Author’s Note: The lines and phrases highlighted in bold + italics are quotations from the Verses of Meera as translated by Robert Bly and Jane Hirschfield
“What do I care for the words of the world.”
Meera sang even as she snaked through the sunlit alleyway that opened into the town arcade, the hot winds making her gauzy veil fly behind her. She strode on, unhampered by the ankle-length skirt hanging from the jutting bones of her narrow waist, unfazed by the mysterious bundle weighing her shoulders down.
“Meera, stop!” I panted; the front of my skirt bunched up in one hand as I struggled to keep up with that whirlwind of a girl who made me feel like an old maid with just two years over her fifteen. “At least tell me where we’re headed.”
Perhaps taking pity on my wearied bones, perhaps by design, Meera finally halted. The opening of the winded alley was in sight. Abandoned on both sides, it was the perfect spot for the infamous princess to whisper, “I need you to bear witness, sakhee.”
I immediately knew she was up to no good, at least nothing good in the eyes of the world that’d already deemed her a wayward eccentric.
Yet, I tried to keep judgement out of my eyes. It was all I could offer this silly sakhee, this dearest friend of mine. “Witness to what?”
A blush crept over her brown cheeks and her eyes gleamed. Making me stiffen.
“What new mayhem are you planning now? What’re we here for?”
She simply removed the pack from her shoulder and offered it to me for inspection.
It was so heavy; I had to crouch and place it on the ground to untie the three layers of cloth. Meera remained standing, well, towering over me. When the last layer of cloth gave way, I clenched my eyes shut, blinded by the incredible sight it bared. Heart racing, I only slowly opened my eyes back. To ensure I too hadn’t fallen victim to my sakhee’s tendency to nurse delusions.
A quick dive of my hand into the bundle confirmed I wasn’t hallucinating.
“What—these are all your inherited jewels, everything you own!” I hastily repacked the bundle, glancing around to confirm the alley was still desolate.
Meera snorted. “Yes. In some sorry people’s eyes, it is.”
“What do you mean to do with this,” I shoved the pack at her, scared to hold it a moment longer.
She slung it over her shoulder as if it merely contained today’s laundry. “Why, to make a purchase with it, dearest.” She spun around, her mirror-studded, red skirt swirling from the impact, her yellow veil dipping another inch. I caught her elbow.
“Purchase what?” I gritted out, the hot dry winds slapping my cheeks.
Meera, as was her new usual, was beyond the worldly concerns of weather, place, and propriety. “My bridegroom.” I gawked for so long, even she, ever-oblivious to the world, thought to clarify. “I’m here to buy my bridegroom, sakhee, and you’re here to bear witness to our marriage.”
*
I adored the ethereal face of my bridegroom without shame or restraint. The soft curls around his hollowed cheeks, the kohl lining his forever-smiling eyes. I felt a pang of jealousy towards the flute that got to touch his lips so much more frequently than me. More so, I envied the string of night-jasmines which hung around his slender neck and rested on his heart. Someday, I’d be it; I’d decided. At that point, however, I still had to navigate my mortal fetters, torn between what I could do and what I must.
“Meera, you can’t buy a clay statue with all your gold! An idol is no bridegroom.”
Vishakha, the kindest of my sakhees—skinny, erudite daughter of the fat royal priest—pulled me away from the handcart on which sat my groom, my Krishna. The dark god who lifts entire mountains as effortlessly as he uplifts souls.
I threw my Dark One a knowing glance. Then, turned to humor Vishakha, “Whyever not, sakhee?”
“It’s too high a price!”
I shook my head. “I say, too little.”
The stricken look that decolored her full cheeks wasn’t new. What was new was my enhanced forbearance of her disapproval.
She palmed her face. “Your father will be furious.”
“It’s done, sakhee,” I smiled, “Even the King’s fury can’t reverse what’s already transpired.”
“What has already happened?”
My smile widened like a pebble-struck wave.
As did Vishakha’s eyes when she deduced, “Your wedding… to Shri Krishna?”
I could only nod.
Her voice hollowed out with incredulity. “When?”
“In my dream, the other night.” I shut my eyes, reminding myself as much as informing her, “In the dream all doorways were made royal, and he held my hand. In my dream, he married me. Claimed me as his, after all this time of making me yearn.”
When I opened my eyes, shock was turning to horror which ultimately morphed into an unnecessary sadness in Vishakha’s narrow eyes.
“So, you’ve gone from being Krishna’s lover to his bride? A mortal girl for a divine being’s other half?” she challenged; clutching the pack of jewels.
I glanced at the sculptor selling my Krishna, gesturing for him to stay put before cupping Vishakha’s cheek. “I’ve always been a half of him. In all my lives.”
She wanted to protest; but words always came faster to me than to her.
“It’s just a formality for this world of decrees and declarations.” Saying that, I took the pack from her and moved to procure my bridegroom,
“People are talking, Meera,” the distress in Vishakha’s hiss made to pause. “They say—” her voice cracked, unused to spewing slander.
“Meera is insane… The family is ruined.” I filled-in without turning, adding when she nodded, “I can live with that. I can’t live without him.”
#
My friend had chosen a perilous path and all I could do was watch her stumble through it. This path of no return, where the real world lost all reality and the only meaningful entity left was The One—her Beloved.
I’d felt it the day Meera told me about her encounter with the Dark One. Of how he met her stealthily in the night, how she could glance upon his smiling face, radiant like the moon, only from the side. Yet, I didn’t accept the irrevocability of her condition until I saw her cradling her bridegroom in her arms.
The king, his courtiers, the society—no one would accept it! lamented my mind. There’s going to be no peace for her now on. For the first time in my life, my anguished heart berated a god. Why have you wounded my friend with the arrows of desire, Krishna? Don’t you have the milkmaids’ to fawn over you? Don’t you have your divine Radha?
“I am Radha.”
Meera’s cheerful declaration made me jump with the petrifying thought that her divine love had granted her access to my inner musings.
But she wasn’t talking to me.
“Are you, my lady?” asked a scantily-clad woman twice our age, her veil causally thrown over one bare shoulder. “Goddess Radha-incarnate?”
“Alas,” sighed Meera, “Radha, the eternal half of Krishna. Radha, doomed to long after him each time the two of them incarnate on this decaying terrain of mortals.”
The older woman beamed, but her smile seemingly lacked the derision that Meera’s words elicited from others. Which is why, I didn’t interfere as she twirled her gold-studded braid in one hand, saying, “Well then, I shall be content to stick to my role of a lowly milkmaid.” My ears prickled with forewarning. “Just one of the many petty playmates who flock around the divine lovers, Radha-Krishna, in their realm of dance and love.”
Meera shook her head. “No one is petty or lowly on my Krishna’s playfield.” She extended a hand, intending to place it on the woman’s uncovered shoulder.
“Meera, we must go,” I caught her hand and mumbled an awkward excuses before dragging the indiscriminating princess back into the alley that led home.
“What were you doing mingling with a street-woman in broad daylight where anyone might’ve recognized you? She’s a devadasi; she dances for the temple-goers.”
“She dances at the temple, for my Krishna,” Meera corrected pointedly, even her sharp notes carrying an ecstatic melody. “I couldn’t ignore her; she’s one of his favorites.”
I scoffed at her lovesick naivete. “So she told you?”
“So he told me,” Meera gestured at the terracotta idol, “By putting her in my path.”
I resisted the urge to tear off my veil; Meera’s own veil had been reduced to a neglected heap around her neck.
I halfheartedly argued, “She probably approached you on spotting the idol in your arms. Just another swindler, hoping to extract easy coin—”
“She promised to teach me her dance,” Meera cut in.
I froze in my tracks. She though, remained unstoppable.
“Then, I will dance for him too—”
She drawled on, describing the ecstasy of having the Dark One’s gaze on her body, the unadulterated joy of making him smile. Deep in her musings, she left me far behind.
At length, I couldn’t help blurting out, “You really have a death-wish, no, Princess?”
That made her stop, both in her slow stride and her frenzied speech.
I caught up to her and grasped her elbow, skinny from her diminished diet. “Meera, this isn’t your Krishna’s realm of dance and play. This is the mortal world, run on rigid rules. Your father, the Rana―”
I stopped as her gaze hardened. Until she peeked at her terracotta groom. When she looked up at me again, there was laughter in those eyes.
I threw up my hands. “Every time.”
She shrugged, “What can I say…”
I began to walk away. “Say nothing.”
So, she sang, “My eyes have a life of their own, friend, they laugh at rules.”
*
It was the day his dark cheeks would be smeared with yellow turmeric paste as bright as the silken lower garment held to his waist by a delicately-crafted golden girdle. Our haldi ceremony; the pre-nuptial ritual of the beautification of the bride and her groom.
I could only hope that once we were as married in the eyes of this world as we were in the spirit, my Dark One would have no more excuses to abandon me on a whim as he did until then.
“Meera, reconsider—” Vishakha cut through my meditations on my beloved, familiar concern in her almost-shut eyes.
But because her eyes were less shut than the others’, I gave her an answer. I had stopped with everyone else. “Impossible, sakhee.”
“Why don’t you understand?” She lunged from where she crouched across Krishna and trapsed my bedchamber, seeking new words to make me relinquish my delusions.
I no longer bothered convincing her, or anyone, that the only delusions was the world outside. After all, my truth, my beloved, prevailed unhindered within me.
At length, my sakhee put together some syllables. “Everyone is furious with you. They’re arranging a match. The Rana—” On cue, the drums on the entrance to my keep rang loud, thrice.
Announcing the arrival of the much-fretted-upon king. The Rana, my birthfather.
Vishakha tried to grab my beloved, but I whisked him away first.
“Put it away. Just for now.”
I grinned, “Not a chance in the world,” returning my attentions to my groom.
Shortly after, the antechamber doors were thrown open and the thick curtains were noisily parted for the hallowed monarch of an inconsequential land. The noises scared away the birds on the balcony, though the peacocks hung back, as accustomed to the Rana’s temper tantrums as me. As smitten by the melodies of Krishna’s flute as me.
“How could you have done such a thing, you senile brat!” Rana thundered, looming over where I sat surrounded by bowls of rosewater, honey, and milk.
Vishakha’s anklet bells rattled as she rushed forward, “My King, she’s just—”
“Don’t you dare intervene, Priest’s Daughter! Out!” spat the ever-raging king.
Vishakha retreated in fear. Though she couldn’t hold her ground, she didn’t leave me alone either.
Before the Rana could unleash more of his ugly rage on her, I stood and faced him. “I’ve done nothing. All I was doing was being when the Dancing Energy came by my house.”
He balked, mustached face blanching. “You gave up all your inheritance for this piece of clay?” He pointed a hairy, bejeweled finger at my beloved.
Krishna would smile at this raging buffoon, so I did, too.
“Actually I put him on a scale before I bought him. He was worth all my gold. And my body.”
Rana’s hand moved to the sword on his gold-embroidered cummerbund.
“No, she doesn’t mean that!” Vishakha was instantly beside me, shielding me with skinny hands. “I was with her, Ranaji. Nothing untoward happened. What’re you saying, Meera-bai!”
“My truth,” I pried her hands from around me. “I did give my body to my Dark One. My social body, my town body, my family body.” I looked from my friend to my foe. “It was all so worth it.”
He trembled with the indignation of the ignorant. “The filth you spew! Are you inebriated?”
I laughed. “Drunk for life, unsoberable.”
The Rana pushed Vishakha out of the way. She barely caught herself by the bedpost. But before I could lend any aid, the Rana seized me, shaking my entire frame through my shoulders. “You thought nothing of what the world would say of me? Don’t you feel any shame? Fear the judgement of wise, holy men, uncouth child!”
I held fast onto my beloved all through his manhandling.
Even when he was through, I took my time placing my Krishna behind me, out of the range of his assaults. “I don’t like your strange, strange world, Rana. There are no holy men in it, and the people are all trash—” A backhand to my cheek stopped me from finishing the next verse of my latest composition.
“You’ll marry the Prince of Mewar on the upcoming solstice,” the King-of-trash-people roared as my gaze landed, and blissfully remained, on my half-adorned groom.
Forbearance is key. My Krishna told me. Everything in its turn, he whispered with his quintessential sweet mischief, while the Rana barked orders for me to be kept within the walls of my keep, my cage. I’d be let out only to visit the Goddess’ hill temple for pre-wedding ceremonies.
Yes, forbear I shall, I concluded, returning to my nuptial preparations as the doors were bolted. Patiently, guided by my love, my teacher, until it’s time to embark on the road to freedom.
#
To say that the situation had turned lethal would be like calling a drought too dry or a flood very wet. But I lacked the words to articulate the escalating adversity. Meera was the poetess among us; the eloquence of her verses improving in proportion to her alienation from our… from the Rana’s world. Seeing my sakhee essentially jailed, her only crime being loving a deity whom many had loved before, I realized how right she’d been in her denunciation of this trash-world.
Fools sit on thrones, while wise men beg for a morsel of bread; she’d bemoaned—accurately.
The world was certainly twisted, illogically so. While it exalted men who renounced familial and emotional obligations, when a young, unclaimed girl like my Meera chose to walk that path, it went absolutely livid. Her detachment made them feral.
And slanderous. “That Meera is a pesky brat, always has been.”
The voice came from one of the junior queens’ verandas as I crossed their palace on way to Meera’s keep. I parted orange sheers to spot a horde of heavily-bedecked women lounging in the shade of an awning, giggling as they fanned their slender-waisted mistress—the youngest of Ranaji’s wives, Queen Jaivanti, barely two years my senior.
“I bet this married-to-the-divine is simply an act,” she told her attendants, reclining on plush cushions and loosening the pleats over her gold-embroidered blouse. “A callously whipped-up excuse to cover baser indulgences—”
I flung aside the curtains and strode in noisily, letting my indignation show.
Some of the maids straightened in attention while others made way to let their mistress get a look at her unexpected visitor. “Vishakha bai? Welcome.” Jaivanti took her time sitting up, adjusting her trunkload of jewels. “My maids were just—”
“You call her daughter,” I hissed, my blood boiling.
By then the queen had regained her queenly airs. She reclined back on her mountain of cushions and gestured for me to join. When I didn’t, she dallied, languidly sipping cannabis-infused-milk from a gilded goblet. Eventually, she met my gaze. “I’m but a junior rani, bai. I follow the court’s rhetoric. I can’t counter the wagging tongues that insist there can be no smoke without fire. However, if it makes you feel better, I personally don’t believe the girl to be of lose character.”
“Good,” I spat, spinning on my heels.
“I simply think she has gone soft in the head!”
I wondered if she’d waited for me to reach the threshold before uttering that.
Catching myself on the jagged twin stairs, I threw her my iciest glare.
It wasn’t my strong suit, and the young queen nonchalantly shrugged it off. “It’s fact. Ranaji himself told me so.” She turned to her maids and mock-whispered, “when he came to me last night. So much sorrow she’s given him. I only hope the child I provide him would—”
I ran from there, at a loss for words.
After all, their slander was balanced on a kernel of truth. The so-called fact—that even Meera won’t deny. The truth of her gradual disengagement from reality.
Just the previous day, I’d entered her rooms, smelling of camphor and incense, to find the bed pushed to the farthest corner. In its original place, lay only a rug. Atop which lay my emaciated sakhee, clad in the ascetic’s ochre robe she’d made me smuggle-in the day before. The only other article on her person was a necklace of meditation beads.
Her mother, the chief queen, hovered nearby, tearful, furious. “You’re insane, na?”
I halted behind the antechamber curtains, trembling at the unusual sight.
“You could say that.” Meera replied serenely, her eyes closed. “As for me, I’m just being a good student. My teacher, my Krishna told me that the scholar’s garb and the saint’s beads are all the feminine wiles I need. So, I take the path that ecstatic human beings have taken for centuries.”
Raniji looked like she wanted to tear Meera’s hair from her scalp or, barring that, her own. “Please, Meera… Ranaji will punish you!”
“Why? How?” Meera wondered, childlike. “I don’t steal anything, I don’t hit anyone; what’ll you charge me with?”
“Have some decorum, unruly child. You’re to be married—”
Meera laughed, long and loud, like one possessed. In a way, she was. If there was any doubt left in Raniji’s mind, she spelt it out. “I’m already married, Ma. I can’t remarry, especially after I’ve known him.” Her mother gasped, but Meera broke into song. “I’ve felt the swaying of the elephant’s shoulders. And now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious.”
Meera’s mother didn’t hit her, or even rebuke her, but the way she spun on her heel and rushed out past me, holding in her sobs, was far more rattling. To me. Meera merely greeted me and invited me to listen to the tale of her latest nocturnal encounter with her Krishna.
Thus, I couldn’t argue with the junior queen’s vile claims. By then, my sakhee had cried in my lap innumerable times, pining for her beloved, telling me how she awaited his arrival all night, in vain, complaining about his fickle nature and cursing his unbridled comings and goings. How then could I deny her insanity?
It was then an unexpected relief when I walked into Meera’s now-guarded keep to find the Rani waiting in the lounge outside her chamber. Smiling. “She finally slept, Vishakha,” she declared unprecedented, clasping my hands. “It’s been two hours!”
“Really?” I squeezed her hands, sighing. “O hail Nidra-devi! It’s been forever, I thought she—” I shirked off the morbid idea. “May I look in on her, Raniji? I’ll be quiet—”
“Of course, daughter,” Raniji stroked my head. “You alone have fretted about her as much as myself… and Ranaji.” She looked down, aware as much as myself, that the Rana didn’t fret for Meera, only about what’d become of his honor because of Meera.
Tongue-tied, I touched her feet, and headed for Meera’s suite, relieved by the news of her reprieve. The pleasure of seeing it for myself, however, escaped me again.
Because when I found her, she wasn’t asleep on her ascetic’s mattress.
She was perched on a high branch of a mango tree, wide awake and far away.
*
“The doctors could do nothing for me. Some absence within me is eating me away.”
Silence swallowed my song as Vishakha tried to swallow my mad ramblings. Tried to understand, as she liked to say. I didn’t push her. Her silence gave me freedom to listen on in peace. I hoped she’d take my lament to my mother, to our friends. For these songs were all I had for them now. It was one of those days where I dreaded that Krishna had abandoned me, and so, desperately needed a listening ear. It needn’t even be a kind ear or a comprehensive one, I told myself as the sounds of advancing anklet bells overpowered the notes of the flute ebbing farther and farther away from me.
“Meera,” her voice was tender if also wary. “What’re you doing on that tree?”
“Listening to him,” I murmured. “Walking away, like the inconsiderate brute he is.”
For a while, my sakhee went as silent as my love. She, though, didn’t leave me.
“Oh, sakhee, Raniji said you’d fallen asleep,” she mourned.
Reminding me, “That’s right. Yes. I had fallen asleep. And then…” I clenched my jaw as the ballad came back to me. “That blasted cuckoo bird!”
“Well, what did the bird do?” she sounded simply curious, long past the threshold of shock.
“It woke me up with its damn love-song. Reminded me of my loneliness. Salt on my wounds.”
“Oh, my poor sakhee,” she reached up for my hand, “please coms down and get some sleep.”
“Oh no. I shan’t sleep,” I blurted. Even when I gave in to her urgings and climbed down from the tree, I resolved: I shan’t sleep again; he sneaks away every time I do.
In my heart, I berated my power-maddened lover, demanding to know where he went after he left my body. You put the boat in the surf and then walked inland, leaving the boat in the ocean of parting. As always, he wouldn’t respond.
As the silence prolonged and deepened, my sakhee left me as well.
#
I knew I needed to do something for Meera if I wanted to see her alive. It was why I left early that day and didn’t visit her the next one. I had to make arrangements for what I meant to do.
I went to a holy woman, camped in a hermitage just outside the town, with a tale and a plea.
What I asked of her could’ve left us both, and then some others, assuredly headless. Yet she agreed. Her serene confidence gave me hope.
Which is why the discovery, the next day, hit me doubly hard.
Entering the palace, devoid of its usual bustle, I was accosted by a scowling Jaivanti in the queen’s courtyard. “Rani—” I bowed stiffly, eager to find Meera and tell her about my plans.
“Heard about your sakhee’s latest feat?” she jibed.
Nausea rose in my gut. Had Meera done something stupid? Was I too late?
“I don‘t know what you speak of…”
“Why, of your friend’s brush with Lord Death.”
I blanched. I was too late. My vision blurred.
But then the queen added, “And her triumph over him.”
My teeth rattled as I blurted, “What did you do to her!”
A playful slap to my cheek made me desist. “Watch what you insinuate, bai. No one did anything to her.” Whether from pity or just because she couldn’t hold it in any longer, the junior rani animatedly elaborated. “Ranaji sent Meera her bridal trousseau. Gods know how there came to be a giant asp in one of the coffers—”
I felt hard-pressed to breath. So nauseated, even the self-absorbed rani noticed.
“Oh, don’t make yourself sick!” she fanned her hand dismissively so that her bangles jingled. “Your mad friend had enough pre-existing venom in her system to survive one little asp. She lives.”
My head hammered from the absurdity of it all.
“They say, she wound it around her neck and closed her eyes, smiling all along as it caressed her neck and breasts.” A derisive sneer gave Jaivanti’s bony features a skewed appearance. “She probably imagined it was her divine husband, come at last to claim his bride, that crackhead.”
“After that she danced on the terrace!” cried one of her maids before I could soak in the last revelation. “I was there. I saw how shameless—”
Those words brought me to my sense. Once again, I fled from them. Not because I didn’t have anything to say to them, but because they didn’t matter. Meera did, she needed me.
The junior rani’s words clarified two things instantaneously. First, my friend had miraculously survived a snakebite, and second, what she’d survived was an assassination attempt.
Two assassinations attempt, I learnt when Meera recounted the tale of her adventures.
“Rana sent a gold coffer of complicated ivory; but inside a green and black asp was waiting.” she informed me amusedly. “It’s a necklace that belonged to a great Queen; they told me. As if Meera’s insanity implies, she has no discretion.”
I shuddered to think what she might’ve gone through. But then could I really know what she truly went through any longer? “Then, what did you do?”
Meera shrugged, “Put it around my neck.”
“How are you alive?”
She gave me a crooked smile, and I recognized the ever-mischievous girl I’d grown up with. “Once the snake slithered off my body and they packed it back in its coffer, I put on my dancing anklet and went to the terrace. There, I danced. Spun around, singing his songs, until I couldn’t feel my body anymore. I sang to my Krishna, in tandem with my anklet bells.”
“And that saved you?” I gaped, suspended between awe and disbelief.
“No, sakhee,” she patted my hand, “The ignorant King’s boundless insecurity did. Seeing me dancing, he thought the asp had butchered its job. They dragged me to my room, where the royal medic was waiting for me…” she smirked. “With a vial of poison.”
In five words, Meera transformed my horror into humor. “They neutralized their own poison!” I cried, the camphor’s aroma seemingly opening up my mind as much as my nostrils.
Meera smiled. “Truth be told, I was ready for death the moment I saw the asp. That’s why I went out to dance, I thought it’d make for a glorious end to this mortal sentence before I reunite with my Krishna. But then, seeing that gleaming vial of poison, I understood,” her voice grew distant, dream-like. “My beloved wants me to live on this plane some more. And that he hasn’t abandoned me, even if you had,” she poked a finger into my arm.
“How dare you!” I hit her hand, “I didn’t abandon you. I was away devising a way to help you.”
Meera grew attentive in a way she hadn’t been since her first encounter with her Dark One. It felt ironic, given what I was going to tell her.
“Yes, my gentle rebel,” I grasped her hands. “I’m going to help you escape this world-of-trash-people. I’ve arranged an escort of real holy people for you. Tomorrow, when they make you go to the temple on the hill, you won’t return to this court of fools.”
*
Don’t tell me no, Mother. I’m on my way to visit holy people…
It was difficult to pen those last words to my first teacher, my Ma. Not because I felt sorrow at leaving her, but because I knew of the sorrows, I was leaving her to endure. But those were beyond my control. Ma wouldn’t endorse the path I’d chosen. For, it entailed getting lost in the woods behind the hill temple and following the sound of the flute until I met my new family. The escort of holy men, women, and others that Vishakha had arranged for me.
They told me their custom was to begin walking and never looking back. I told them my custom was to never take customs too seriously and looked up, through my veil, when our caravan crossed from under Vishakha’s house. Sure enough, she was on her balcony, smiling at me.
No one else would recognize Meera in that garb—ash smeared on her forehead, her slim frame devoid of all gold and glitter, clad in one long ascetic’s robe. But my sakhee spotted her sakhee and poured fresh water over a banana plant—praying for my safe travels, for my new family to suit me better than my last one. Mostly, they did.
Among them I was free—to live, to love. Travelling with them was like returning home from an unending journey. With my wandering heart come home, Krishna couldn’t be far away. So I sang: All the awake ones travel with Meera, singing the name. She says with them, get up, stop sleeping, the days of a life are short.