pilot

In this riddling world, all other guides are suspect.
(With a rueful smile)

Fools must be fools. No wonder, mother, I failed
To realise that the Truth that upholds our world
Is beyond the comprehension of the mind
Which never can see life for what it is:

A Brindavan of bliss when He comes to play,
Day after festal day with us and we
In joy surrender all we have at His feet
And so fulfil our destiny through love.
Only, mother, I wonder if I may — "

MIRA (Touching his head in token of blessing)

Ask what you will, without a qualm, my son!
For who knows — perhaps the One who danced with me
To help you see, has chosen to make you want
To be trained to hear — as He so often does,
In ways that baffle our reason. Who can tell
When He will play His Flute and whose dark doubts
Shall transmute to radiant certitudes as night's pain
Thrills into golden ecstasy at dawn!"

AJIT (kissing her feet)

I have now, at long last, not only seen
His redeeming feet, but heard the voice as well
Of the Guru He appointed for me. So
You must, 0 mother, believe me when I claim
That I ask now not to question, but to learn.

Page 141

(Folding his hands')
Mother, I humbly ask you: how can one
Attain to illumination through a mere
Singing of His Name or a simple Mantra?
Man vaunts in joy: he lives in a prison-house
He has laboured long to build, hemmed in by the ego's
Sentinel walls, all but impregnable.
He winces even if you prick them with
So much as a tiny pin of disapproval.
He loves his den more than God's light and air
And quails at the bare thought of floating in
His sky of Freedom, liberated from
His shadow-cabined self-love. So I ask you:

How could we ever hope to sing our way
To salvation? How could we, by dint of chanting
A Name or a Mantra, be delivered from
This Maya's pen of darkness masquerading
As God's own home of light and bliss and beauty?

(With a sigh)

So many sing His name or some trite phrases
Day after tedious day and yet, alas,
Do they not stagnate where they were? In this
Our strange world's daedal maze how few do win
A clue to the exit! And still fewer, we find,
Dare follow the clue to debouch into the vast
Of Godly freedom — Mukti. Only a handful,
The elect, dare sally — out from their ivory towers —
To give us the lead of light they have achieved
Of love and wisdom, strength and purity.
So will you please explain how a mere Name,
When sung, delivers the singer, in the end,
From the dark crypt of his ego and attachments?

(His eyes glisten)

O mother, I have transgressed against the holy,
I know: yet have I not been redeemed by
His compassion which tonight came down to flay
My overweening arrogance because

Page 142

You, His Compassion's deputy, forgave me?

(His voice grows thick)
I know this ... still reassure me that you have,,
Indeed, absolved my sins, do smile on me
When I sing in rapturous tears at your feet:

As the flower, though stung, forgives and opens

Her petals to the bee again,
So her rebel child's affronts the mother

Forgives even when she weeps in pain .....

MIRA (Blessing him tenderly once more as he s falls, weeping,
at her feet)

When once you have glimpsed His feet and I heard His Flute,
Need you still ask if I have forgiven you?
Nay, tell me who are we to forgive the sinners s
When He Himself comes to kiss away their tears,
Absolving time and again their sins and lapses s?
Could you move a single step toward His feet :

Did He not run a hundred to make you welcome
As his own child with whom He loves to play?

We seem, indeed, so feckless and pathetic
Creatures of circumstance who revel in doom

Yet think we are wise — like moths that fondle the flame.

But, in reality, are we not all

Diminutive sparks of His Primal Fire,

Whence we all stemmed and whither we'll all Hi merge back?

So vex no more your mind with such misgivingigs,

But panoplied with his blessing's strength march on,

With His Name upon your lips and love in your heart.

I only pray: may you momently remember

His Grace which came to open your eyes tonight;

And may you cherish ardently through life,
This priceless, beneficent spark of vision.
For 'tis a spark that cannot grow to a flame
Unless you fan it with your sleepless love,
Singing His Name with every heart-beat till

The great day dawns when out from your every pore;

His Name cascades His sun-victorious music
To repeal life's dismal, atheist anarchy.

(She closes her eyes for a while, then looks at him and

blesses- him once again)
I'll answer- your query now — about the Name:

How it cam help us rend the chrysalis

And give ms wings to soar on — to His blue

Like kin acclaiming kin. Let me, for this,

Exploit the simile — of the prison-house

You mentioned with such warmth and mystic fervour.

(After a pause for breath tranquilly)
A prisoner?, in a cell, procures a chisel
And hammier; then begins to bore a hole
In the wall in a corner underneath his bed.
Day after strenuous day he goes on boring.
He knows 'twill take him long; but he persists
Because from his dark dungeon he must escape
Which he can achieve only by hewing away
The stones in a hidden niche. So, tirelessly,
He plods con in the dark for hours at night.
After seven long years, one morning, lo,
The breach has just grown large enough: Oh joy!
Even an hour before, till the last stone-slab
Was whittled away, he had no hope; but now
His freedom beckons to him: incredible!
In the space of an hour all is changed! Gone, gone
The accursed life of gloom and hopelessness!
Fate's tyranny is ended! He emerges
Into the light and air of unwalled freedom!
His pulses race: it seems too good to be true,
And yet the miracle has happened! But
Remember: till the last obstructing slab
Was broken to bits, he had been moping in
His sty of living death. Even so, my son,
His Name does act as a Mace of Heaven to achieve
A deep breach in our egos' immuring walls

Page 144

That doom our lives to abysmal night — although,
Enamoured of gloom, we laugh at His Gleam as myth
And acclaim our ego's cellars as citadels.
And 'tis because we elect to home in hell
That we legalise the wages of sin with Reason's
Soul-killing sophistry — outlawing His
Love's Brindavan of deathless bliss and beauty.
(Dropping her voice)

But one thing is certain, my son: by dint of logic,
However unassailable and God-proof,
None may annul, outwit or shut out One
Who, subtle and all-pervasive like the air,
Can, even through your imperceptible pores,
Insinuate Himself into your heart athirst
'' For a whiff from His heights, and then, in its empty vases
Stemless miracle buds of worship blossom,

Like laughter of green outbreaking through chinks mid rocks!
Or He may choose like the light-waves to invade
Your world of dream and, hid there, play His Flute
To flood your wakeful wastes with His blue rapture;

Or, sometimes, when your Warder Reason dozes,
He steals in on His own Name's wings, to redeem
Your jailed soul with a lightning-glimpse of His Grace.
And 'tis the saints and seers who tell us this
And the Guru, His Vicegerent, is sent by Him
To initiate us into the human-divine

And marvellous passion-play He comes to stage

From birth to birth to reveal to us the eternal

Rapturous Way of liberation from

The atheist dungeon-walls that stifle our souls.

And because in our Maya-fostered ignorance

We take our prison-house for His crystal Home,

He arms us with His Name's own victor sword

So, wielding it we may all hew away

Brick by brick, our egos' sky-hostile walls.

Page 145

A month later. In Mira's temple she is seen again dancing. On her right Ajit is revealed seated with folded hands, the proud pedant transformed now into a humble devotee. On her right are seated Mira's Guru, Sri Sanatan and the temple-priest, Pundarik. After a time she breaks forth into song.

MIRA (sings as tears course down her cheeks)
They ask: "For whom do you sing your songs

For ever, endlessly ?
Whether one harks or no —you go on

Pouring your melody /"
For whom does the heart still brood and long,
Sweet koels warble the boughs among,
Blossom the buds in hues' display,
The rivers dance on — who can say ?

And yet they'll ask: "For whom do you sing

For ever endlessly ?
Whether one harks or no —you go on

Pouring your melody /"
For whom do bulbuls trill and trill
And plumaged peacocks sway, athrill,
The clouds, sleep-walkers, saunter on
And priest winds fare from dusk to dawn?

And yet they'll ask: "For whom do you sing

Forever, endlessly ?
Whether one harks or no —you go on

Pouring your melody !"
For whom stays rapt, in trance, the saint,
Comes the artist spring our earth to paint ?
For whom do the skies, aflush, awake
And trees in laughter of green outbreak?

And yet they'll ask: "For whom do you sing

Page 146

For ever, endlessly ?
Whether one harks or no — you go on

Pouring your melody /"
Why pines for the Lord His devotee,
Desolate — everlastingly ?

Why appeals the heart to the viewless star
And the ways of love are what they are?

And yet they'll ask: "For whom do you sing

For ever, endlessly ?
Whether one harks or no —you go on
Pouring your melody !"

AJIT (with a sigh)

O mother! how you do transport the soul
With your lilting melodies! How your divine
Similes and sweet rhymes and rhythms compete
With one another! ... When you sing you do
Cascade a resonant billowy flame of nectar
And it is a flame that sheds light but not heat!
And how the words are momently transformed
By the magic of your music, even as
Wan water-vapours are with the sungold's kiss
Into dream rainbows!

SANATAN

You have said it, my son!
For when she sings I hear a voice of light
Whisper to me that she is sent by Him
To boon our lustre-avid benighted souls
With a new faith we never could have conceived:

A faith that draws its life-breath from His Light.
Yes, Mira, when you sing in our midst, athrill,
I feel you have come commissioned by our Lord
To ransom our night-imprisoned anguished souls,
Transform our cynic intellect's atheist strands
And put to shame its infidelities,
Extolled by purblind men who revel in

Page 147

Their egos' abysmal nights of God-denial.
And so you had to quell these — not with arid
Theology or logic — but with vibrant
Music inspired by His Flute's haunting call
Which we in our folly, alas, dismiss as fancy!

AJIT

But Gurudev, why must we fail to prize
A gift divine we ought to acclaim?

SANATAN

Ask the one
Who not only has acclaimed but found it, too,
Singing her way to Him, the Lord of Knowledge,
And so has come to know, through love, what we
Strive in vain to grapple with our fool minds.

MIRA (smiling)

Nay, Gurudev! Mislead not one who has
Sought refuge at your feet. I only sing
What you inspire.

SANATAN (laughs)

I'll have to steal your thunder
To rebuke you: for 'tis you who have inspired
My inspiration through your songs and music;

Although, in the end, all inspiration is
Sent by the One who, curtained by clouds, breaks out
As lightning, though the clouds will vaunt 'tis they
Who strike the sparks to blaze swift trails of light.

(Turning to Pundarik)
Now, tell me, friend, have I not hit the target?

PUNDARIK (smiles)

O Gurudev! embarrass not poor waifs
By queries they cannot meet. We never plumbed
The depths achieved only by godly divers.

Page 148

We can but float on bubbles nor dare aspire
To profundities: we can at best pay dream
Homage to angel shores beyond our ken.

(To Mira)

So I, for one, can only go on praying
To you to go on blessing us with your songs,
Only, 0 mother, grant that I may have
The humility which asks not futile questions.
For only your holy self can know for whom
You sing and how He answers through your songs.

AJIT

You may not ask, being a holy priest
And as such know all about holiness;

But I am an Arcadian and so must question
To be enlightened...

(To Mira)

That is, if you will

Deign to give me an answer?

MIRA (indicating Sanatan)

Why not ask Him?

SANATAN
Nay, Mira, play up: tease not honest souls.

(To Ajit)

You are on the right trail, my discerning son!
If question you must, prod her who knows the answers.
Pundits can talk till doomsday even as parrots
Can go on twittering — but 'tis given only
To light — and not to heat — to repeal darkness.

AJIT (To Mira)
Now, mother mine! How would you evade the thirsty!

MIRA (Smiling)
So be it. I will pour — although, I warn you,

Page 149

It may be thunder and lightning more than rain.

AJIT

I am not dismayed. For rainbow-clouds dispense
Rapture and peace which refresh even more than downpours.

(Seriously)

You sing of those who pine for your Gopal,
Declaring that He is yours and you are His.
But woe is me! How shall my feet of clay
Achieve what is beyond the dare of wings?
You belong to skies, we to our craving cages.
How can we aspire, being what we are,
To win to the blue — beating against our bars?
How shall we, wingless elfs, consort with angels?
Oh, if He is our Lover and Beloved,
Why do such as we cry and cry in vain
For One we could claim as our very own?

MIRA

But your premiss is false: do we cry and cry for Him:

We only clamour for His Grace and Love,
Demand — they sustain us on our own terms.

AJIT
Forgive me, mother, I am still at sea.

MIRA

You would not be, my son, if you could only
Accept that it is not for such as we
To insist on His obeying to our will:

We are to be shaped by Him, not He by us.
If we are humble, we would know that we
Are sent here so we may fulfil ourselves
On earth by doing His will at every step.
For He knows, and not we, how to uplead
Our half-lit, groping minds to His sun-truth;

But our loud self-will, alas, does fret and fume

Page 150

Announcing, clamouring — it wants this and that,
Nor pausing, alas, to enquire once what He wants!
Folly, son, is not fain to view things save
With its own eyes — from its own perverse angle.
So, regarding things askew, unwittingly,
We grow blind to what He would have us want.
If once you achieved the humility of wisdom
You would realise that first you must fulfil
The conditions He has posed. And one of these
Is to keep your vigil sleeplessly — lest He,
Your heart's Beloved, may not find your doors
Bolted against Him when He deigns to call.
Let me tell you a mystic parable.

(After a pause)

Once upon a time there lived a King,
A noble monarch whose bounties rained like sun's
Unstinted largess of all-healing light.
He often went about incognito
To know first-hand of the urgent needs of those
Who looked to Him as their one God on earth.
One day his herald announced with beat of drums:

"The King desires to make it known to all
That he will visit a house in the deep of night.
And so in every house or cottage a lamp
Must brightly burn all night in this our great
Metropolis and the villages round about,
So His Majesty may wend his way and choose
The host with whom he will stay for one night.
Blessed is he who shall receive his Grace."
The citizens and rustics were all thrilled;

But as the days went by, tired of waiting,

They put out their lamps, arguing: "Why must we

Waste nightly so much oil? Surely the King

Will come in state in his resplendent car

With his noisy equipage. The rumble of wheels

And sound of the horses' hooves will doubtless make

The sky reverberate and waken us,

Page 151

When we shall promptly kindle all our lamps."
They made long lists of all their grievances;

The amenities they lacked, the boons they craved,

The favours they desired and, above all,

They vied with one another in emphasising

Their multifarious merits, gifts and virtues.

Now on the purlieu of the town a poor

And humble widow lived in a tiny hut

On a small pension sanctioned by the King.

Thrilled with the royal proclamation, she

Kept kindled in her hut her one and only

Oil-lamp which brightly burned night after night.

Her knowledgeable neighbours laughed in chorus

And mocked at her: "You are every kind of a fool,

You imbecile, to waste for nothing nightly

Your little store of precious oil! You know

Full well that you can ill afford to squander

The beggarly dole you receive from the King.

'Tis lunacy! say, how can you expect

The Ruler of our destinies to seek

A pauper's hospitality? Furthermore,

Suppose he called on you now — where would you

Receive him in your dismal hovel? And how

Do you propose to entertain him, fool?"

So they, her patronising, prosperous neighbours

Went on and on till she dissolved in tears

And faltered out: "I know I have no claim

To the Grace of our noble Lord ... This, too, I know

That the odds are a million to one against

His visiting my hut... Yet... who is there

That hopes not against hope? ... And who can tell

How Grace will act? ... Are not even tiny blades

Of grass blest by the light of the high sun-god

And starveling streams replenished by angel clouds?

And then," she pleaded, "I keep my lamp burning

Because such is the will of my great King,

My heart's one Donor, on whose bounty I live

Page 152

From day to day ... I know my place, good friends!

I know I am a cipher ... Only ... I

Know this, as well, that 'tis for him to ordain

As 'tis for me to accept and do his will.

You may laugh and mock ... but I will follow my lights

Such as they are ... You go your way, wise friends,

And I'll go mine alone. Only I swear:

I'd sooner starve than flout my master's wish."
Nettled, they jeered at her with one accord
And decided she was "crazy." But, unperturbed,
Night after lonely night she kept her vigil,
Companioned by her sole, loyal lamp,
While all her affluent, wise and thrifty neighbours
Slept on in peace, conserving their precious oil.
After a month, one day, to their utter amazement,
A royal chariot hove in sight and rattled
Past their imposing mansions to draw up
Before the lowly hut of the "crazy" woman
And took her to the palace where the Queen
Appointed her as her own personal maid
And, after a time (as she endeared herself
To her loving mistress serving her with sweet
Humility and swerveless loyalty)
She grew to be her dearest confidante.

(Appraising Ajit with a smile)
Have I now met your question?

AJIT (reflectively)

I understand now:

To do His will in glad and full surrender
Is the way to the last fulfilment. We are tested
At every step so we may shed our self-will.
'Tis only when we die to our old self
That we may claim our birthright — godly Freedom.
For only then can His will — working in us,
As a leaven — transform our flawed human nature
And, once this is achieved, through serving Him,
11

Page 153

We are exalted to His divinity.
When we play with Him in this His cosmic lila
As His trusted friends and darling confidants.
Have I divined your import?

MIRA (nodding, pleased)

You have, bless you!
Only add: 'tis our egos which, first and last,
Erect the walls between His will and ours.
Our self-will, stemming from our self-love, is
At the root of all our man-made misery.

AJIT (bowing)

The spirit's truths dawn on me, more and more,
Daily, O mother, since you came to me.
Only ... sometimes ... perhaps because I still
Choose to hug my old outlook ...
(he pauses)

MIRA

You mean

The spectacle of human suffering
Still makes you restive?

AJIT (surprised)

How did you divine?

SANATAN (smiles)

Her eye of light sees into the heart of things
Where our mortal eyes spot only surface bubbles.

MIRA (in mock anger)

Oh, lead them not astray, when sages choose
To put on an act, people are taken in.
Nor even in jest suggest — you are as blind
As the orphans who come to you to be guided home.
(To Ajit—laughing)

Page 154

Take him not at his word when he's in the mood
To fool the undiscerning innocents
Like you and me.
(After a pause)

But tell me — what is it
That vexes you, my son?

AJIT (hesitant)

I know not how
To put it in words ... but since you know our frailties,
You will forgive me if I cannot help
But feel, sometimes, a stir of swift revolt
Deep down in my heart when I see men suffer,
And I ask myself wherefore philosophers
And saints must still acclaim this cult of pain.

MIRA

The philosopher's outlook on life, my son,
Is alien to me; nor can I lay
Claim to high sainthood. So your pointed dart
Has missed the target. I can only say
What I have learnt in my life from the school
Of experience. If you mean one should never
Glorify pain, I am at one with you.
And I may assure you that not once have I
Idolised pain. But the fact remains that pain
Has met me at every bend till I met Him,
My Gopal, when I saw the last of pain,
Because to touch Him is to transcend sorrow.
But till the day He came to abide with me
I did go through deep pain again and again.
It caught me, unawares, first through the chink
Of my hyper-sensitiveness, insomuch
That I was frantic even when a pin
Pricked me. Even a shadow of hurtful things
Depressed me deeply.

In the second stage,

Page 155

It was no longer shadows but real things

Jolts, shocks and disenchantments, thorns and gusts

Entanglements, attachments, expectations,

Dreams shattered, trusts betrayed, men's cruelties —

In a word, everything that came to sully

The flawless image of beauty that presided

In my heart's temple, made me desolate,

Till I turned to my Gopal — to break away

From my moorings to be anchored only in

The Harbour of His Grace beyond all storm.

(Her eyes glisten)

But then, in the third stage, even my Gopal
Vanished and my soul groped, alas, in night!
For two long years I lived in the agony
Of exile — sundered from my All-in-all:

A pain which made the light before my eyes
Loom like an irony of ironies;

Life seemed to jeer at me for having hoped
At all for bliss in our world of suffering.
I drew my every breath in pain in the frozen
Gloom of despair: every touch and tremor
Reminded me of my Gopal I had lost.
To have savoured nectar and then to be invited
By the turbid waters of the stagnant pools!
My soul, in torment, could not see a thing
From the viewpoint of the sober worldly-wise.
They said I was a rudderless boat, a flotsam
That could at best toss for an interlude,
To sink thereafter in the darkling deep
Of utter shame and fathomless frustration.
My name was mud in my noble family
Whose high deeds are still sung by minstrel priests
And chronicled in Mevar's deathless sagas:

They called me names because I had eschewed
The tradition-worshipped veil of high-born women.
They were all scandalized to see a Queen
Consort with all and sundry: in a word,

Page 156

I played for the highest stake and lost my all:

The worldlings' support even as my Gopal's.

SANATAN (smiles)

True, only you were not sent forth by Him
To be sustained by the worldlings. Therefore He
Schooled you through pain so you may reveal to those
Who adored their little lusts and thrills, that one
Who is called by His great Love must bid farewell
To the lesser loves, laughing to scorn the props
And lures of the world of senses. Because you
Were His own darling child and maid, you had
To be disowned by the worldlings of the world,
So you might come to be owned by Him alone,
In His eternal city of bliss and beauty,
Where you belonged as you once sang when you
Came at last to journey's end: sing, sing that song
The lovely song you sang to disavow
Our dismal world to be pledged to His Brindavan
Where only His Love rules and His Light reigns.
Come, Pundarik, let's sing in chorus with her.
(They sang together, Mira leading the chorus)

Farewell, our dismal vale of sighs and tears!

We'll wend to His far shore of blessedness.
Farewell, our heart-lost land of fogs and fears !

To acclaim His Brindavan of Gleam and Grace.

Fare far, still far from our domain

To His garden where springtide never can wane,

Beyond the clutch of din and pain,

We'll leave our glooms for His haven of Gleam and Grace,

And wend to His Brindavan of blessedness.

Where only Love Divine holds sway,

Where none sustains defeat in play

And the Friend presides for whom all pray,

Page 157

There we'll knock at His door of Gleam and Grace;

Let's wend to His far shore of blessedness.

Where none says: "This is mine alone,"
Where woe or illusion is unknown
And children of Light the dark disown,

We'll live there in His home of Gleam and Grace,

His marvellous Brindavan of blessedness.

"Hark, calls the Beloved," Mira sings,

"Playing the Flute, the King of kings!

To Him, the Evergreen, on our wings!
Give all we have to the Lord of Gleam and Grace !
We will to His Paradise of Blessedness."

AJIT

How thrilling to be owned by Him, the Lord!
You, mother, came to our world of lesser lores
To wean us from their maya and sing to us
That not till we are vowed to disclaim this
Our phantom carnival of transient pleasures
Entailing disenchantments, can we win
To the everlasting joy of being reclaimed
By Him, Gopal, as His darling intimates.

SANATAN

And what intimacy, indeed! Could ever we, humans,
Imagine how He can, in love, play up
Once we accept to be under His wing?
Oh, how He assumes our ways, comports Himself
Like a mortal, seeks us out, in Grace, even deigns
To laugh and parley with us, so we may learn
To play at hide and seek with Him in rapture,
As one of us and — loving Him — open ourselves
To His victorious Light that quells the inherent
Darkness of our unregenerate nature!
Our God seeks birth as a human so we may

Page 158

Be the more swiftly divinised till our

Flawed natures, become one with His, merge all

Their taints and blurs in His Love's gold-incandescence!

AJIT (hesitantly)

Will you give an instance? Does the Divine, indeed,
Laugh and fence with us as a human?

SANATAN (to Mira)

Tell Him.
For now he is receptive to your pure
Love's own Light — he will not misunderstand.

MIRA (with a smile)

So be it, Gurudev. I will confide
In him now though he may still be at a loss
To grasp with the mind what is beyond its ken.

(To Ajit)

The question you have asked, I can, my son,
Answer from experience. Yes; the One
Who can hurl a myriad suns and stars all spinning
For countless aeons through interstellar space,
Does indeed come down to play and laugh with us,
So we may be transfigured the more swiftly
By His joy and laughter as well. Could any of us
Ever laugh if He declined to laugh with us?

(Laughing to herself)
How once, in a teasing mood. He said to me:

"Mira why do you link your name with mine,
Now that the world decides you're raving mad?"
"Because, my Lord," I answered back, "our world's
Great sages say: you only understand
The idiom of the ones who are raving mad,
And as these, touched by you, still madder grow,
You do feel more and more at home with them."
"Mira, you're not far out," He laughed, "for tell me:

What, in the name of good sense, can they say
When they find me, alas, chasing you who are

Page 159

The Queen of the lunatics?" He mused for a while,
Then with a cryptic smile: "Only I wonder
If these sane worldlings ever surmise how
Mad are the sane who prefer shells to pearls
And call mad those pearl-connoisseurs who
Discard the empty shells to cull the pearls!"
(All laugh)

PUNDARIK

Forgive me, mother, because even when
I could not help but laugh with you all now,
A question vexed my mind: how could our Lord,
Who is infinite and immortal, stoop to accept
The limitations of mortality?
How could the last Ruler of our destinies
Not only bear our impure human touch
But put on our mortal nature to court our love?

SANATAN

How can you entertain such strange misgivings?
Could there be aught on earth which did not draw
Its light from His sun, its breath from His life-breath?
Pundit, is it not written in the scriptures: .

"Yadeveha tadamutra yadamutra tadanviha:

Whatever is here is there — in the Beyond

And whatever's there, can here, in the world, be found?"

And not only in the scriptures, friend, but in

The Gita, too, has He not promulgated:

"Ye yatha warn prapadyante tarn stathaiva bhajamydham:

In whatever mode mortals approach and love me
I answer in the same tune and accept them?"
Once you accept that He, too, wants our love
Even as we want His — you can with reason

Page 160

Accept as well that He delights in playing
At hide and seek with us in love's sheer rapture.

AJIT

Pardon me, Gurudev! But may I ask
A question about His play?... I know not how
To express my meaning without sounding stilted,
But you who are the soul of tolerance
And understand our human limitations
Far better than the worldly-wise of our world,
Will surely forgive me if I ask how can
The infinite Godhead (who is self-fulfilled,
The Atmaram, basking in His own sun-bliss)
Could seek to be born as a mortal to make love
In the human rhythm to us, crass egoists,
Who dare deny the gods and insult angels,
Who murder innocence and do outstride
Even beasts in bestiality and blood-lust!
I can understand His meeting us half-way
To lead us swifter out of this dark maze
Of sorrow back to our inviolate Homeland
Which we, fools that we are, disclaimed to live
Like self-convicted exiles in a madhouse.
And though I may not fully comprehend
What maya is, still I may perhaps claim
To have a dim perception of the Lord's
Loving solicitude to deliver us all
From the yoke of His own self-projected maya,
This labyrinth of rapturous illusions.

(Turning to Sanatan)
But what bewilders me still everytime
I want to puzzle it out with my mind's lights,
Is the why and wherefore of His predilection
For this our bedlam and His baffling urge
To put on our nature and play at being human
Accepting gladly the hospitality
Of our dismal dungeon — almost, as it were,

Page 161

Forgetting, for the nonce. His ways divine!
How could He bring Himself to ape our ways,
Crying and laughing, planning and organising
In the human mode with us, alas, whose antics
Make blush for shame so often the hounds of hell.

SANATAN (frowning).
Insult not the form our Lord Himself has chosen
To manifest His Love's epiphany:

Krishna, the Avatar of flawless beauty,

The Nonpareil, who gave His pledge in the Gita

To be born from age to age to sustain Dharma.

Learn to worship the dust His twin feet hallowed.

Be on your guard: 'tis perilously easy

To scoff and fulminate, judge and condemn

From the dais of the schoolman mind. Never forget:

Humility is the stair to knowledge and glad
Acceptance the essence of surrender. True,
Men do comport themselves abominably,
But has not our Lord stressed that 'tis because
They sully His inviolate light in the soul,
Of love and truth and purity, that He
Takes birth in the world as radiant Avatars
To uplead our way-lost souls to His starry truths?

(Dropping his voice)
But a truce to wordy arguments. Remember:

'Tis not for the such as we, blind egoists,
To indict and curse in righteous indignation,
Since we all do err and sin again and again.
Furthermore, cynic questionings can never
Invoke a deeper lustre — they only cloud
Our half-lit minds till even the little skylights
Of our prisoned souls, clogged by pessimist doubts,
Shut out the night-victorious boons of His sun.

(Putting a hand on his shoulder)
So once you have on bended knees accepted
Our Lord's eternal gospel of love and beauty

Page 162

And hailed His glorious lila of delight,
Once you have turned to the orient lead of faith,
You must put behind you your unregenerate nature
Your old and self-sure habit of measuring,
Dissecting, testing and judging from the mind.
Even if you truly thirst to understand
The rhythm of His deep lila, outgrow you must
Your mental way of assaying mystic truths,
The way your purblind ego would goad you on
To plumb the uncharted deeps of cosmic life.
Accept now once for all that as a boy
Has to outgrow his juvenile consciousness
Before he can understand the adult's ways,
Even so one must outgrow life's twilight glimmers,
The preconceptions of the intellect's dawn,
Before one can claim kinship with the glow
Achieved by souls in spirit's noonday knowledge.
In these inner golden worlds the saints and sages
Are the adults whereas you, a mental seeker,
Are but a child from the viewpoint of the wise.
And that's why, down the ages, seers and prophets
Have saluted faith in reverence as the prime
Pathfinder in soul's pilgrim quest for God.

AJIT
But Gurudev, is reason then redundant?

SANATAN

Nay, reason too can help but not until
It learns to be subservient to the soul.
The analytic intellect is helpful
As servant but incompetent as master.
Roundly, it helps you deal with the world of senses;

But once you have set out to win the passport
To the starland of the Spirit — adored of sages
And peopled by the gods — you must first learn
To unlearn what the arrogant atheist reason has taught.

Page 163

For reason walks on stilts whereas true faith

And fervour can serve you with angel wings,

And aspiration dower you with strength,

Not the frail physical might or mental force,

But the soul's invincible power which fortifies

Your flame-will to attain the Pinnacle

Of His sun-love, star-knowledge and moon-delight.

(Pointing to Mira)

Your soul has bowed to her because you saw
In her lustre what your fool mind failed to glimpse.
Accept her lead and you shall win to the Peak
Where He will come, in Grace, to play with you
Unfolding vistas of His bliss and beauty
Such as you dare not even dream of now.
Oh, the ecstasy to be His instrument!
To sense His rapturous touch in everything,
To see each act illumined by His ray,
To be hailed at every turn by His dear voice —
What we call naralila: His sporting with us
Revealing at every bend a panorama
Wherein each atom teems with His living Presence
And every spark throbs with His Fire's heart-beats,
When the Godhead born as man in flesh and blood
Redeems mortality with His Love Divine!

(He halts and sighs)

But a truce to the vain endeavour to describe how
The apocalyptic Vision beholds a speck
Glassing the Vast, a drop holding the deep!

AJIT (moved)

I stand rebuked, Gurudev, I bow to you:

I will be on my guard from now on. Only
May I implore you, sire, on bended knees:

For mercy's sake, confide in me — although
I know words cast more shadows, alas, than light,
Still we must make words do till we achieve
The golden Silence where they dissolve in bliss,

Page 164

The knots of the heart are loosened and all's explained.
So I beseech you — tell us a little more:

How He, our Blessed Lord, comes down to play
With us in human lilts to manifest
His hoary Divinity?

SANATAN

Ask her, through whom

He came to manifest it all to me.

MIRA (reproving)

Oh, confound not seekers with like cryptic phrases.
He came to you because you grew to love Him.
I served but as an accidental spark
To touch off the conflagration. You know full well:

I only brought you back the Image you had
Entrusted to my keeping in my childhood.
He answered afterwards as Balgopal
Because you had adored Him as a child.
It was all preordained, as your great Guru
Sri Chaitanya had assured you years ago,
And as He, my Gopal, too, bore him out
And told you why you had to wait for me —
Why 'twas predestined. So it was I had
To serve you as a stairway to His Haven:

You reaped through me what you yourself, as Guru,
Had sown in me when I was a romping child.
And so your own love's boon came back to you
Through me, your own creation, even as comes
Back to our earth from clouds what they received
From earth as her offering. So, Master mine,
Tell him you must now in detail how He
Came to you as the Everliving Cherub
To answer your great love in the way you wished.

SANATAN (shaking his head)
Nay, you recount the story — you. His own

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Daughter of Bliss and maid of Brindavan.

MIRA (pouting)

But it is your own life-story, Gurudev.
So don't insist like this!

AJIT

Perhaps he's shy.

MIRA

But why must he be shy once he has opened
The mystic lock and entered the adytum?

SANATAN

But who gave me the key? None knows, my child,
Better than you — how long I had to wait.
So catechize me no more — now that He
At long last has revealed to me why you
Were sent to me. Shall I divulge —

MIRA (with folded hands)

Oh please!
Say not such things again — even in jest.
What the Lord confides in you is not for the public.

SANATAN (smiles to Ajit)

I call you to bear witness now how she
Goads others on to come out into the open,
While she, herself, would lie hid under the veil.

(To Mira)

But tell me, is it fair when your heart knows
The Image you worshipped came to life for me
In answer to your urgent supplication?
So it's for you to speak —

(in mock solemnity)

and may I remind you
Once you have come and pledged yourself to me

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When I command, you have no choice and must —

MIRA (finishing—with a resigned smile)

Obey ... So be it since you leave me no
Alternative, my merciful commander!

(to Ajit)

So listen, my son! It is a thrilling story
Perhaps too thrilling to be acceptable
To the intellect of those who, judging from mind,
Dismiss all high, divine phenomena
That befool our realist reason's man-made logic.
They forget alas, that the ultimate tribunal
Of Truth is not the bench of this our puny
And self-sure intellect whose preconceptions
Are, far too often, belied even by life.

(Shaking her head)

Nay, the last touchstone of the Truth that rules the world
And life is the experience of the soul,
Blest by His Grace no reason can explain.
So listen: only doubt no more, my son,
When those who have received His Grace attest
That He does come still to play as man with men
Who in simple faith accept and worship Him
And thrill to His celestial-human play.

(After a pause)

His Gurudev, the radiant Sri Chaitanya,
Rebuked my Master when, once, he had said:

"As my heart's Lord stays hid behind the veil
I have failed to rend, I want now but to die."
His Guru admonished: "Sanatan, my son,
If one could attain to Him so easily,
I'd die a million deaths. Nay 'tis not by
Dying for Him one opens oneself to His Grace:

Only by living for Him and Him alone,
Surrendering all you have and are to Him,
Can you win Him as your Playmate and Beloved
And achieve the blessedness envied of Gods.

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And then, since you have given yourself to me,
How dare you dispose of what you own no more?
(After a pause)

So my Gurudev was silenced by Sri Chaitanya
Who sent him to this hallowed Eternal City.
I had met him first when I was a little child,
And cherished his sweet memory because
He had booned me with the Image of my Lord.
But I knew not then that he was my appointed
Guru to whom I had to wend and bow
As my soul's one friend and pilot in this life,
Till my Gopal enjoined on me to leave
My world of maya and give myself to him;

For not till then — He said — could I attain
The ultimate fulfilment.

PUNDARIK

Forgive me, mother,
But once Lord Krishna came to you in person
How could you still ever need to accept a Guru?

MIRA

That was a part of what my Master calls.
The great Lord's naralila: the Divine
Puts on the nature of dismal man on earth
So earthlings may, through loving Him, transcend
Their earthly limitations the more swiftly.
For once you love Him you do open to His
Alchemist compassion whose touch alone
Can divinise your egoist impulses.
These are not my words — 'twas He told me this
Many a time — and with what tenderness!
The deepest tenderness on earth is a pale
Reflex of His divine solicitude.
As I'd not leave Him, how He coaxed and argued
With me to explain the recondite mystic truth
That does sustain the Gum's miracle power

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To ransom the seeker disciple. He confided:

'T was not enough to see the deep as deep

Or the drop in the deep: one must, withal,

See the deep in a drop — Gopal in the Guru—before

One could have an inkling of the starry secret

Of human-divine love, the Infinite held

In the finite, the Timeless in a fleeting moment.

But to resume my story.

(She masters her emotion with effort)

At the time
My Gurudev was living in strict seclusion.,
When I went to him he looked away and told me
To seek another Guru as he had taken
A stern vow not to look on a woman's face
Till the attainment of his heart's Beloved.
I answered him with a song I improvised:

(She starts singing)

Come to my aid, my Lord and King, in thine own land of bliss,
Where every heart is a Gopi-soul, aheave thy feet to kiss.
Brindavan's one Beloved! helpless Mira appeals to thee:

Can one who calls himself a man thy darling minstrel be ?

AJIT

I have often heard this claimed in Brindavan.
But is this also a part of what you call
The Divine's mystic immemorial play
As a human lover — the Everliving Bridegroom
Who comes to the Tryst to savour His own love
In every Gopi-bride-soul here below?

MIRA (Hesitating)
Nay, you'll misunderstand...

AJIT

O mother mine

Evade me not, I pray ...

12

Page 169

MIRA

I am not evading.
I wish I could explain more lucidly,
But how portray with words what is this bliss
That He invites His Gopi-brides to share
With Him in His deathless carnival of love
We call His Raasalila.? Nor can the secret
Of His inviolate Love be ever unveiled,
Still less described, with words. It is revealed
Only to His elect — His blessed brides,
The Gopi-souls, who live from age to age
In utter self-oblivion, immersed
In His love's rapturous deep both in a trance
Of rippleless silence and whirls of delight.
But this last savour of His tenderness
Can never accrue to those who have not been
Initiated in His nectarous Love
Which momently renews itself in time
And thrills, withal, to the heart-beats of the Timeless.
So importune me no more to elucidate
The supreme mystery of His highest Love
He comes to reveal to Gopi-souls alone,
In His Eternal City from age to age.

AJIT

I understand. I promise never again
To ask such futile questions. Pray continue.

MIRA (resumes the thread with a smile of irony)

When I had sung this song, my great ascetic
Gurudev smiled...

SANATAN (amending, with a laugh)

Nay, cried in a tearful voice:

"I. capitulate to you in deep disgrace."

(To Ajit, breezily)
Which was only the beginning of the end

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For lo and behold, in the first Act she enters
As an ideal disciple, bowing in deep
Humility — only to culminate,
In the last Act, as she herself sang once:

(humming)
"Charanki kinkini bani vo sirka taj ho gayi:

"She came to Him to tinkle as His anklets
Only to end by gleaming as His crown!"

MIRA (feigning anger)
If you say such things again —

SANATAN (in mock repentance)

I fold my hands
Apologise. I'll say no more. Go on!

MIRA (waggling an admonitory finger)

Remember I shall hold you to your pledge.
I will not go on if you laugh at me.

SANATAN

How dare you say I dare laugh at the great
Mira who has made history? And say, can we
Ever laugh at one we feel browbeaten by?