Basudhara Roy
My anklets chime with many.
Watch us transfixed as we spin,
sixteen thousand milkmaids, (1)
our skirts and souls billowing out
to the world in love.
At some point in the dance,
they will all merge into me
like rays tracing back to the sun.(2)
That doesn't make me forget, though,
that I remain replaceable.
You are always one.
Inside your mouth, the universe's grandeur
can turn a woman dizzy (3)
as she reconciles in her little mind
your immense unity with this plenitude.
A woman knows plurality –
the scatter, the splinter, the split,
the gradual giving away of the body
in bits. Milk, curd, butter, cheese -
it's not the many that bother her.
It's instead, the incongruity of the whole,
the imperturbability of making way
with things intact.
Your flute awakens desire,
each time the same.
Vrindavan's spirit blossoms to its bidding.
Every woman to its response becomes one, they say.
To my heart, however,
waxing and waning like the moon,
no other note makes sense.
No other man becomes to me
the cowherd I have loved.
Blue-throated, petal-eyed, dusk-skinned,
my Madhav (4) walks irreplaceable.
The world see-saws between the one and the many.
I am no sage but I know
that both mortals and god are made,
each by the other
and the makers’ worth is known
by what they leave behind.
The god I have birthed
in the peacock-feathered one
shall speak in time
more for my faith than his grace.
Thus, the mortal conquers the divine.
1. Lord Krishna is said to have sported in leela or divine play with sixteen thousand gopis or milkmaids in the holy ground of Vrindavan.
2. Of the sixteen thousand gopis, Radha or Radharani is supposed to have been the most prominent and has the place of being Krishna’s consort.
3. When the infant Krishna, accused by his mother of eating mud, opened his mouth to her, she saw inside it a manifestation of the cosmos.
4. One of the many names of Krishna.
Basudhara Roy is Assistant Professor of English at Karim City College, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Moon in My Teacup (Kolkata: Writer’s Workshop, 2019) and Stitching a Home (New Delhi: Red River, 2021). She can be reached at basudhara.roy@gmail.com.
