Days of Blue
Krishna, my mother and bad verse
A week before any major festival, my mother starts to tick things off on an infinite to-do list. Nothing marks the arrival of a festival than the pungent odour of Pitambari. The old murtis are brought out to be polished. Trips are made to the bank to search for a very specific gold necklace or earring. After endless scrolling on Pinterest, she decides upon a kolam and practices it in chalk before she commits it to rice flour. Flowers are brought by the bag; arguments break out over the correct number of coconuts and betel leaves to be purchased. This is a habit that is repeated over and over from Varamahalakshmi to Deepavali by the women of the house.
As I was writing this, however, I could hear my mother hum. There is music, there are flowers. Today is Gokulashtami and I can actually see my mother enjoying a festival. The work is all there; in fact, she goes overboard today. There are five different kinds of savoury snacks and three sweets. Nobody has asked her to cook so much. The house is dotted with little steps imitating the trodding of an infant. Our living room transforms into his playground. As my mother fusses over whether the tulsi malai is dense enough for the image of the cowherd boy, I think of how easy it is to love a god.
Religion, festivals and gods have always been complicated for me. Am I prostrating enough to the gods? Why am I not as happy as I ought to be on Ganesh Chathurthi? Are my Sanskrit prayers sincere enough? Is it wrong and insensitive today for me to publicly say that I pray to Sitapati? Are my eyes shut tightly enough for the gods to open their eyes and look my way? I don’t mind prescriptions and rules. They bring order to this otherwise tremendous and inarticulate belief called faith that I have. But the object of my faith is a god, a God, if you will and I am unsure how to reach there, if I even want to continue my faith. I remember visiting Vrindavan and finding it difficult to say Radhe Radhe, unlike everyone else. My mother on Gokulashtami stood out as an oddity to me — how could she possibly be so certain in her faith to the point of enjoyment. I remember scribbling this particularly terrible verse on a few Gokulashtamis ago:
Oh Krishna, what is it about you
That makes me love you and adorn you
The flowers of my heart do not droop;
They are sheltered in the rain by the song of your flute.*
The nuns in my Catholic school would have told me to keep a pure and simple heart, the Lord would then comfort me. My heart is anything but pure and simple, it is all too human. This is not Gokul; I live in a world that spits out dirt.
But it is Gokulashtami and my mother, without so uttering in words, tells me that to love a god is easy. Place a smidgen of butter on his coral lips or offer him some sweetened puffed rice. It is fine if the murukku is slightly less crunchy, he is a child after all. In my mother’s universe, the slayer of Kamsa, the charioteer for Arjuna has milk teeth. For a woman obsessed with how the stars align and whether the moon is waxing or waning, she tells me that if I cannot celebrate Gokulashtami today, we can do it tomorrow when some other sects celebrate him. The stars will continue to be aligned for him, and therefore, for her. Loving Krishna comes to her as naturally as her name — her family calls her Radha. I sometimes think she has accepted her name as an omen.
Maybe, maybe, this ease with which we all seem to fall in love with the imagery of Krishna in this country and beyond, is what commands maddening levels of devotion. The eternal voice of faith in my childhood was MS, singing in the words of that gentle old man Rajaji: kannakku theriyaamal nindraalum yenakku//kurai ondrum illai. You stand here, unseen to me, but I have no grief. But Rajaji was lying — he is everywhere. As Bharathiyar writes, even a crow’s feather is memorabilia of the dark lord; even heat from a flame evokes your touch. It is easy to pray to him and easier still to simply love him; for some of us, it comes as naturally as sea-waves reaching out to the full moon.
* Within four lines, I have packed every cliché available: flower, flute, rain, complete with an Oh! I used to think this was peak poetry. George Orwell would have had a blast.
Beautiful, beautiful piece!
as always, excellent piece