Sūrdās

Begin with the country, because the country is half the story.

There is a stretch of land on both banks of the Yamuna, north and south of the town of Mathura, that is called Braj. It is not large. A man on foot can walk round the whole of it in about a month, and pilgrims do, and the round is measured in kos rather than in miles because it has been walked for a very long time. The land is flat and sandy and the soil is pale. In the hot months the dust comes up off it in a fine powder that gets into cloth and food and eyes. In the rains it turns green in about four days.

Nothing grows tall there except the trees people planted and the ones that survive the goats. There is kadamb, which flowers in the rains in round orange heads and which every poet in that country has written about. There is ber, which is thorny and gives a small sour fruit that children eat. There is karīl, which is a leafless thorn bush and holds nothing but its own green sticks, and in spring people play among the karīl thickets and throw colour at each other. There are pīpal trees at the crossroads. There are peacocks, in numbers that surprise people who come from elsewhere, and in the rains they call all day.

The year there has three parts and everybody lives by them. The cold months are short and clear and the mornings have mist on the river. Then the hot months, which are long, and in which the wind gets up in the afternoon and carries the sand, and the wells go down, and nothing is done between noon and four. Then the rains break, usually in the last days of the hot weather when people have stopped believing in them, and the whole country changes colour in under a week and stays changed until the autumn. The festivals sit in that year where they have always sat, and there is hardly a month without one. Colour is thrown in the spring. Swings are hung in the trees in the rains and the women sing on them. In the autumn the hill itself is fed, with cooked rice piled up in front of it in a heap the size of the hill.

The river runs through the middle of it. It is a wide brown river with sand banks that shift each year, and it is shallow enough in the dry months that cattle cross it, and in the rains it takes fields. Away from the river on that side, a few hours west of Mathura, there is a low ridge of sandstone four or five miles long, and it is not high. That is Govardhan. It is called a hill by everyone and it does not look like one. People walk round it barefoot.

Along the river and among the villages there are a dozen patches of woodland that are counted and named, and there are ponds that are counted and named, and there are ghāṭs, the stone landings where steps go down into the water, and those are counted and named too. Gokul. Mahāvan. Nandgāon on its hill, and Barsānā on the hill facing it. Vṛndāvan in the bend of the river.

What happened in that country was this.

God was born there as a human child, in a prison at Mathura, and was carried across the river that same night to a herdsman's village, and grew up there among cows. He was dark. He was fed by a woman called Yaśodā who was not his mother and who never found out, and he was brought up by a herdsman called Nanda who was the headman of the village. He was a difficult child. He stole butter out of other people's houses and ate dirt and lied about both. He killed things that came to kill him, which was often, and did it before he could walk. He lifted the whole of Govardhan hill on one hand and held it up for seven days to keep the rain off the village and the cattle. He grew up and played a flute, and when he played it the women of the villages left what they were doing and came out to him in the dark, and there was a dance on the sand by the river in which every one of them believed she was dancing with him alone. Then he went away to Mathura on a matter of business and did not come back, and the women of Braj stayed where they were and grew old.

That is the līlā: the play, the whole set of things God did when he was in that country as a boy. In Braj it is not a story about the past. The people who live there will tell you which field, which tree, which bend of the river. The hill is the hill he lifted. The ghāṭ is the ghāṭ where the clothes were taken. Go to Barsānā in spring and the women will drive the men of Nandgāon out of the village with sticks, laughing, because of something that was said once.

Now put a road through it.

By the sixteenth century the road from Agra to Delhi ran up the west bank of the river and straight through Mathura, and it was one of the busiest roads in the world. Agra had become a capital. Grain went north on that road and cloth came south on it. Armies used it. So did bankers' runners, and horse dealers out of Kabul, and Jain merchants, and men carrying indigo, and every kind of official. The carts were solid wood and the wheels shrieked, and the bullocks went at two miles an hour, and a train of them took the whole width of the track and would not give way to anyone.

And along that road, because every road in Hindustan carried them, went the pilgrims. Braj was already a place people came to. They came for the parikrama, the walk round, and they came for the bathing days, and they came because a relative had died and the ashes had to go in the river. They walked. They carried their own grain. They slept under trees and at the ghāṭs and in the courtyards of temples, and at every stopping place there were people waiting to feed them, rob them, guide them, bless them and sing to them.

The singing was a trade. This has to be said plainly, because it is the trade Sūrdās was put to and it explains a good deal about him.

A man with a voice could live on a pilgrim road. He sat at a ghāṭ or a gateway or a crossing where people were obliged to slow down, and he sang, and people who were tired and far from home and frightened about the journey put grain and copper in front of him. Some of these men were very good. A few were the best singers in the country. The trade had its own standards and its own competition and its own long apprenticeships, and it was not begging, although a bad singer on a bad day could not always tell the difference.

It was also, in that country and in those centuries, one of the few things a blind man could do.

There is no need to soften this. A household with a blind child in it had a problem it could not solve. The child could not be put to the fields, could not be sent with the cattle, could not be taught the family trade if the family trade required eyes, and could not be married easily. Such a child was fed as long as there was food and resented as soon as there was not. What such a child could be given was a voice, if he happened to have one, and the roads were full of men who had been given exactly that and nothing else. They went in twos and threes, with a boy to lead them, and they knew the road stone by stone and turning by turning, and they arrived at the festivals on the right day, and they sang for the crowd and moved on with the crowd.

It was a hard trade and it was a real one. A man in it had to know a hundred compositions and the rāga of each, and which rāga belongs to which hour, because you do not sing a morning rāga at dusk and nobody who knows anything will pay you if you do. He had to know what a Mathura crowd wanted and what a crowd of Bengalis on their way to Purī wanted, and they are not the same. He had to be able to take a new song off another man at one hearing. He had to hold a crowd that had not come to hear him and had somewhere else to be. And he had to do all of it without ever being able to see whether anyone was still there.

The good ones were not poor. They were not rich either, but they ate, and they had somewhere to sleep, and after enough years on one stretch of road they were known on it, and being known is most of the trade.

Nobody wrote their names down.

Somewhere on that road, in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, in a village whose identity people afterwards argued about, a boy was born into a brāhmaṇ family that had nothing, and he was blind. He was blind from the first hour and he never had a memory of seeing anything at all.

He was not wanted. He was fed for a while and then he was not, and when he was still a small child he went out of that house and did not come back to it, and he made his living, and he made it well, because the voice he had been given was one of the great voices of that or any century.

He spent the first half of his life singing about himself.

Then somebody stopped him, and he spent the second half singing about Braj. He sang the prison at Mathura and the crossing of the river in the rain. He sang the butter and the lie about the butter. He sang the hill going up on the one hand. He sang the flute and the dark and the sand, and the cart going out of the village towards Mathura and not coming back, and the women of Braj growing old, and what they said, and what they said was the finest thing said in that language by anybody.

He did all of it without ever having seen a face, or a colour, or a cow, or the country he was describing.

In the hot months the wind gets up at Sīhī in the early afternoon and comes across the fields with the topsoil in it, and everything in the village that can be shut is shut, and the people lie down inside with wet cloth over their faces and wait for four o'clock. Then they come out again. The light is still hard and the ground still burns through the sole of the foot, but the wind has dropped and the cattle have to be seen to.

Sīhī was a village near Delhi and it was small. A village of that size is a short list. There is a cluster of mud houses with flat roofs, put up against one another so that the walls are shared and a quarrel about a wall is a quarrel about somebody's house. There is a lane between them, which is where everything happens. There is a well, and the well is the other place where everything happens. There is a threshing floor beaten hard and swept, and a pen for the cattle, and a thorn fence round the whole of it that is not much of a fence and is mended when a jackal gets in. There is a pond that fills in the rains and is cracked mud by the end of the spring. There are fields of millet and gram, and a few of wheat where the water can be got to them. Under a tree at the edge of the village there is a stone with red on it that gets oil at the right times of year and is nobody's business in particular.

That is what it has. What it does not have is longer. It has no market and no shop. It has no grain dealer, so grain is sold at somebody else's village and bought back at somebody else's price. It has no physician. It has no place of instruction. It has nothing written down in it at all except what the revenue people keep, and they keep that elsewhere. It has no carpenter and no potter of its own but shares them with the villages round about and waits its turn. It has nobody in it whose name is known a day's walk away. News arrives on foot, at the speed of a man walking, and leaves the same way.

Delhi was close enough that the village lived in its weather. Orders came out of it. Soldiers came out of it and went back into it, and the roads they used were the roads everybody used. The great road ran through that country and carried more traffic than any road in the world, and Sīhī was not on it and was near it, which is the ordinary relation of a village to a road. You heard about it. You went out to it when you had reason. The rest of the time it lay over there, a line of dust in the daytime and a sound at night, and carried other people's business past you.

The family in that village that this is about were Sārasvat brāhmaṇs, and they had nothing.

Those two facts go together more often than people outside the country suppose. Caste gives a man rank. It does not give him an income. A brāhmaṇ with land is one kind of man and a brāhmaṇ without it is another kind altogether, and the second kind is common. What the caste gives him is a right to be fed at other people's rites, and precedence when he is fed, and a form of address, and the certainty that no one in the village will put him to certain kinds of work. What it does not give him is anything between the rites. And the work he is protected from is the work that is available, which is other men's fields, so the protection is also a fence.

Rāmdās sang.

That was the living. It is a real trade and it has a calendar. There are months when people marry and months when nobody does, and in the marrying months a man with a voice and the right standing walks from village to village and is busy. There is a birth to be sung at, and a naming, and the tying of a thread on a boy, and a death, and the days after a death when the family sits and wants something said over them at the right hours. There are the nights in the year when a village wants singing and will find grain for it, when the swings go up in the trees or the colour is thrown or the lamps are lit along the walls. He went out to those and he came back with what he had been given, which was grain in a cloth, and sometimes cloth itself, and sometimes a handful of copper.

What he owned was a stock of compositions and the rāgas they went in and the knowledge of which hour each rāga belongs to, and that is property. A man of that trade has it out of somebody else's mouth, from his father or from whoever took him up, and he keeps it, and it is the thing he has to leave. He could not be robbed of it and he could not lend it out. In the months when nobody married he sat in the village with the whole of it in his head and nothing to do with any of it.

The house was one room and a yard. There was a roof that had to be gone over before the rains every year and a place in the wall where the grain was kept, and everyone who lived in that house knew how far down the grain stood without going to look. That is the ordinary condition of such a house. The quantity is known and the number of people is known and the two are held against each other all year.

A son was born in that house, and the child was blind.

He grew. He was fed and carried about and put down in the yard and got in the way of things and was moved. Early on, a household begins to work out what a child is going to be for, and this one presented a difficulty that the house could not solve and did not discuss.

He could not be sent out with the goats, because goats go through a gap and up a bank and into standing crop, and the whole of the work is seeing where they have got to and getting between them and the boundary. He could not be stood in a field to keep the birds off, because keeping birds off a field is seeing them come down. He could not be sent to the next village with a message. He could not be put behind a plough or a pair of bullocks. He could be sent along the lane to the well with a small pot, on a path he knew by the feel of it, and he was, and that is not work and everyone knew it was not work. It was a way of having him out of the room for the length of time it takes to fetch water.

Nor could he be taught the family trade, which was the part that mattered. A poor brāhmaṇ lives by conducting other people's rites, and a rite is a physical business. It is fire and vessels and water and thread and grain and leaves, set out in an order in a house that is not yours, with people watching, and an almanac to be consulted about the hour. The man who does it is looked at for the whole of the time he is doing it. Nobody pays a man to perform a rite in his courtyard if the man has to be told where the fire is.

And he would be hard to marry. A family gives a daughter to a house on a calculation about what the son of that house will bring in over the rest of his life. The calculation for this one was not difficult to do, and it would have had to be answered with something, and the house had nothing to answer it with.

There are months in a year like that one and months unlike it. When the grain stands high in the wall the question does not come up. When it goes down, it is watched, and when it is watched the order becomes visible, and the order is that food goes first to the people who bring something in and last to the people who do not. Nobody sets this out. It does not get said. It works itself through a house the way water works through sand, and the people in the house adjust to it without noticing that they have. He was fed while there was food and he was resented when there was not. That is what a fixed quantity of grain does to the people sitting round it, and it was not cruelty, and there was nobody in that room who could have put a name to it.

He knew. A one-room house has no distance in it, and what is not said in one is said in the yard, and the yard is four paces away.

Then at some point it became apparent that the child could sing.

It would have come out the way it always comes out. The father sang a thing at night, in the yard or on the roof, working at it the way a man works at his own stock, and the next morning it came back at him out of the child. Not approximately. Whole, with the turns in the right places and the words in the right order and the rests where the rests were, and held after one hearing, and held again a month later. Every man in that trade knows how rare that is because every man in that trade has spent years acquiring by labour what this was arriving without any.

And then, not long after that, better. The father stood in his own yard and heard his own material come back at him done better than he had ever been able to do it. That is a particular thing to have happen to a man, and it happened in a house where nothing else had ever gone right.

It did not change how anyone felt about him. The house had formed its opinion before he was any use and the opinion stayed where it was. He was worth more than he had been and he was not thought better of, and the two facts sat in the same room together and neither of them troubled the other. He ate better. That was the whole of the difference, and it was a real difference, and he would have taken it.

Nobody sat him down and taught it to him the way a trade is usually taught, piece by piece, for a fee earned back later. He had it the way he had everything else in that house: by being in the room when it happened. The rāgas that went with the compositions came the same way, and the hour of the day or night each one belongs to, which is the first thing a singer learns and the one he can never afterwards unlearn, because a morning rāga sung at dusk is wrong in the body before it is wrong in the head. Nobody explained when to take a piece up and when to leave it alone, and nobody explained how a singer's own name gets worked into the last line of a thing so that it stays his afterwards. He could not be given a book and there was no book in that house to give him. He arrived at all of it side on, out of one mouth into one ear, standing in a yard, listening to a trade being practised by a man who had not set out to teach him and did not think he was worth the trouble of it.

What a blind child learns in a village he learns because there is nothing else in front of him for as many hours as there are in the day.

He learned the voices first, all of them, every person in Sīhī and every person who came into it. Not the voices only. How far off a voice is and which way it is facing. Whether the man is standing or sitting, whether he has walked in from somewhere or has been in the shade all morning, whether he is pleased with himself, whether he is about to ask for something. Then the feet. He knew who was crossing the yard before they were across it. He knew the neighbour who came down on one leg harder than the other, and the old woman who dragged, and the particular sound of his father coming back from another village, and from some way off, out of the length and speed of the step, whether it had gone well.

He learned the place itself. A village is full of sound that sits still and can be used: the pulley at the well, the grinding stone, the cattle in the pen, the lane, and the change in the lane where the wall ends and the sound stops coming back at you, and the flat dead patch where the threshing floor opens out, and the tree, because a tree with leaves on it sounds different from the air beside it. He could walk the whole of Sīhī and did. He knew the hours from the birds and the cattle going out and coming in and the change in the air at dusk, and he knew rain was coming when the wind went round.

And he held things, because nothing could be put down and looked at again. This is the part that people get wrong about afterwards. He did not acquire a memory. He used the one everybody is born with and never got the habit of setting things aside on paper, and so nothing was ever set aside. A composition heard once at a wedding in another village was still there in the winter. A conversation at the well was still there in the spring, with the pauses in it.

None of this was given to him. Nothing was handed over in exchange for anything. He had a working set of faculties, a great deal of time, and no alternative, and that is what a person becomes under those conditions.

It included the things he was not meant to have. People in a village get the range of a blind child wrong all his life and never learn better. They drop their voices at the other end of a lane. They speak about him in the yard when he is inside the room and they stand two paces from him and say it over his head. So he grew up knowing precisely what he was in that house, and what the neighbours thought he was, and what was said about what would become of him, and he had all of it word for word.

In the evening he used to go out past the last of the houses, where the ground rises a little and the thorn scrub starts, and sit down and listen to the road.

It was a long way off and it never stopped. The carts came up out of the south all day with their wheels shrieking, and the sound of one arrived a good while before the sound of the next, and there was a bell on the lead bullock of some of them and not of others. Men shouted at the beasts in the same three words all their lives. There were horses in among it, going at a different speed from everything else, and there were feet, a great many feet, and voices in languages that were not the language of Sīhī. It went on after dark and it was still going at first light. It came from somewhere. It went somewhere. It had nothing to do with the village and did not stop at it.

He sat out there until somebody came to the edge of the houses and called him in.

He went out before light, which is when anybody in that country goes who is going a long way, and the ground was still cold and the dust had not got up yet.

Everything he owned was on him and it weighed nothing. A length of cloth. A stick. Whatever the cloth was tied round, which would have been a bowl and a day's grain and not much else, because a house with nothing in it has nothing to send with anyone.

A house of that kind and a child of that kind come apart. There is no mystery in it and nothing in it that has to be accounted for. A household counts what it has and what it must feed, and this one had a boy in it who could not be used at home for anything and could be used somewhere else for one thing, and there was a road at the end of the fields going in both directions. They came apart. That is what happened to them, and it happens to houses of that size in that country all the time, and it is one of the ordinary sounds of the place, like the well rope.

The rest is the road.

Start with water. You cannot see a well. Wells in that country stand in the open with no wall round half of them, and the ground goes flat up to the lip and then stops, and a man can walk to the edge of one and be standing on it without knowing. So you do not find water. You are told where water is, and to be told you have to ask, and asking a stranger for the well tells him at once that you are alone and cannot see, and you have to do it in every village you come to. In the hot months that is not part of the day's business. It is the whole of it. And where there is a tank instead of a well the steps go down and then they stop, because the water has dropped away from them since the rains, and below the last step is mud that will hold a foot.

Then food. You cannot forage. Every other poor man on that road can take fruit off a tree at the edge of a field, or dig, or set a snare, or judge a crop and help himself to a little of it after dark. You cannot find the tree. You cannot judge the field. You cannot steal, because stealing is done with the eyes and the whole art of it is watching who is watching. So everything you eat has been put into your hands by somebody who decided to put it there, and you eat when it comes and not when you are hungry, and you eat what it is.

Then sleeping, and who finds you asleep. You sleep at the edge of a village under a tree, or on the step of a shrine, or at a ghāṭ among the other people who sleep at ghāṭs, or in the corner of a rest house if there is one and you are let in. The rule you learn in the first season is that you sleep where there are other people or with a wall at your back, and never alone in open country, because asleep you are a body with a bundle beside it and nothing else. Everything you own is on you. What goes in the night is gone, and you do not know whose hand it was and will never find out, and you cannot describe a man to anybody. So you learn to sleep the way an animal sleeps, in the top part of sleep, and to come awake at a change in the sound and lie still until you know what it is.

Dogs. Every village in that country keeps dogs it does not feed and they come out at a stranger before he is inside the fence. A man with eyes turns and faces the dog and bends for a stone, and half the time he does not need the stone, because the dog has seen that motion before and knows what it means. You cannot do any part of that. You get a direction out of the noise and then the direction changes, and you cannot tell whether it is one dog or four, and you cannot tell whether the one that has gone quiet has gone away or has come round behind. The stick in your hand is for dogs first and for the ground second. Everybody in the trade carries one and everybody in the trade has been bitten.

The rains. For two or three months the road is not a road. The surface you know by the feel of it under the foot is not there, the dry cart ruts you use to walk a straight line are under water, and a nālā you crossed in the spring with the stones showing is now something that takes a man off his feet. Nothing dries. You are wet for weeks together and the cloth on you rots on you, and the fever comes through the villages in the same weeks. And the traffic stops, because nobody travels in the rains who can help it, so the months in which it is hardest to stay alive are the months in which there is least being given away. The men in that trade know this about their year the way a farmer knows it about his.

You cannot run. That is not a small item and it is worth going slowly over. A cart comes up a track between two fields with the driver asleep on the shaft and the track is the width of the cart. A horse is coming through a gateway and the man on it has no reason to expect anybody in it. A crowd at a festival begins to move all at once in one direction. Two men start a fight in a market and everybody standing near them steps back. Everybody else steps back. You do not know where back is. Standing perfectly still is the whole of the technique and it has to be learned against the body, which wants to move and is usually wrong about which way.

And you cannot see who is coming. You get a great deal from the feet, more than sighted men would believe: how many, how heavy, how old, in a hurry or not, together or apart, and whether they have stopped talking. What you do not get is the face. Boys follow a blind man through a village to see what he will do, and call out from behind him, and move, and call out from somewhere else. That is on that road too, and it is not the worst thing on it, and he went through it and came out the other side of it.

Against all of which there is one thing, and it is the thing that kept him alive. A blind man with a voice on a pilgrim road is a recognised kind of person, and people have a settled habit about that kind of person. They do not rob him, much, because there is nothing on him worth the trouble and because of what it would be to do it. They give him a little food. They tell him the turning without being asked twice. The trade is a kind of protection and outside the trade there is none, which is why nobody leaves it.

The trade works like this. You sit down where people are obliged to slow down, on the ground, with a cloth in front of you, and you begin.

You cannot tell whether there is anybody there. That is the first thing and it never stops being true. You start at nothing and you go on at nothing, and then somebody's foot slows, which has a sound, and then somebody puts a bundle down, which is a different sound and is the sound of a decision being made, and after a while you can hear the difference between a crowd standing and a crowd sitting.

What is being exchanged is not complicated. Men have been walking since before light. They are a long way from their own houses, carrying their own grain, and worried about the rest of the road and about what is happening at home while they are not there. Somebody sitting in the dust does something with his voice that they were not expecting to hear at a cart halt. They stop. They stand there for longer than they meant to. Then they put down a handful of grain, or the end of what they were eating, or a copper coin, or a piece of cloth, and they pick up their bundles and go on. The first time that happens to a boy he finds out the thing that settles the rest of his life, which is that a voice is something you can eat.

He was not the only one and he never once thought he was. There were a great many blind singers on those roads. Every ford had one. Every big temple gate had two or three, and the festivals drew them in from a week's walk in all directions, and they knew one another at once and from a distance, by the voice and then by the manner. They moved about in small parties, and every party had a boy in it who had been taken on for the walking and got fed for it.

They had a trade language and a body of trade knowledge and they passed it round, because most of it is no use kept. Which festival falls on which day and how far it is from where you are standing. Which headman feeds people and which one has his servants walk you to the edge of the fields. Which village will let you sleep inside the fence. Where the water is on the long dry stage between two places. Which stretch of road has a bad name and in which season. Which house keeps a dog that is out at night. They would tell one another all of that and not one of them would willingly teach another a song, and they all took songs off one another anyway, at one hearing, which is what the ear in that trade is for.

He did not have years to learn it in, not the way an apprentice has years, walking behind other men and carrying their bundles until the day he is let sing. What he had was a tank under a tree a few kos from the house he had left, and whoever came past it. Pilgrims came past it, because every path in that country joins a bigger one eventually, and men already in the trade came past it too, in twos and threes, the way they went everywhere, and stopped to rest at the water the way anybody stops at water. He listened to what came past. He asked what a passing man would tell a blind child for nothing, which was not much, and what could not be told him he worked out by doing it wrong in front of somebody and being told so. He learned to judge a traveller from the first sound of him, the way any beggar learns it. He learned not to take the whole of what was offered even when it was offered, because the next man might have nothing, and he would still be sitting there when the next man came.

It did not take him long to go past anyone who had told him anything, because there was so little any of them had to tell a blind child sitting at one tank, and so much time in which to work out the rest for himself.

What he sang about was himself.

It is the obvious subject for a man in that position and most of the men in that trade used it and used it badly. The bad version is asking. A man sits in the dust and sings that he is wretched, and everybody in front of him understands exactly what the song is for, and it is for the grain, and they give him a little of it and think no more about him, and they are right not to.

What he did was a different thing altogether and everyone who heard it knew it inside two lines. He was not asking for anything. He stood himself up in front of a crowd of strangers as the worst creature alive and then made the case, properly, with particulars, and refused every mitigation that was going. He would not be let off. He went at himself harder than anybody sitting in front of him would have dared to go at him, and he did it in a voice that had no business being in a man sitting in the dust, and what happened to the men listening was that somewhere early on they stopped thinking about him and started thinking about themselves, and could not get out of it, and did not want to.

He worked at it for years, the way a man works at the one thing he is going to be known for. He built two in particular and he built them as a pair, so that the first one set it up and the second went further than the first had left any room to go. He kept them back for the end, when the crowd had been sitting a long while and would take anything. Grown men cried in front of him at those two. Men who had counted their grain out carefully that morning gave him the whole of what they were carrying and walked on with an empty cloth, and afterwards they told people about it, and at the places where he was known people asked for those two by name and would wait for them.

He was not the only one who did that kind of thing and he never once thought he was, but there was nobody within a day's walk of that tank who did it the way he did it.

Somewhere in those years the other thing began, and it began so quietly that nobody could have said afterwards when it started.

A man who has heard the singing once comes back the next evening. That is common. A man who comes back a third time, and a fourth, and is still there a week later when the crowd has gone on, is something else. Such a man hangs about at the edge of things. He fetches water without being asked. He is there in the morning. And at some point he stops asking for a song and asks for the other thing, which is that he wants a name of God to say, and he wants it from this man and not from another one, and once it has been given he belongs to the man who gave it.

That is the whole transaction, and there is nothing to watch. One of them says a word and the other one repeats it and goes away saying it. What it does is settle, permanently, which of the two is over the other, and everybody in that country understood the arrangement, because half the men sitting on any set of steps had somebody they said a word for.

It happened to a good many men in his trade, all over the country, and it is not a small or a sentimental thing. It made a household out of a man who had none. A singer with attached men had somebody to carry the grain and somebody to argue with the boatman and somebody to sit outside the door when he had fever. In return he had to be, for the rest of his life, the thing they had decided he was.

They called him svāmī. Nobody granted him the word. It attached itself, the way it attached itself to other singers who had come up the same way, and after a few years of being called it in public a man is it.

What he taught them was not much, and he would have said so himself, and did.

He had a name of God and he gave it out, and when a man asked him what to do with it he said to say it, and when the man asked what else he said there was nothing else. He had no lineage to hand on and did not claim one. He had no teaching to speak of about the world, beyond the plain advice of a careful man, which was to keep off other people's grain and not to lie, and he gave that when he was asked for it and not otherwise.

Nobody in Sīhī ever had him back again. He was a few kos off, by a tank under a tree, and the village heard of him the way villages hear of such people, and did not go to fetch him.

Then, one day, the same thing that had once put him on the road out of Sīhī put him on the road again, and he found he could not stay at one tank for the rest of his life any more than he had been able to stay in the house he was born in. He got up before light, the way he had the first time, with everything he owned on him and none of it heavy, and went.

He went with two men he fell in with on the road inside the first day, because that is how it is done. A blind man setting out alone on a road he does not know does not stay alone for long if there is a party going his way, and there nearly always is. They walked at night in the hot months, the way parties like that always did.

The road is cool then and the dust has gone down and the carts are stopped in the sarais, and there is nothing on it after midnight but people with their own reasons. A boy one of the men had picked up along the way went in front with a stick and grumbled about snakes. Behind him came the three of them in a line, each with a hand on the shoulder of the one in front, and they went like that from dark until the sky went grey, and then they turned off and slept under whatever there was until the middle of the afternoon. They went faster at night than the pilgrims did by day, because a pilgrim stops to look at things, and because night cost the men in that line nothing. Darkness was not a condition they had to make allowance for. It was the one hour of the day when the rest of the road was working under the same terms they worked under always.

There was a thing people in Sīhī said about him, from before he had ever left the village at all. When he was six years old, small enough still to be underfoot in that house, he had told his mother something out of nothing, with no way of knowing it, about a neighbour's house, and it had come true two days later exactly as he had said it. Whether that was the reason he went at all, or one of the reasons, or no reason and only a story that got fastened onto him afterwards because a story likes to have a beginning, nobody in Sīhī could ever be brought to agree, and it made no difference now to a man walking a road he did not know, in the dark, with two strangers.

The two men he was walking with had spent their whole lives inside a year shaped like that, the way a cultivator knows when to put the seed in, and out of them, over that week on the road, he got the shape of it whole for the first time, entire, in a way it had never come to him at the tank.

The cold months were the great months. That is when the country moves. The weather is clear and the nights are cold enough to want a fire and the rivers are down and the roads are hard, and the bathing days fall one after another, and whole villages go out on the road together with their grain on their heads and their old people on carts. Prayāg in the cold months held a town of people who had no town. A man could sing there for weeks without ever facing the same crowd twice.

Then the spring, and colour thrown, and Braj filling up with people who had come for that and nothing else. Then the hot weather, which is the lean time. The crowds thin. The wells go down and the wind gets up in the afternoons, and the people who are still on the roads are there because they have to be, and they are in a hurry and in a temper and they do not stop for singing.

Then the rains, and the whole trade stops. The tracks go to mud and the nālās come up in an hour and take the fords out, and nobody crosses anything. That was the season a singer sat still, in a village where he was known, or at a ghāṭ with a roof on it, and ate what he had put by, and that is what the putting by was for. It is also when the songs get made. A man with a wet month in front of him and nothing to do in it will work on a thing he has been carrying around half finished since the winter.

After the rains the country dries out and opens, and everything happens at once. The hill fed in the autumn with its mountain of cooked rice. The full moon of the first clear month. The long walking round of Braj, which takes the better part of a month and puts a moving crowd on every road in that country at the same time. Then the cold again, and Prayāg again, and round.

Inside that year a man moved with the crowd and never ahead of it and never behind it. You do not arrive at a festival on the day. You arrive before, and you take your ground, and you hold it, and the ground is everything. The place you want is where people are made to stop: the head of a flight of steps, the gate of a temple, the mouth of a lane too narrow for two carts. You want them slowed down and not yet where they are going. And you stay while the crowd stays, and on the morning the crowd starts to go you go with it, because the grain stops the same hour the people do.

It is a business, and it was one. What is unusual about it is that it has no capital in it at all. There is no stock, no tools, no beast, no land, nothing that can be stolen and nothing that can be lost. There is one asset, carried in the body, which gets better with use and cannot be taken away by anybody, and the whole of the enterprise rests on that single thing. Against it stands every ordinary risk of the road: fever, a bad season, a broken foot, a man with a stick. A singer in that trade is one illness away from nothing at all and knows it, and that is why the good ones were careful men who kept a store of grain and did not drink.

The trade had come to him because there was nothing else it could have been, and by now he had more of it in him than either of the two men he was walking with.

What he had to know first was a hundred compositions, and know them the way a man knows the way to his own door. Not most of the words. All of the words, in order, with the turn at the end of each line, in the rāga they belong to and at the speed they go. And then keep knowing them. A song a man has not sung in a year is not in his head any more, whatever he thinks; it has gone soft in the middle and will fail him in front of people. So a working singer runs through his stock the way a man runs through his accounts, singing over to himself on the road the ones he has not used, in a flat undertone, while the boy walks along beside him thinking about something else.

Then the hours. Every rāga has its hour and the hours are not negotiable. Sāraṅg belongs to the middle of the day and will do nothing for you in the dark. Dhanāśrī comes in as the light goes off the water and the crowd settles, and it is a rāga made for taking hold of people who are tired, and every singer on that road knew it and kept something in it for the end of an evening. Get the hour wrong and nothing visible happens. The crowd does not boo. They simply go quiet in the wrong way and start looking at each other, and afterwards the cloth in front of you has less in it than it should, and the man who did it cannot always tell you why.

Then the taking. A singer hears a thing once. He is standing at the back of another man's crowd, at another man's pitch, with his hands folded, and the other man is singing something he has never heard, and he takes it: the words, the turns, the rāga, the shape of the ending. Once. There is no second hearing and there is nothing written anywhere. By that night it is his, and in a fortnight it is at the other end of the road being sung by men who have never met the man who made it. This is how everything travelled in that country and it is the reason a poet puts his own name into the last line of a pada, because the name is the only thing that travels with it.

Then holding. Most of a singer's crowd did not come for him. They came off a boat, or out of a temple, or they are sitting because their feet hurt. You get them at the start of a line and you have about as long as it takes to say a sentence before they decide. He could hear the whole of it. He could hear the sand when people shifted and the difference between the shift of a man settling and the shift of a man about to get up, and he would put something across the front of that man before he was on his feet and keep him there another quarter of an hour.

And then stopping. That is the last thing learned and some never learn it. A crowd that has been held has a moment when it is full, and if you go past that moment you take back a part of what you gave them, and they walk away in a smaller mood than they were in. The singers who ended too late were mostly the ones who liked the sound of themselves. He was not one of those. He stopped in the middle of the quiet, while they still wanted it, and let them sit there with it, and got up and went away and left them wanting.

Nobody taught him any of that out of a book, because there was no book, and there had been nobody at the tank whose business it was to teach him anything. What he had instead was the water, and whoever stopped at it. A man rests at a tank for as long as it takes to drink and fill a pot and no longer, unless something makes him stay, and a boy sitting there learns to read that length of time the way another apprentice reads a teacher's face. Get a thing wrong, in whatever way it can be got wrong, and the man is back on his feet before the line is finished. Get it right and he is still sitting there at the end of it. Nobody explained what had been wrong, because there was nobody there to explain it, and he worked it out the only way it can be worked out without a teacher, which is by trying a thing a dozen ways and noticing which one kept a stranger sitting in the shade a minute longer. It took years and there was no ceremony at the end of it.

They travelled in twos and threes. That is the size of the thing, and it is a practical size: one man singing, one keeping the time and coming in under him, and the boy. The boy was somebody's spare son out of a village along the road, fed and clothed and given nothing, and he carried the bundle and led them and went for water and took the copper up off the cloth, and when he got big enough to be useful somewhere else he went, and there was another boy. Some of those boys stayed for years. Some of them learned the songs from the back and went off and worked for themselves.

They knew each other, all of them, all down that road, and they were not a brotherhood. When two of them came to the same festival there was a piece of ground worth having and only one of it. Sometimes it was settled in the ordinary way, which is that the man already there had it and the second man went further along and took the second-best place and grumbled. Sometimes a man came up behind another man's crowd and started something louder at the same hour on purpose. Sometimes a party arrived two days early for no reason except to sit on a stretch of steps that everybody knew somebody else wanted.

And the same men carried a sick man's bundle for four days without being asked. That happened as often as the other thing and often between the same two. There is a shape to a trade where everyone is at the same risk: they undercut each other in the morning and sat up all night with each other's fevers, and when one of them died on a road the rest of them did what had to be done with the body and split his grain and took on his boy, and then went back to fighting about ground. Both halves are true at once and neither one cancels the other.

By the end of that week the road had brought them down onto the stretch between Agra and Mathura, where the river runs beside it and the traffic slows and has to get across. He had never walked that particular stretch before, but by the sound of it and the smell of it and the shape of the ground under his stick it was not different in kind from every other stretch he had ever known, and a man who has learned one road has learned the shape of all of them.

This was the one he stayed on.

In the dry months the river there goes down until men walk it.

The water pulls back off the sand a little more each week until what is left is a channel you could throw a stone across, running slow and warm and the colour of weak tea, with bars standing out of it that were well under water in the autumn. Then the carts go over. A bullock cart comes down the bank in a cloud of its own dust, and the driver walks in ahead of it to feel for the bottom, and the wheels go in and the water comes up to the axle and no further, and the whole thing grinds across at the pace of a man walking and up the far bank and away. Behind it the cattle come down in a body, and they cross with their heads up and their noses out, and they come up the other side shaking themselves, and the herd boys come after them shouting. They have been crossing there for as long as anyone in that country can account for. It is a cow crossing and it is called one.

Midway between Agra and Mathura, on a river that both of those places live beside, there is nothing remarkable about the spot at all except that it is where the road touches the water.

The steps are cut stone at the top, a few courses of it, laid by somebody long dead and never repaired. Below that the stone is broken and the edges have gone and the courses have slipped out of line, and grass comes up through them in the wet and dies back in the heat. Below that there is no stone. There is mud, grey and greasy and printed all over with the feet of everything that has come down to the water, and in the last of it the mud gives way to sand. Above the top step the ground goes back and up into dry sand, pale and deep and blowing, well above where the flood gets to, and on it there is thorn scrub in low stands with the wind through it, and ber bushes, and nothing green except after the rains. And the road comes down to the landing out of the north and goes away out of it to the south, and on both sides it leaves the water at once and goes off across the flat with its dust standing over it.

In the wet months a boat does the work. It is a flat thing that goes across on a rope, and it takes what it can hold and not a man more, and it comes back light and goes over loaded, all day, and the chain of it going out over the gunwale is one of the two or three sounds that stand for the place.

You know the hours at that crossing by what you can hear.

It starts before light with the water buffalo going down. Then the first boat, and the rope, and the argument at the boat, because there is always an argument at the boat. Then the carts, and cart wheels on that road are solid wood and they shriek, and you hear a train of them a long way off and go on hearing it a long way after. In the middle of the day the whole place goes quiet and the loudest thing is the kites. The river makes one noise against the cut stone, which is a small slapping, and another against the mud, which is almost nothing, and when the wind comes up the river in the afternoon it makes a third that is not like either. The frogs start before the last of the light and not after, and once they start you will not get anything else that evening. Then the buffalo again, coming up the bank with the boys behind them, and the dogs, and then the carts stop and the boat is tied and it goes quiet for the night except for the dogs.

It smells of wet silt, which is the main smell and is not unpleasant, and of cattle, and of dung drying in cakes on a wall, and of smoke at any hour of the day, and of gram parching, which carries further than any of them. Down at the water there is a place where the dead are burned, and on the days when there is one the smell of that goes up the sand on the evening air and everybody at the crossing knows it and nobody remarks on it.

The light there is the light of a flat country with water in the middle of it. In the middle of the day it comes up off the sand as hard as it comes down, and there is no shade but the thorn, and people lie under carts. Then it lengthens, and the far bank goes from white to yellow to brown, and the last of it comes off the top of the water and goes up under the leaves from below, and then it is gone, quickly, because it goes quickly there.

And the seasons make three different places of it. In the heat the sand is wide and the river is small and mean and the boat is hauled up on the bank with its seams opening. In the rains the water comes up over the mud and over the broken stone and once in a few years over the top step as well, and takes the thorn scrub and the bodies of drowned animals downstream past the landing in the brown, and the crossing simply stops being a crossing for a while, and the boat is out and the fare doubles and nobody argues about it. Then the cold months, and the river drops and clears and the mornings come with mist lying on it so thick that you hear the boat before you see it, and the far bank is not there at all until the middle of the morning.

He came there when he was eighteen, on his own feet, out of the country round Sīhī where he had grown up. He had left the tank the way he had once left the house before it, before light, with everything he owned on him and none of it heavy, and had walked the better part of a week in the company of two men he had fallen in with on the road, until it brought him down to this crossing along with everything else that used it. He had never seen the place, in the only sense in which he ever saw anything, and he did not stay there because anyone told him to. He stayed because a crossing tests a man in a way a tank four kos from Sīhī never had to, and having stopped there once to sing, he found there was more to be had from it than there had ever been at that water, and he simply did not go on.

A man stops moving when moving stops paying, and within a season or two it had begun to cost him more than it brought in.

His feet had had enough of it. Everybody's feet go in that trade, hard and cracked at the heel and then split, and a split heel on a hot road is a thing a man thinks about all day. And there was the other calculation, which is that a man who is known in one place does better than a man who is known a little everywhere.

Against that he had noticed what everybody in his trade notices in the end about a ford, which is that it is the only place on a road where people are obliged to stop. Not slowed down. Stopped. The boat holds what it holds and no more, and the rest sit on the sand and wait for it to come back, and they wait in the morning and they wait in the evening, and they do it every day, and they do it nowhere else on that road. A festival gives you a crowd for a few days once a year and then the road empties. A crossing gives you a smaller crowd every hour of every day for ever, and it delivers itself.

So he stayed through one hot season, and then through the rains, and then it was the cold months and there were people on the road again and no reason to be anywhere else, and after that the question of going had stopped coming up.

The hut was built for him in the way those things are built, which is that nobody asked him.

Two or three men who had been coming down in the evenings decided between themselves that he was not going to spend another wet season sitting under a cart, and they went and cut the thorn and carried mud up from the low ground in baskets, and there was an argument about where to put it which took longer than the building did. One party wanted it near the steps where the people are. The other party said that in a bad year the water comes over the top course, and that a hut on that ground would be mud soup in the first week of the rains, and that the right place was back on the high sand where the thorn stood. The second party was right and won, and that is why his place was where it was, up the bank and along from the landing, with the stand of thorn between him and the road.

It went up in a few days. When it was finished they brought him along the sand and put his hand on the doorpost and told him it was his.

After that the rest of it came on by itself, the way a thing does once it has a place to be.

Men who had attached themselves to him on the road had been coming and going for years. Now there was somewhere to come to. Some of them had houses in the villages back from the river and came down at the end of the day with their own supper inside them. Some had nothing and slept at the hut, and those were the ones who ran it. The ground in front was beaten flat and swept, and swept again whenever anyone thought of it. Water pots stood in the shade of the wall and were filled before light. The grain was carried in and kept and measured out, and a man who is given grain by strangers all day and never handles a measure of it himself needs somebody honest at that, and the one who took it on was.

They fought about him constantly and quietly. Who walked him down to the water. Who sat nearest when there were people. Who had been with him longest and was therefore entitled to answer a question put to somebody else. He knew it was going on. He let it alone, and now and then he settled a thing by asking for the man who had not been asked for in a while, and nobody ever caught him at it.

The days took a shape and kept it for years.

He was down at the river before light and came up wet, and would not be helped with his hair. He sang in the morning to whoever was on the sand, and in the morning it was mostly the people waiting for the first boat, and they were a good crowd because they had nowhere to go until the boat came back. He stopped when the heat came, and sat out the middle of the day in the thorn shade with a wet cloth over his head, and slept some of it. In the afternoon there were the ones who had come on purpose, and they were dealt with singly. In the evening he sang again, and that was the singing people walked in from the villages for, and they came out along the river road in twos and threes as the light went, and they knew to come early because the good places on the sand went first.

What came in was grain, mostly, and cloth sometimes, and ghee at the festivals, and once in a while something from a merchant who had got across a bad river and wanted to mark it. He never handled the copper. That was known about him up and down the ford and it was not a rule he announced; he simply did not, and the men around him took it off the cloth and it went into the store, and the fact that he did not touch it was one of the reasons the store kept filling.

The name travelled the way names travel on a river, which is by boat and by cart and faster than anybody expects. Boatmen carried it upstream and down. Cart drivers going north out of Agra told other cart drivers what was at the cow crossing and whether it was worth timing the day to be there in the evening, and enough of them decided it was that there began to be carts pulled up on the high ground at dusk whose drivers had no reason to be stopped. Families coming to put a dead man's ashes in the water were sent up the sand to him by the ferrymen without anybody asking. Singers off the road came to listen and went away and talked about him to other singers, which is the only reputation that means anything in that trade. In the end you could ask on that road for the singer, and whoever you asked knew which one you meant.

He was not the only holy man on that water and he was not the strangest by a long way.

That river had them all along it. There were men with hair that had not been cut or combed in so many years that it was matted into a single rope and wound on their heads and weighed what a small child weighs. There were men who sat out the hot weather in one spot with fires lit round them. There was one who kept the night watch over an image while it slept, standing the whole night through and fanning it, on his feet from dark until morning with his eyes shut the entire time, because he had been told at some point not to open them and had not opened them since, and his body never tired. There were men who carried water on foot from one town to the next every night of their lives and were back before the morning service. There was one who did a temple's washing up and slept about an hour and then begged dry flour round the villages and mixed it with water into a lump and held the lump up towards the flag on the temple and ate that and nothing else, ever.

Some of them were extraordinary and nobody who saw them ever forgot it.

Some of them were simply wasting themselves, and it was said so plainly at the time and not behind their backs, and one of them was told to stop it and sent to eat out of a kitchen like everybody else.

Sūrdās did none of that. He ate what was put in front of him and he ate it at the usual hours. He slept at night. He did not stand, or sit in fires, or refuse food, or set himself tasks, and he never once in his life gave anybody the idea that he thought suffering was worth anything on its own account. He had had a great deal of it and had formed no high opinion of it. What he did was sing, twice a day, and he did that the way a good craftsman does a thing he has done all his life, which is carefully and without fuss and slightly better each year.

And what he sang was himself.

That was the subject and everybody on that ford knew it and not one of them thought it was a fault. He sang about a man born wrong and gone on wrong ever since. He sang the whole account of it: the house that could not keep him, the roads, the begging, the lying that a beggar does, the things done for food, the small meanness of a man with nothing. He put himself at the very bottom of the list and then argued that he was below the bottom of it, and he did it without one word of self-pity, which is the difficult part and is why it worked. A man whining about his own life empties a crowd in a minute. What he did was something else. He stated it. He made the case against himself the way a clerk makes an account, item by item, and he did not ask for anything at the end.

He had been at it for years and the work showed. There was not a slack word left anywhere in the best of them. He had two he kept for the end of the evening, built as a pair, and he had taken them apart and put them back together so many times that they had got down to the bone. They asked for nothing and offered nothing and simply laid the man out on the sand in front of you, and something in that went into people sideways and got under their arms.

People asked for those two by name. Pilgrims frightened about the journey and sick for their own houses would sit in front of a blind man telling them he was the lowest creature on the river, and it would go into them, and they would find themselves crying on a sandbank in front of strangers, and then untie their bundles and put what they had on the cloth and go away better than they had been in weeks.

There was nothing false in it anywhere. He believed every word. That is exactly why it worked, and it is why he had no reason on earth to sing anything else.

So the evenings went, one after another, for years.

The last boat goes over when there is still enough light to see the rope, and after that the ferryman ties up and goes home, and anybody left on the wrong bank is on the wrong bank until morning, and knows it, and settles down on the sand to make the best of the night. Which means that at that crossing, every evening of the year, there is a small stranded company sitting on the high sand with nothing to do and nowhere to go and a whole night in front of them.

The carts had stopped. The frogs had started. Somebody was banking a fire up the bank behind him, and further off a woman was calling a child in. He was brought out and set down on the mat and turned to face them, and he sat a moment with his hands on his knees and let the sand go quiet, and took the rāga that belongs to that hour, and began.

The hall was stone and held the cool of the night until the middle of the morning, and the argument in it had been going on for days.

It was a court in the far south, further south than most men of the north ever went, in a country where the rice came twice a year and the stone of the temples was black. The king kept scholars the way he kept horses, in numbers, and because he kept them they had to be exercised. So there was a hall for it, with the king's men along one wall and the learned along the other and a crowd at the door that grew through the morning and thinned in the heat and came back in the afternoon.

The form of the thing was fixed and everybody in the room knew it. A man stated a position. He defended it against whoever came at it. He was not permitted to shout, and he was not permitted to move his ground once he had taken it, and if his position was carried he said so out loud in front of the assembly. What was at stake was not a purse. It was which reading of the books that court would keep, and which men it would go on feeding.

He sat on the floor with the rest of them. He came of a Telugu brāhmaṇ family and he had been arguing his way about the country long enough by then that men in halls like that one had heard of him before he arrived. He was not an attractive opponent. He did not make speeches. He asked short questions and waited through the answers with his face down, and then asked the next one, and the effect after an hour of it was of a man walking round a house trying every shutter. He never conceded anything to be liked. He was capable of sitting silent while another man talked himself into a corner and then saying nothing about the corner, only putting a hand out flat, which meant he had finished.

He beat them. The paṇḍits of the south were beaten in their own hall and the report of it went north with the traders, and it lost nothing on the way.

What he did the morning after was leave. There was no procession and nothing was carried in front of him. He took what he had come with, which was a water pot, a bundle, the books in the heads of the men who walked with him, and an image, and he went out by the road he had come in on while the town was still getting its fires going. A man who has just won an argument of that size can generally be persuaded to stay and be fed for a month. He could not.

He did not call it a conquest. His own name for what he was doing was the walk round the earth, and that is what it was: the whole circuit, on foot, and then the same circuit again. West to Dvārikā where the sea is. Into the forests of Jhārkhaṇḍ. Banaras, and the burning ground, and the paṇḍits there, who were the hardest in the country and knew it. Prayāg, where the two rivers meet. Braj, again and again and again. He broke the round off when he was called and picked it up afterwards where he had left it. Once he left it standing in Jhārkhaṇḍ and walked out of the forest to Braj, because a hill there had asked for him.

On the road he went at the pace of the images. He ate once, off a leaf, what had been offered first. He slept where the day ended, in the courtyard of somebody's house if there was somebody, and under a tree if there was not, and in that country there is always a tree. He crossed rivers in other men's boats and paid for it with nothing, because the boatmen in most places would not take it from him, and he would be gone up the bank before the argument about it had finished. He knew the roads of Hindustan the way a carter knows them, by the stages, and he knew who lived at the end of each one.

He kept a house at Aḍel, across the water from Prayāg. A man who walks like that needs a house for one reason, which is that the images cannot walk. The house at Aḍel had a kitchen in it and a store, and a room where the Lord was kept, and a wife who ran all three. Her name was Akkājī. She did the sevā of the house, which is the service of the image: the cooking for him, the offering, the dressing, the putting to bed at the right hour whether or not there is anyone to see it done. When her husband was away, which was most of the time, the bhog still went in at the hour it went in.

He would come back off the road after months of it, walk in, and go and look at the Lord first and at his family afterwards, and the first question he asked in the house was generally about the sevā and not about the people. This was not coldness and nobody in the house took it for coldness. It was the order things came in, and everyone there had agreed to that order, which is a different matter from being made to keep it.

He had rules about that house and they were short. Never offer him what is stale. Never offer him what is left over from anything. If there is a good thing in the market, carry it home for him, and do not cook his food anywhere but at home. He is the one who enjoys the best there is, so give him the best there is. He said these things once each to the people concerned and did not say them again.

There were two boys in that household, Gopīnāth the elder and Viṭṭhalnāth the younger, and for a long stretch of those years they were small.

The path itself was founded at Gokul, on the river, at midnight, and the only other person there was asleep.

He had been sitting at the temple on Govindghāṭ in a state his own people called great anxiety, and the anxiety had a shape and he could state it. He had been told to join souls to God. But a soul is a faulty thing and there is no part of it that is not faulty, and the one he was to join it to is the treasury of every good thing there is, and the two will not go together. You cannot hand over what is filthy. That was the whole of the problem and he could not get round it and did not try to pretend he had.

It was the eleventh of the bright half of Śrāvaṇ, the night before the twelfth on which the thread is made ready, and the thread had been made and put away where nothing could touch it. In the middle of that night the Lord spoke to him and settled it.

The souls you join to me, he said, I will accept. The ones you give the name to, every fault they have will come off them.

Dāmodardās was lying beside him and woke up. He heard a voice speaking in the room, and he heard that it went on speaking for some while, and he understood not one word of it. He asked in the morning. He was told that there was an obstruction on him still, ten births thick, and that it would wear through in time. Nothing else was said about it, then or later. The words of that night were written out and they are called the Siddhānta Rahasya, the secret of the doctrine, and they are very short.

Dāmodardās was the one man Vallabhācārya kept nothing back from. He had the whole of it put into him over years, the Bhāgavata read to him and gone through with him night after night until the doctrine and the secret of the Lord's play were standing in him like furniture in a room. Later, when the two boys in the house were still small, Vallabhācārya asked that this man should not die before he did, so that the thing would be alive somewhere in a body while they grew.

What he did with it from then on took about as long as it takes to describe.

A man came to him and was given the name of God to say. That was the first part and it could be done in a doorway. Then, usually the next morning, after a bath, in front of an image if there was one, the man made the thing over. Himself first: the body he had, the senses in it, the mind, the breath. Then everything attached to that body, which is to say his house, his wife, his children, his cattle, his stock in trade, his money and the use of all of it. He put the lot into the Lord's hands and it stopped being his. Vallabhācārya would put a hand on his head while he said it. That is brahma-sambandha, and it is done once in a life and takes a minute.

What it does is this. From that hour the faults on the man are the Lord's business and not his, and he does not go on scouring at them, and he does not go into the forest to burn them off, and he does not sit down and add them up. The food he eats is not his food, because it has been offered first and he is eating what was left when the Lord had finished. The work he does is not his work. It is not that he is now a good man. It is that the question of whether he is a good man has been taken off him and put somewhere else, and he is expected to get on with the cooking.

The name for the path is puṣṭimārg. Puṣṭi is the word for a child filling out on milk, the plumpness that comes of being fed well by somebody else. The way of nourishing. What you live on is given to you, and it is given because he chooses to give it and not because you have got yourself into a condition to deserve it. Grace is the other word for that, and grace is not a reward. What is asked of you in return is bhakti, which is love given to God and work done for him, and there is no second thing asked.

It was set against a good deal. It was set against the way of the rule, where a man climbs by doing each prescribed thing in its order and can be graded on how far up he has got. It was set against knowledge, against the whole apparatus of learning God the way you learn a grammar. It was set hardest of all against the man who starves himself. There was a Vaiṣṇava at Govardhan who did the temple's washing up, slept an hour and a quarter, carried water from the river at Mathura before light, scoured the pots, plastered the kitchen, and then went round the villages begging dry flour, and mixed it with water into a lump and ate that. The image complained. One of your servants, he said, is giving me a great deal of pain. Vallabhācārya went to Agra and to Mathura asking who had offended the Lord, got nowhere, came back and found out which man it was, and ordered him to stop and to eat from the kitchen like everybody else.

You do not leave the house. You do not leave the trade. You keep the wife and the children and the shop, and you cook for him first, and what is left you eat. He was pleased with a man at Nāroḍā who went out to earn his living and said so plainly instead of saying he had gone on the Lord's business, and he said why he was pleased: that is the mark of a Vaiṣṇava, not to use the Lord's name to make a living with.

He wrote as he walked. The book he was writing all his life is the Subodhinī, and it is a commentary, going line by line, on the Bhāgavata, which is the book in which the Lord's own doings are set down, the birth at Mathura and the butter and the flute and the rest. Not on the Gītā. Other men wrote on the Gītā. He wrote on the tenth part of the Bhāgavata, where the child is, and he was still at it when he was old.

He was hard to please and he could be worse than hard. At Thanesar he slept in the house of a paṇḍit, and before dawn he was up to wash and heard the man of the house telling his wife to get up and replaster the kitchen floor with dung before the Vaiṣṇavas were about and made it unclean. Vallabhācārya called him out. He took water from the man's own pot and poured it into his hand and said a mantra over it and sprinkled it on him and said: I have let go of you. Then he walked out of the house and out of the town and would not take so much as water in the place. The paṇḍit came apart afterwards and ate whatever he found in the bazaar, but he kept one thing, which was that he held it up first and told the Lord of Govardhan to eat it. One day it was sweets. And the Lord remarked to Vallabhācārya that he had eaten some very good sweets at that man's house.

Maharaj, Vallabhācārya said, I let go of him. Why are you eating at his house?

You hand them over to me, the Lord said, and I take them because you ask me to. You may let go of a man you handed over. I do not let go of what has been handed over to me.

Vallabhācārya had nothing to say to that and said nothing. Long afterwards he told Dāmodardās that if a Vaiṣṇava ever offended him again he would take the man back after a lakh of births, and he added the rule he had got out of it, which was that you speak to a Vaiṣṇava only after thinking, and never without thinking.

In Braj the work had gone further than anywhere else, and it had gone furthest of all on a hill there, a low sandstone ridge standing up out of the fields a good way back from the river, out of which an image had come. He had had a temple built for it and had set it inside and had given it the name Śrīnāthjī, and the service of it had been put in order piece by piece over the years, every hour of the day given to somebody and everything arranged. He went back there whenever he could and he was never satisfied with it, and each time he went he found another thing that was not yet being done properly and had it seen to.

So he came north again. He went out of Aḍel and up the Yamuna towards Braj with a party of disciples behind him, and the party moved at the pace such a party moves at, which is slowly, because of the images. Every man carried his own, wrapped and slung and never once put down on bare ground, and at the meal hour every man stopped where he was and made a fire and cooked and offered it and waited, and ate afterwards. A day's march with that party got you less far than a day's march. A day's march ahead of them, where the road comes down to the water midway between Agra and Mathura, there was a ford called Gaughāṭ.

The first boat came over in the middle of the afternoon, which was the wrong hour for it, because nobody who can help it crosses at the hour when the sand burns through the soles of the feet.

The ferry at Gaughāṭ was a flat boat that went across on a rope and took what it could hold and no more, and in the dry months it did not go at all because the carts and the cattle walked. That year it was going. It came over loaded and went back light and came over loaded again, and it kept doing that, and after the third crossing everyone on the ford had stopped what they were doing to watch, because a party that size does not get moved across a river without somebody paying for it and somebody deciding it is worth paying for.

They came ashore in the shallows with their bundles up on their shoulders and their cloth held out of the water. They came up the mud and over the broken stone and onto the dry sand above it, and the sand took the prints of a great many feet all at once, which is a thing you notice on a ford, where the prints are usually one set at a time going straight from the boat to the road.

Every living soul at a river crossing lives off the crossing. The ferrymen live off it. The man who sells parched gram in a twist of leaf lives off it. So does the woman with the water pots, and the boy who minds sandals, and the priest who does the offerings for the dead and keeps a book with the names of everybody's grandfather in it, and the two or three who sit at the top of the steps with their hands out and have sat there so long that they are part of the steps. When a large party lands, all of these people stand up.

Nothing came of it. The party did not ask for a guide and did not ask where the temple was and did not want the gram or the water or the priest. They went along the sand away from the landing, upstream of it, and put their bundles down and sat, and sat out the rest of the afternoon where they were. When the sun came off the top of the water they went in and washed, and the one they were all arranged around washed too, and came out, and sat down facing the river, and said the evening prayer. Then he started a fire and began to cook his own food.

That was the part that was carried up and down the ford afterwards. A man with that many people behind him, cooking for himself on the sand, wanting nothing from anybody. It was reported to Sūrdās with a certain amount of indignation, as though something had been withheld.

His place was upstream too, further along, on the high sand above the flood line where a stand of thorn stood. There was a hut. It had been built for him by men who wanted him to stay, which is how most things of that kind get built, and it was mud to the height of a man's chest and thatch above that, and it leaked in the first week of the rains every year and was mended every year after it had leaked. In front of it the ground had been beaten flat and swept, and it stayed swept, because there was always somebody with nothing better to do. There were water pots in a line in the shade. There was a mat that was his, that nobody else sat on, and a second mat for whoever was talking to him.

He had been there for years. The ferrymen sent people up to him without being asked to. When a family came off the boat with a dead man's ashes in a pot and stood about at the top of the steps not knowing what they were supposed to do next, somebody would point along the sand at the thorn trees and tell them to go up there.

There were a good many of his men about the place by then, and they had the running of it between them, and they fought each other quietly about who did which part of it, and he knew they did, and let it alone.

The day started before light. He would be got down to the river and would bathe and come up wet, and he wrung his hair out himself and would not be helped with it. Then he sat, and while he sat the ford woke up, which takes about an hour and is noisy. Then the first boats. The day went the way it went. He sang at the two ends of it and slept through the middle, and in the afternoons there were people who had come specially and had to be dealt with one at a time.

He sang his own padas and he had a great many of them by then and knew exactly which ones did what. He could tell from the sound of the sand how many were in front of him and whether they were sitting or standing, and he could hear a man get up to leave and put a line across the door of him and keep him there. Singers came off the road to listen to him and went away and told other singers.

What he did not sing was the other thing. The child in the butter and the hill going up on the hand and the flute in the dark at the river: that was in the air of that whole country and had been for longer than anybody could say, and every third singer on the road had a piece of it, and some of them were good. He had been hearing it since he was small. He never sang it. If somebody asked for it he turned the request round and gave them something of his own instead, and they went away satisfied, because what he gave them was better than what they had asked for.

He had stopped changing. The pair for the end of the evening had been finished for a long time and he was not making new ones like them, because there was no reason to. The men round him repeated his lines back to him. Nobody on that sand had told him he was wrong about anything in a very long time, and he was not a man who could not have taken it. He simply was not being given it.

In the afternoons the ones who had come a distance were brought up to him one at a time and sat on the second mat. They wanted what people always want. They wanted a word said over a sick child, or a name to say, or to be told that something they had done was not as bad as they thought it was, or simply to sit for a while near a man who was supposed to be holy and then go home able to say they had. He gave them what he had. He was patient with them in the way of a man who has understood that this is the work and there is no other work.

The boy who led him about was somebody's son from one of the villages, and had been doing it long enough to be quick. When the noise came up from the landing that afternoon, Sūrdās sent him to go and look and come back.

The boy came back at a run and got it out in the wrong order, the way a boy does. That there were more of them than he could count. That they had images with them, every single one of them, slung and wrapped. That the one in the middle was the great man from the south, the one who went about the country arguing and had never yet lost, and that he had come up from Aḍel, and that he was camped on this ghāṭ, on their own sand, and was cooking his own food on his own fire like anybody.

Sūrdās heard the whole of it. He asked nothing about the argument in the south and nothing about the paṇḍits. What he asked was whether the man had started cooking or had finished.

Then he said: go back. Sit down a little way off from him, where he will not have you standing over him. Do not speak to him. When he has eaten and is settled, come and tell me.

The boy went.

It was a working singer's courtesy, and it is the oldest courtesy there is. You do not go to a man at his fire. A man who is cooking is busy, and a man who has just eaten and washed his hands and sat back is a different man altogether, and anybody who has made a living out of picking the hour to open his mouth knows the difference between them the way a farmer knows weather. He had spent his life judging when a stranger is ready to receive something. He judged it that afternoon the way he always judged it and he judged it correctly.

It was also that he was not going to be seen running.

He had a place of his own above the flood line and men who called him svāmī, and a name on that ford, and if he had gone down the sand at a half trot while the man was still bent over his fire, his own people would have watched him do it. He would have arrived as one more local man wanting to be noticed by a great one passing through, standing at the edge of a crowd, waiting for a gap. He was not going to arrive like that. He would go when he was fetched, at the right hour, when it could be a call and not an attendance.

So the afternoon went on, and he sat where he was.

It was a long afternoon. The heat went out of the sand slowly and the smell of other people's cooking came up the bank in it, a good many small fires' worth, which is not the smell a camp usually makes.

People came up from the landing wanting to know what he was going to do about it, which is what people always want to know. His own men were not pleased. One of them said the visitor should have sent word up out of politeness, since the sand belonged, in the way sand can belong to anybody, to the svāmī who had been on it for years. Sūrdās did not take that up. He said nothing about it at all, which those who knew him best understood to mean that the point had been noticed and would not be pursued.

The evening people came for the singing and he did not sing. He said he would sing in the morning. That was the first time in a long while that anybody there had heard him put it off, and one or two of them sat on for a bit anyway, in case he changed his mind, and then went home.

He asked twice for the boy. The boy was not back.

The light went off the water and the heat came up out of the sand the way it does after, and the buffaloes came up the bank with the boys behind them shouting, and the kites went off the far bar in ones and twos. Somewhere along the sand a child in the camp was crying and was carried about until it stopped. He sat against the thorn with his hands on his knees and did not ask for anything, and the men around him kept their voices down without being told to.

The boy came up out of the dark at the edge of the swept ground, out of breath again, and stood there getting it back, and said:

He has eaten. He is sitting.

The cooking fires were burning down by the time anyone came for him.

There were fires all along the sand, small ones, each with a man bent over it. That was the habit of the people who travelled with the Ācārya. A man carried his Ṭhākurjī with him, the image he served, wrapped and slung and never set down on bare ground, and at the hour of the meal he cooked for it and offered it and only then ate himself. So there was never one great fire in that camp but many small ones, and the smoke from them went down the river on the evening air, and the cattle coming to the water at that hour walked through it and did not mind.

Sūrdās had known for most of the afternoon roughly where the camp was and how big it was, because a man who cannot see a thing counts it instead. Twelve fires or so. Voices from three or four directions, which meant they were sitting in groups and not in a line. No women. Somebody grinding something. A language that was not Braj being spoken near the water by two men who kept laughing. He had taken all of that in the way other people take in a view, without effort and without thinking about it, and by the time the boy came he had a shape in his head that was not far wrong.

They led him over. Somebody's hand under his elbow, sand giving under his feet, a stick in his right hand that he did not really need on that ground and carried anyway.

Vallabhācārya was sitting on a low seat with his people gathered round him on three sides, and Sūrdās came up and made his obeisance and stayed where he was, which was a little too far off.

Come and sit closer, the Ācārya said.

So he came forward and sat down in front of him.

Sūrdās took the measure of people by their voices and had been doing it all his life, and he was better at it than sighted men are at faces. A voice tells you where a man is from, how much of it he has spent shouting, whether he is sitting straight, whether he has eaten, whether he is pleased with himself, and how much of the room he thinks belongs to him. The voice in front of him was from the south and was not loud. It was a voice with no ornament on it whatever. It did not go up at the end of a sentence to check that you were still listening, because it had not occurred to the man that you might not be. And it was close to the ground: he was sitting down properly and had not shifted once since Sūrdās came up.

Sing something, the Ācārya said. Something in praise of the Lord.

Sūrdās said that he would, and he sang. He chose Dhanāśrī, which is an evening rāga and the right one for that hour, and he sang the thing he had been singing on that ford for years, the thing people came to hear.

I am the chief of all the fallen, Hari.

Who is my equal? Take my measure. I am worth exactly that much.

Everyone scattered anywhere has gathered now in one place,

and the one place is me.

We went at it like a competition, filling the belly with sin.

Sūr will get across by holding onto the feet of the rest.

That is the whole of what I am.

Nobody interrupted. He finished it, and let the last note go, and then, because the silence held and because he had a second one that went with the first, he sang that too. Also Dhanāśrī. He had built them as a pair.

Lord, I am the forehead mark of all the sinners.

The rest are sinners in two things, or four. I have been one since I was born.

The hunter. Ajāmil. The woman at the crossroads. The fowler. Pūtanā.

You lifted every one of them and stepped over me.

Nobody here is fit to serve you. I am saying it straight.

Sūr says it, and dies of the shame of saying it.

They were good. He knew they were good. He had spent years on them, and they did what he had built them to do, which was to take a listener by the throat and hold him there. Men had wept at that pair. Men had emptied their bundles onto the sand for that pair.

The Ācārya let the end of it sit for a moment. Then he said:

Are you a donkey?

Sūrdās did not move.

What are you whimpering for, the Ācārya said. Sing something about the Lord's own play instead.

The word he used was the word for the noise a beggar makes at a door when he has decided not to leave, or the noise a dog makes when it has been beaten and comes back anyway. It is not a word you say to a man with his own disciples sitting behind him. It is not a word you say to a guest. Nobody on that sand had spoken to Sūrdās in that register in a very long time, if anybody ever had.

Behind him his own men heard it. That is worth holding onto, because they were there, the men who had walked over with him and settled down at the edge of the lamplight to listen to their teacher sing for a famous man, and what they got instead was their teacher being called an animal in a language they all understood perfectly. Not one of them said anything. They did not get up. Nobody's hand went to anybody's arm. The whole sandbank went quiet the way a room does when the wrong thing has been said and everyone is waiting to find out how bad it is.

What he could have done was stand up and go. He had somewhere to go. He had a hut and a following and a reputation on a road that carried half the traffic of Hindustan, and no obligation at all to a travelling Telugu brāhmaṇ who had landed on his ghāṭ that afternoon and eaten his own food off his own fire.

What he said was:

Maharaj, I do not know how.

That is the sentence the whole life turns on, and it is not a defence. He did not say that he sang what he knew. He did not say that people liked it. He did not say that a man born the way he was born had a right to sing about it. He heard the charge, which was that he had spent his gift on his own condition, and he agreed with it, and then he told the truth about why: nobody had ever shown him the other thing. He had the voice. He had the craft. He had years of practice at the ford, and a following, and a name. What he did not have was the material. He had never been given the līlā, the play of God in the world that the singers of Braj lived inside. He knew he was a beggar because he had been one. He did not know Gokul, because nobody had taken him there.

The Ācārya said:

Go and bathe. Come back. I will explain it to you.

So Sūrdās got up off the sand and went down to the water.

The steps at Gaughāṭ were cut stone at the top and then broken stone and then mud, and he went down them the way he went down everything, which was slowly and without any particular care, because falling was not a thing that frightened him. The river in that season would have been low and slow, warm at the top and cold underneath. He put his clothes on the step and went in.

There is nothing on record about what he thought about in the water, and no reason to invent any. He was a man who had just been called a donkey in front of his own disciples and had agreed with it. He was a man who had built two very good songs out of the worst thing that had ever happened to him and had just been told that this was the smallest possible use of them. He was also, in some way he probably could not have put into words that evening, a man who had been waiting a long time for somebody to tell him he was doing it wrong.

It was a ford, and nothing had ever happened at it. Carts went over in the dry season and boats in the wet. Grain went north on it and cloth went south on it and had done so for longer than anybody at Gaughāṭ could say. What happened there that evening was that a singer with a good voice and a small following sang two songs about himself, and was asked a rude question, and gave an honest answer, and was sent down to the water.

He came back up wet, with his hair down his back, and sat where he had been sitting.

Above him on the bank the fires were out. The Ācārya's people had moved back to give the two men room, and somebody had lit a single lamp and set it on the sand where it was no use to anybody but did what lamps do, which is to mark that something is going on.

The Ācārya waited until he was settled.

Then he leaned forward and spoke into his ear, and what he said first was a name.

The name was short. It took less time to say than it takes to set a pot down.

It was a name of God and it went into his ear and nowhere else, because that is how the thing is done. It is not called out over a crowd. It is not written, which would have been no use to him in any case. One man leans across and says it once into the ear of another man, close enough that his breath is on him, and the man receiving it says it back, and after that he has it and says it for the rest of his life and does not pass it to anybody else, because it is not his to pass.

Behind the giving of it was the promise made to Vallabha in the dark at Gokul. He had been going up and down the country ever since with that sentence to act on, and he acted on it at fords and in courtyards and on the road, wherever he found somebody he judged fit for it, and he had come to Gaughāṭ off the Aḍel road that afternoon and found a blind singer on the sand.

The name does not commit a man to a feeling. It commits him to a practice. From that hour you say it. You say it when you do not want to, and when you are hungry, and when the rains fail, and when a child in the house is ill, and when somebody has insulted you in front of people who know you, and at the end when you cannot get your breath. Nobody is watching to see whether you do it. There is no one to report to.

It also puts a man under a person. That is the part nobody mentions at the time and everybody finds out afterwards. Until that evening Sūrdās had been the top of his own arrangement. Men came to the thorn stand above the flood line and called him svāmī and took the name from him, and he gave it, and what he said about God on that stretch of sand was the last word on the subject because there was nobody there to say otherwise. After that evening there was a man above him, and the man was not gentle, and had called him a donkey within the hour.

He said the name back.

The men on the bank could see that something was being done and could not hear what it was, which is the usual arrangement. The Ācārya's people had already moved off to give the two of them room. Sūrdās's own men had come over behind him in the course of the evening, the way men do when their teacher has gone to sit in front of somebody else's, and they were somewhere out on the sand in the dark, not close enough to hear and not far enough to be anywhere else.

Then Vallabha put his hand on his head, and made him say the other thing.

The second part is the samarpaṇ, the giving over, which is called brahma-sambandha. It is not a vow to do better. It is a conveyance, of the kind a man makes when he signs a field away, and it is said aloud, in words, after the man who is giving it to you.

What is conveyed is everything. The body first, which is the item people expect least, and then the senses one by one, the eyes and the ears and the tongue and the nose and the skin, and the breath, and the mind, and the wife if there is a wife, and the house, and the sons, and the grain in the jar, and the cloth on the back, and whatever the hands make from that day forward, in this life and in whatever lives came before it and whatever may come after. All of it goes over to Kṛṣṇa. It is not lent and there is no arrangement for getting any of it back. What a man keeps is the use of it, and he keeps that the way a servant keeps the use of his master's tools.

For a singer the item on that list that matters is the voice.

It has to be said flatly what that meant for him, because it was his whole living and everybody at Gaughāṭ knew it. He had a throat that had been worked on since he was a boy and he had spent years learning what to do with it. He knew where a crowd's attention went slack and how to get it back. He knew which rāga would carry across moving water and which one would not. He knew the exact weight of the pause before a last line. That was capital, and he had earned it the hard way, and he had sold it every day of his adult life at a ford on a pilgrim road and eaten out of what it brought in.

Merchants going north with cloth were held at that ford whenever the water or the ferrymen were wrong, and they sat about with nothing to do in the evenings, and he had sung to them and they had gone on in the morning leaving more on his mat than he could carry off in one trip. He could do that on any day he chose, and he knew he could. That was the whole of it: the thing he had been given instead of eyes, and the thing that had fed him since he was a boy on the road, and the thing he was better at than almost anybody alive.

After the samarpaṇ he had all of it still and none of it was his. A man who has made that giving cannot sing for his belly. He cannot sing to be admired, and he cannot take a patron, and he cannot hold back the best of what he has for the paying crowd and give the rest to God. Whatever comes out of him has already been made over, before it is made. He sings it to the one it belongs to, and the grain comes onto the mat or it does not.

Nobody sat him down and explained this. It took about as long to do as the name had taken.

Then came the third thing.

Vallabha recited to him the anukramaṇikā of the tenth skandha.

The Bhāgavata is in twelve books and the tenth is the book of the child. The anukramaṇikā is the list of what is in it. Not the stories. The order of them, the headings, the bare account of what happens and in what sequence, the way a man going through a bundle will tell you what is in it before he unties the cord.

The cold had come off the water by then, the way it does on that river in the dry months an hour or two after dark, and Sūrdās was sitting in the cloth he had put on wet. Nobody offered him anything to put over it and he did not ask. The lamp on the sand had a moth at it. The Ācārya's voice was not a singer's voice and had no weight in it at all, and he got through the thing at the pace of a man reading out an inventory.

He said it straight through, sitting on a low seat on the sand at Gaughāṭ, at night, in the honorific plural he used for everything, to a blind man who could not read and had never been taught.

The king at Mathura driving his sister's wedding chariot, and the voice out of the air telling him which child would kill him. The children born and taken and killed, one after another. The seventh one moved across into the other wife's womb. The birth at midnight in the prison, and the chains coming off, and the doors standing open, and the guards asleep on their faces. The father carrying the child out and the river going down to let him cross and closing again behind him. The two children exchanged before morning, and the girl slipping out of the king's hands as he swung her. The woman who came with poison on her breast and was given the breast to give. The cart kicked over. The whirlwind that carried him off and put him down. The dirt eaten and lied about, and the mother looking into the mouth. The butter. The butter again. The mortar, and the rope that was always two fingers short, and the two trees that came down in the yard. The move to the new woods, and the calf that was not a calf, and the crane. The boys and the calves taken away and given back. The palm grove. The snake in the pool and the dancing on its heads. The fire in the dry grass, swallowed. The rains coming. The flute at dusk, and the women standing still in their houses with their hands in whatever they were doing, telling each other what it was like. The clothes taken up into the kadamb tree. The brāhmaṇs who would not give food and their wives who did. The sacrifice stopped, and the hill lifted on the one hand and held there seven days with the whole village and the cattle under it, and the rain beaten off, and the king of the gods coming down afterwards with nothing to say. The night on the sand at the full moon, and the dance in it, and the vanishing in the middle of the dance, and the searching, and the coming back. The serpent that swallowed the headman and was made to let him go. The man sent from Mathura with the chariot. The washerman, the flower seller, the crooked woman made straight. The bow broken. The elephant at the gate. The wrestlers. The king pulled off his seat by the hair and dragged the length of the floor. The parents found in the prison and the chains struck off them. The school, and the boy who shared his lodging there. And the friend sent back from Mathura to that country with a message for the women who had been left, and what the women said to him when he delivered it.

The river went on against the steps below them. A dog started up somewhere on the bank and stopped. The Ācārya finished the list and said nothing further, and for a while neither did anybody else.

Then Sūrdās's faults went out of him and the ninefold bhakti was accomplished in him, the hearing and the singing and the remembering and the serving and the rest of them, all nine and complete.

Three things came out of him after that, one after another, and they came in this order.

The first was a verse in Sanskrit. It bowed in the heart to the one who lies on the serpent, whose līlā is not a thing separate from him, who is served by a thousand Lakṣmīs, and who holds all the arts. Vallabha had written a commentary on the Bhāgavata, the Subodhinī, and at the head of the part of it that takes the tenth book stood an opening verse, and what Sūrdās said on the sand was that verse, word for word, in Sanskrit, in metre, though nobody had ever said it to him. Vallabha knew from it that the whole of the Subodhinī had been opened in him. Sūrdās was blind and had never been to a teacher and had never in his life read a line of anything.

The second was a pada in rāg Bilāval, which is a morning rāga, and the night by then was far enough gone that it was not the wrong one.

Out on the water the cakvā and the cakaī were calling. They are the ruddy shelducks that come onto the sandbanks of that river in the cold months, and they feed all day in sight of each other, and at dark they are parted, every night of their lives, and call across the water until it gets light. Every poet in that language has used them. He had been listening to them from that stretch of sand for years and knew them the way he knew the ferry chain.

Cakaī, get up and go to the lake of his feet.

There is no far bank there and no dark coming, and nobody calls across.

Here you are given the one day and made to pay for it with the whole night.

You have spent your life answering a voice you cannot reach in time.

Go to the water that does not divide anybody.

Sūr says: love with no parting in it, and no morning wanted.

The third was in rāg Devagandhār, and it was the Nanda-mahotsav, the day the child was born in Gokul and the headman of the village found out.

Braj, the headman has a son.

The word is out in the lanes before anyone has lit a lamp.

Nanda is giving away cows and cloth and cannot count what he is giving.

The women are at the doors with curd in their hands and turmeric in it,

and not one of them is walking straight.

Drums at the gate. The old men are dancing and nobody has told them to stop.

Sūr says: there is butter trodden into the road and nobody minding it.

The Ācārya let the end of it go and then said:

Sūrdās, it is as though you were standing right there.

Behind him on the sand his own men had heard the whole of it. They had been listening to that voice for years and had a fair idea of what was in it, and between them they knew every song he had and could tell from the first two notes which one was coming. They had never heard either of these. They had never heard anything like either of these. It was the same voice and it was not the same man using it, and every one of them out there in the dark could hear that.

Nobody went to bed. There was no reason to, by then, and nothing was said that would have let them.

The light came up the way it comes up over a river, first as a grey on the water that the fishermen work by and then all at once. The birds in the thorn started before anything else did. There was mist off the river at that hour in that season, lying along it at the height of a man, and the far bank was not there and then was.

Up on the bank the camp began to move. A man went down past them to the water with his pot. Somebody was breaking up thorn for kindling. Then the smell of smoke, and the sound of a man blowing on embers, which is a sound you cannot mistake for anything else, and then the same again further along, and further along again, one fire after another all down the sand, because each of them had his own to light and his own Ṭhākurjī to wake and to wash and to feed before he ate anything himself.

The cattle came down through the smoke to the water, as they did every morning.

Sūrdās sat where he had been sitting all night. His hair had dried on his back.

The Ācārya did not move his camp that day, or the next one.

He had come up off the Aḍel road with Braj in front of him and cause to be there, and a man like that does not sit down on a sandbank without a reason. He sat down on this one for two or three days, and what he did with them was teach.

The first morning he bathed and did the sandhyā and cooked and ate, in that order, because that was the order and he never varied it. Then, when Sūrdās's own men had been brought up to him, as is told below, he sent for Sūrdās and taught him the Puruṣottama Sahasranāma, the thousand names of God.

It is what its name says. A thousand names, in order, each of them a thing that can be said about him or a thing he has done, strung so that one pulls up the next, and it is recited straight through and not dipped into. A man with a book learns it by going over the page until he stops needing the page.

Sūrdās had never needed a page and had never had one.

They went at it in the shade at the top of the bank with the day getting hot around them. Vallabha said a stretch and stopped. Sūrdās gave it back. Vallabha said the next stretch and Sūrdās gave back both, and then the third and Sūrdās gave back all three, and so on through the morning and into the afternoon and through the next morning after that, while the ferry went over and came back and went over, and the carts came down to the water and shrieked their way up the far side, and the cattle stood in the shallows getting away from the flies.

He did not get any of it wrong. A man who cannot read does not carry his learning in a box he can open; he carries it in himself, in one piece, and either it is there or it never went in. Everything Sūrdās had ever been given he had been given through the ear, from the first rāga he learned as a boy on a road somewhere to the two padas he had sung at that fire the night before. He had spent his whole life doing exactly this and nothing but this. The thousand names went into him at the speed of speech.

Then the Bhāgavata broke open in him, the whole of it, and he began making padas out of the first book, and then out of the second, and then out of all twelve.

It took days and it happened in front of people.

The Ācārya's men were there and had nothing else to do. There were Sūrdās's own men, who had less than nothing else to do and would not have left in any case. There were the ferrymen, in the slack part of the afternoon. There were pilgrims who had come down the bank because somebody at the crossing told them that the singer was singing.

A man would say a thing and Sūrdās would take it up and sing it, and while he was singing it somebody else would think of the next thing, and it went on like that from after the meal until it was dark.

The first book, and the king who had seven days left and sat down by the river to use them properly. The fourth, and the boy who was told to get off his father's knee and went out into the forest at that age and stood still under a tree until he was answered. The sixth, and Ajāmil.

He had sung Ajāmil before. He had sung him at that same ford for years, in the pair of padas he used to open with, where Ajāmil is one of a line of wretches on a list and the list is there to make the singer look worse than any of them. He sang him now from the other end: the man at the end of a bad life calling his youngest son to him, and the boy's name being one of the names of God, and the messengers turning back at the door because a name had been said in the room.

The seventh, and the boy in his father's house who would not stop saying it, and the pillar coming apart. The eighth, the sea churned and the elephant in the water with its leg held and its trunk up. The ninth, and the kings. The tenth, which he was full of, and which took longest, and which they kept coming back to. The eleventh, and the end of the Yadus on the beach by the sea, killing each other with reeds. The twelfth, and the age we are in now, in which nothing works except the name.

Whatever they asked him for, he had. That is the plain account of those days on the sand at Gaughāṭ. Somebody would name a thing and there would be a pause of no particular length and then the thing would come out, made, in a rāga, with the last line of it carrying his name the way a potter's mark sits on the bottom of a pot.

Before any of this, on that first morning, he had done the other thing, and the other thing cost him more than the singing did.

He had disciples. That had been true for a long while and everybody at Gaughāṭ treated it as a fact of the place, like the ferry. They called him svāmī. They had built the hut and they kept it standing. They brought him what they had. Some of them had been with him for years and had come to him off the road the way he had come off the road himself, and one or two of them were men with houses and families in the villages behind the ford who came down when they could get away.

And he had given every one of them the name of God. With his own mouth, into the ear, the way it is done, because he was a svāmī and that is what a svāmī does.

He took all of them to Vallabha and had them given it again.

He did not make a speech about it. They came up one at a time, in the morning, and sat down in front of the low seat, and the Ācārya leaned over and said the name into the ear, and put his hand on the head, and then they got up and went back down the sand and the next one came up.

The oldest of them had been at the ford longer than Sūrdās had. He had come off the road with a bad leg and stayed because there was somebody there worth staying for, and he had carried water up that bank for years, and he went up to the seat with his leg dragging and got himself down on the sand in front of it and took the name from a stranger without asking a single question. The boy who had run down the sand on the evening the camp arrived took it too, and was told to sit up straight, and sat up straight.

Not one of them argued.

What it costs to do that is not small and there is no use pretending otherwise. The name is the one thing a teacher has that nobody can take off him. Everything else a man in that position holds is loose: the hut is only a hut, the grain comes and stops coming, the crowd at a ford is whoever happens to be at the ford that season. But a man who has given you the name stands above you for the rest of your life, and you touch his feet when you come in, and when he says a thing about God you do not go and check it with anybody. Sūrdās had that from every man on that sandbank, and he stood them all in a line and handed it over to a Telugu brāhmaṇ who had been on the ghāṭ for two days.

He did not seem to mind.

He did not lose a following. Every one of those men walked north with him afterwards or came to find him later, and he was the same man to them, only more so, because they had all heard what came out of him on that first night. What he lost was a position he had never been fit for and had never claimed to be fit for. He had said so himself in front of everybody, sitting on that sand: Maharaj, I do not know how. A man who says that and is then shown the thing he does not know does not go back afterwards and set up again as the one who knows. He gets his people over to where the knowing is and stands where he belongs, which was behind them, and then goes on with his work.

The establishment took care of itself, the way they do.

There was a hut above the flood line, low walls with thatch over them, and a mat in it and some pots and a jar or two, and a worn place in front of it where men sat, and a second worn place down by the water where he used to sing. There was nothing in any of it worth carrying. A hut of that kind wants attention after every rains and gets it as long as somebody wants the man inside it to stay. Once he is gone the thatch goes in one season and the rain gets into the top of the wall and takes it down a course a year, and the thorn stand grows back over the place, and the ferrymen stop saying "up by the singer's" when they mean that stretch of the bank, and after a while there is only sand there with the flood line on it, the same as the rest.

What he took out of it was himself and his stick.

They went up the river.

The party moved the way that kind of party moves, which is badly. It started late because somebody always had something still to pack. It stopped early because a place with wood and water near it had to be reached before dark. It went at the pace of whoever was slowest that day, and on most days that was an old man with a bundle, and nobody suggested leaving him. In the middle of the day it lay up under whatever trees there were.

At every stop the fires went on in a scatter, one to a man, and the smell of them came through the camp in that order, and each man cooked and offered to the Ṭhākurjī he carried and only then ate. Sūrdās ate what was put into his hands.

He walked all day with somebody's fingers round his arm just above the elbow.

That is how it is done and there is a skill in it, and by the second day the men taking turns at it had got the skill. You do not steer a man who has been walking roads since he was a boy. You walk half a pace in front and let your arm tell him where the ground is going, and you say the short words and nothing else. Step. Root. Down. Cart. You do not say "mind the hole", because by the time you have said it he is in the hole. You do not describe the view.

They did describe the view. Not while walking. In the evenings, at the fires, because he asked, and because there is nothing else to do at a fire.

They were not good at it. Men who have had eyes all their lives are hopeless at saying what is in front of them, and they would start on a thing and give it up halfway and tell him it was like something else he had also never seen. He took what he could get. He asked about the water first, always, because that he could work with: how wide here, how fast, where the sand was, whether the far bank was cut or shelving. Then the trees, one kind at a time. Then what was growing in the fields they had passed, and what the ground did to a wheel, and whether the villages were on mounds.

The country changed as they went north and they told him what it was doing, and he asked the kind of questions that show a man is building something: how far off, how high, how many, what colour is that, what colour is the dust here. He had been up and down that road before, in the years when he went where the festivals were, and he knew it the way a blind man knows a road, by its surfaces and its noises and what it smells of at each stage. He had never once gone into it as a place that anything had happened in.

He had sung it, though. He had sung it on a sandbank in the dark with a river going by underneath him and nothing else in front of him at all. A headman's yard and the word going down the lanes and the women running out with curd in their hands and the old men dancing at the gate. He had sung it without having stood in any of it.

Now he was walking into it, at the pace of an old man with a bundle, with somebody's hand on his arm.

The ground gave it away first. The road ran out of the hard grey stuff and onto something finer and paler that took the foot in and gave it back slowly, and the dust that came up into his face off the bullocks in front was a different dust and smelled of itself. The thorn changed. There were trees he could hear the size of, standing singly in the fields the way trees stand when people have planted them and kept the goats off them.

There was smoke on the air from a village off to the left, and under it the smell that country has and does not lose, which is cattle and dung fires and dust and something sweet off the flowering trees, all of it together and none of it separable, coming up warm out of the ground in the afternoon.

There were cows on the road. Not one or two, going somewhere. Cows the way cows are where they are the business of the place, in among the carts, and men and boys with them, and the whole thing moving at the speed of the animals and nobody sounding as though they minded.

Then the peacocks. There were more of them than there was any accounting for, in the scrub on both sides and up in the branches, and they were calling across the road at each other over the noise of the carts, and they went on doing it all afternoon.

He stopped in the middle of the road and stood still.

The man leading him stopped too, and let go of his arm, and told him where they were.

The road bent down towards the water in the last part of the afternoon and the party went down with it, in among the carts, and came into Gokul with the cattle.

Gokul stands on the far bank of the river, downstream of Mathura, where the land is low and the water comes round in a long slack bend. It is not a town and has never been one. It is a settlement of herdsmen, which means the byres take up more ground than the houses and are better built, and the lanes are the width of one cow and are worn down below the level of the yards on either side, so that a man walking through the middle of the place is walking in a trench with walls of mud either side of him at the height of his shoulder. The walls are plastered with dung and the dung dries pale. There are stacks of it by every door, patted into cakes with the print of somebody's hand still in them, because that is the fuel of that country and always has been. There is a great deal of ash. In the evening the ash gets into the air along with everything else.

The ghāṭ is stone at the top and mud below it, and the steps are shallow and wide, and in the dry weather the sand goes out a long way from the bottom of them.

That is the place the child was carried to across the water on the night he was born.

He was born in the prison at Mathura, on the other side, in the dark half of the month, in the rain. His father took him out of the cell with the chains off and the doors open and the guards asleep, and went down to the river with the child held up over his head, and the water was high and coming down hard and it went aside for him and let him across. He came into this village in the middle of the night and went into the headman's house and put the boy down where the headman's wife was lying asleep after her own delivery, and took the girl who had been born to her that night and carried her back over the water and into the cell, and the doors shut and the chains went back on. The woman in the herdsman's house woke up in the morning and found a son.

None of that shows. There is nothing to see in Gokul except Gokul. Boys go by with sticks and a switch of tamarisk, driving buffalo that have no interest in being driven. Women stand in the lanes and talk from one doorway to the other and do not move out of the way for anybody. Somebody's calf is always loose. The place smells of cattle and smoke and the river and the sweetish rot of the bank, and in the evening the smoke sits low over the roofs and does not lift until the wind comes up off the water.

The people who live there will tell you the rest of it without being asked, in the present tense, pointing. That yard. That door. The pot stood there and the churn stood there and he got at it from behind. They are not remembering. They are giving directions.

The party came in and stopped at the open ground above the ghāṭ, and the fires went on in their usual scatter, one to a man, and the Ācārya went through the evening in his own order, the bath and then the sandhyā and then the cooking and then the eating, which was the order he kept everywhere and had kept on the sand at Gaughāṭ and would keep on the hill.

He had been in this village before. It was here, by this water, at midnight, that he had been told what he was to do with the people who came to him, and he had been sitting on the ghāṭ when he was told it, and there had been one other man present who heard the words and did not understand them. He did not mention any of this. Sūrdās found out later, from somebody else, the way he found out most things.

In the morning the Ācārya said one thing to him.

Sūrdās, he said. Take darśan of Gokul.

Then he went off about his own business and left him standing there.

Darśan is the seeing of a holy thing, and in that country it is also the thing's seeing of you, and the two happen in the one act and are not separable. What it asks of a man is that he go and stand in front of what he has come for and look at it. That is the whole of the practice. People walk for weeks to do it and stand about for hours to do it and come out afterwards saying what the eyes were like.

Sūrdās had come to a village and been told to look at it.

What he did was go down full length on the ground.

The word for it is daṇḍavat, from the stick, because a stick laid down on the earth lies along the whole of itself and that is how the body goes: flat, face to the ground, arms out over the head, nothing held back, the same length lying down that it has standing up. It is the bottom of the whole scale of courtesies. Below it there is nothing.

He was in the open ground above the ghāṭ when he did it, near the top of the steps. He put his stick down first, along his side where he could find it again. Then he went down onto his knees, and then forward onto his hands, and then he let his arms go out in front of him and came down onto his face.

The men who had walked up from Gaughāṭ with him had seen it done a thousand times and thought nothing of it, because their own teacher had them making the daṇḍavat at every gate and every flag between Aḍel and here. The village thought something of it. A daṇḍavat in the open, in the middle of the morning, by a stranger, in front of nothing in particular, is worth coming out for. Two or three women came to their doors with wet hands. A man with a load on his head stopped, and stood with it still on his head, and waited to see how long this was going to take.

The ground there was not clean and was never going to be. It was dust with dung worked into it and hoof marks all through it, dried into ridges since the last rain, and there was chaff in it and the husks of something, and it was already warm on the top and cold half an inch down. He put his forehead on it and the grit came into the skin and stayed there.

At the bow, with his forehead on the ground, the whole child-play of Gokul opened in him, the way a room is there all at once when a lamp is carried into it.

He got himself up onto his knees and stayed there a minute, and then he said, to whoever was near him, that he wanted to sing.

They took him a little way off the steps, to the edge of a yard where there was a wall to put his back against and the ground was swept, because a woman had swept it that morning and was still there with the broom. It was the middle of the forenoon by then. He sat down and settled himself, and found the tāl by knocking it out on his own thigh with the flat of his hand, which is what he did all his life when there was nothing else to hand, and he sang it in Bilāval, which belongs to that hour of the morning.

He is crawling across the yard and the dust comes up with him.

Dust on the knees of him, dust in the creases, dust on the mouth.

Somebody put the yellow mark on his forehead at first light and it is still there.

At his throat the tiger's claw on its black cord, swinging when he swings.

He gets one hand forward and then the other, and stops, and looks round to see who is watching.

Whoever has stood in a doorway and watched that

has had out of this world the one thing that was worth having.

Sūr says: and I have stood there.

The woman with the broom did not go back to her sweeping.

There was a crowd round him by the end of it, which in a village at that hour means everybody who was not out with the cattle. Somebody's child was put down in the dust in front of him, on the theory that this was the appropriate thing to do, and sat there and stayed. An old man came out and stood with his hand on the wall and did not sit down and did not go away. Nobody asked him where he had got it. In Gokul that is not a question, because what he was describing was that yard, and the child had been in it, and the people standing round him had the same view of the matter that their great-grandmothers had.

He sang others after it. The cradle and the rope of it and the women pushing it with one foot while they worked. The mother wiping his face and getting nowhere. The fist that would not open and the butter coming out between the fingers of it anyway. He went on into the middle of the day, and they brought him water, and somebody put a dish of curd down beside him that he did not touch, and he went on after that.

By the afternoon there were people in that yard from two lanes away, and the woman who owned it had given up on the idea that it was hers.

The Ācārya came over at some point and sat down at the edge of the group with everyone else and listened, and said nothing at all, either then or afterwards, to Sūrdās about what he had heard.

What he did with it was arithmetic.

There was a temple on a hill to the west with an image in it that had come up out of the rock, and he had installed that image with his own hands and had been running the place ever since, and running a place of that kind is not a matter of feeling. It is posts. There has to be a man for the kitchen and men under him, because the food is cooked fresh every time and offered hot and the quantities are not small and the grain has to be there before it can be cooked. There has to be a man for the cloth and the ornaments, who knows what goes on in the hot weather and what goes on in the cold, and where the small things are kept, and how many there are of them, and who has to account for one that is missing. There has to be a store and a man over the store. There has to be somebody for the flowers and somebody for the water and somebody who does nothing but the lamps, and somebody at the gate to keep the gate, and somebody to sweep, and somebody whose whole office is to blow a conch at the right moment of the afternoon and not before. There are cows and there is a pen and there are cowherds, and the cowherds have to be paid and fed and watched. Over the whole of it there has to be a manager, and the manager has to be hard, because temples attract every kind of person.

He had filled all of it. He could have named the man in each post and generally did, and when a man was wrong for a post he moved him, and when a man offended he said so to his face and did not soften it afterwards. Nothing up there had been arranged in advance. The place had grown the way such places grow, by one thing being wanted and then another, and each time something was wanted he had found the man for it and told him what he was now responsible for, and gone on. Every part of that establishment had begun as a want and ended as somebody's job.

There was one department he had never filled.

Singing went on at that temple the way singing goes on anywhere in that country: whoever was there sang. It was nobody's office. There was no one man answerable for what went up in front of the image at each of the eight times the doors opened, and for which pada went with which hour and which season, and for the making of new ones, and for the standard of it. He had not appointed anybody because he had not found anybody he could appoint. He was not going to hand that over to a good voice.

In a yard at Gokul with dust still on his forehead, sitting against a wall with a village round him, was the singing.

There was a second thing in it, and being the kind of man he was, he had that thought too and did not dwell on it. Of every post in that temple, the kitchen, the cloth, the ornaments, the store, the lamps, the cows, there was exactly one that did not want eyes. It was the one that was empty.

He said nothing about any of it that day, to Sūrdās or to anybody. He was not a man who announced a decision at the moment of making it. He made it, and then some days later a man would be told what he was to do, in one sentence, with no preamble and no explanation of how it had been arrived at, and there was no appeal.

In the evening, after the meal, he asked one of his people whether the road on the far side of the river was dry yet, and was told that it was, and said that they would go up to Govardhan in the morning.

Down at the ghāṭ the last of the buffalo were coming out of the water and the boys were shouting at them, and in a swept yard two lanes back a woman was picking up the dish of curd that nobody had eaten.

They crossed the river in the morning and walked west, and then south and west again, and the country dried out under them as they went.

The change came up through his feet before anybody mentioned it. The sand of the riverside gave way to a harder ground with grit in it, and then to ground with stone lying about on top of it, flat pieces the size of a hand that turned under the foot and rang faintly when a bullock kicked one. The dust changed colour and the men told him so. It had been pale and it went red. By the second day there was red dust on everything they owned and in the folds of their clothes and in his hair, and it stayed there for the rest of his life, because that is what that dust does.

He asked them what the hill was like and they were no use, as usual.

They said it was a hill. They said it was big. One of them, who had been up it twice, did better, and what he gave him was this: it is not high. It is long. It lies along the country the way a fallen thing lies, from that end to that end, four or five miles of it, and at no point along the whole of it does it stand higher above the fields than a big tree stands. It is stone all through. The stone shows in the fields for a long way round, and the wells there come up on stone, and the villages at its foot are built of it.

It does not look like one. A man coming from a country with real hills in it will get his first sight of Govardhan and ask where the hill is.

And everybody walks round it. That is the thing you do there. The walk round the base of it is a parikrama, and it takes the better part of a day, and people do it barefoot because of what the hill is, and they do it not in order to arrive anywhere but as the act itself, and a man who has done it has done the whole of what he came for. On any day of the year there are people on that road. On the days that matter there are people on it the whole way round, and the road is a river of them, and it moves at the pace of the slowest woman in it.

Sūrdās came onto that road in the middle of the afternoon and knew it immediately for what it was, because he had spent his life on roads full of pilgrims and could tell one from a trade road by the sound in about four steps. Nobody was driving anything. Nobody was in a hurry. The feet were bare, which makes a different noise from feet in shoes, softer and more of it at once. There were women singing in one place and a group of men counting something aloud in another, and there were children being carried who wanted to be put down.

He asked the man walking with him how the god had got onto the hill.

So he was told it, walking, at the pace of the road, in the flat way a man tells a thing that everyone in his hearing already knows.

It came up out of the hill. Not all at once. A part of it showed itself and then after a time another part, and what had been rock was an arm and a face and a body standing out of the rock, and the whole of it came out over years and stopped when it was done. Before any of it showed on the hill it had shown itself in a house, in the village of Anyor, which lies under the high part of the ridge, in the house of a man called Mānikcand Pāṇḍe. Mānikcand's brother was Sadu Pāṇḍe. When the Ācārya first came to that country Sadu Pāṇḍe told him the whole of the appearing from the beginning, sitting with him, in order, and it took as long as it took.

For a long while there was no temple. The Braj people put up a thatch over it, the kind of thatch a village puts up, four poles and a roof and no walls, and it sat under that. They brought it what they had, which was milk and curd, and they brought it up the hill themselves and left it and went down again.

It said what its own name was. The name it gave was Devadamana, and there are three damanas on that hill and it said which one it was.

The name Śrīnāthjī is the Ācārya's. He gave it when the image was put into a temple and seated, and after that everybody used it and the old name went quiet. Later, when the cows came, he gave it the name Gopāl as well.

The cows came because the image asked for them. It said to him, in the way it said things to him, that it wanted cows. He had no money. He took the gold ring off his own hand and sent a man down to sell it and buy cows with what it fetched, and what it fetched was enough for two. A man of that country who had cows of his own objected that all his cows were already the Ācārya's and there was no need of any of this, and then did as he was told, and sold the ring, and bought the two, and gave ten of his own besides. After that it went the way these things go. Word got about and men began sending two and four and ten apiece from wherever they were, and in the end more than two hundred cows were given, and there had to be a pen for them and men to take them out and bring them in.

The first temple was small. A man called Rāmdās Cauhān, who lived in a cave of the hill and had done for years, built it, and the sevā of it was given to him.

The big one was built by a kṣatrī named Pūranmal, and it was built because the image told him to build it. He began at the bottom and put everything he had into the foundations, which is where a man's money goes when he is not cutting corners, and the money ran out with the walls not up. So he went east to earn more. While he was away there were people with money who were perfectly willing to finish it for him, and they were not allowed to, and the work stood where it was and waited for him. He came back and finished it himself. The Ācārya chose the hour and seated the image in it.

They came in under the hill at the end of that day and slept at the foot of it.

In the morning the Ācārya said: Sūrdās, come up. Bathe, and take darśan of Śrīnāthjī.

The path goes up from the foot in a way that is obvious to anybody with eyes and has to be learnt any other way. It is not a made road. It is rock, mostly, with steps cut into it where the rock made steps necessary, and the cut steps are not of one height and never were, and between them there are long stretches of bare sandstone worn smooth and slippery by feet, and in the smooth places there is loose grit lying on top which is the part that puts people down.

A man went up ahead of him and he put his right hand flat on that man's shoulder blade, and a second man came behind with a hand at his back, which he did not need and which nobody removed.

The method is this. The man in front takes short steps and does not talk. When a step is coming he raises his shoulder slightly under the hand and the hand feels it. When the step is a long one he stops for a moment first. He does not say a word until there is something that cannot be done with the shoulder, and then he says one word. Up. Loose. Round. Sūrdās came up that path with his stick in his left hand, tapping ahead of his own foot on every second step, feeling for the edge of the rock and the depth of the drop beside it, and he found the edge twice and was not troubled by it.

His feet were bare on the stone. The stone was cool at that hour and would not be for long. It was rough in some places and glass-smooth in others and he learnt the difference as he went, and he learnt the smell of the path, which on that hill is dry rock and dung and the scrub that grows out of the cracks and gets crushed underfoot.

He stopped twice on the way up, to get the feel of the path, and stood with his hand still on the man's shoulder. Nobody said anything about it. Going up a rock path blind is slow work, and there were old men on it all round him going up with a stick and stopping.

Above them somewhere there was a flag on a pole and the wind was in it. He could hear it cracking. He asked what it was and was told, and then he knew how far there was to go, because he could hear it getting nearer.

The top of that hill is not a summit and there is nothing to stand on. It is a long back of broken rock with scrub in the cracks of it and thorn growing out sideways, and paths going off along it in both directions, and the wind comes over it without anything to stop it. He could hear goats somewhere below on the far side, and a kitchen, and the flag, and under all of it the sound of a great many people moving about on stone.

There was water on the hill and he bathed in it. It was cold, colder than the river had been, being deep and out of the sun. He put his clothes on the stone and went down the steps into it and stood with it at his chest, and then came out and dressed and wrung his hair out down his back the way he had at Gaughāṭ.

Then they took him up the last of it and in through the gate.

The gate at that temple has a lion on it and is called for the lion. Inside the gate the ground is flat and swept and enclosed and the noise changes, because the noise of an open hillside is nothing like the noise of a stone court with people in it. There were a great many people in it. There was the smell of ghee burning, which is a particular smell and not like any other burning oil, and under that the flowers, which at that season were marigold and had been made into strings and handled a great deal, and under both of them the sharp green smell of tulsī leaves being torn.

They walked him across the court and into the hall inside it and put him in a place and turned him to face the right way.

The doors were open.

The image in front of him was black stone and had come out of that hill and had the hill still in it. The left arm goes up over the head, the fingers bent as if round something not there. The eyes are large and heavy-lidded and set wide. It was dressed that morning in the way it is always dressed, in cloth for the season, with the ornaments on and the flowers over them, and it was standing in the middle of all that as a child stands in the middle of being dressed up by women, which is to say patiently and not for long.

The Ācārya was beside him.

Sing something for Śrīnāthjī, he said.

Sūrdās had the whole of Gokul in him, the dust and the yard and the tiger's claw and the fist with the butter in it, and any of it would have done. What came out of him was not any of it.

He sang it in Dhanāśrī, which is the evening rāga and was the wrong one for the hour, and he sang it standing, and it was the first thing anybody on that hill ever heard him sing.

I have danced enough now, Gopāl.

The costume was on me from the start and I never once took it off.

Bells at my ankles, desire pulling the strings, greed beating the drum,

and I turned when the drum turned and stopped when the copper came down.

I went where the crowd was. I sang whatever the crowd was paying for.

There is no hunger left in me for another engagement.

Sūr has come in off the road. Take the costume off me and let me sit down.

It is not the pair he sang on the sand. Those were built to work on a listener and they worked, and the man in them is a wretch and is saying so with a crowd in front of him. This one has no crowd in it. It is a man in a trade handing in the trade, at the end of a working life, to the only employer he now recognises, and the request in it is not for pardon. It is to be let off the dancing.

The Ācārya heard it out.

Then he said: Sūrdās, there is no ignorance left in you now. He has taken it off you himself. Now sing his glory.

Behind him and around him the hall had filled up in the way it fills at that hour. They had come up from the villages at the foot and from Anyor just below and from the road, and they were the people of that country and nothing else: men who had come straight off the field with the dung still on their hands, women with brass pots of milk and curd to leave at the door, boys who had been sent with an older sister and were fidgeting, old men who had done the whole parikrama that morning before coming up.

He had heard them come in. He could hear what they were carrying and roughly how many of them there were, and he could hear that none of them had been given any education worth speaking of, because of how they talked to each other.

He sang about them, in Gaurī.

Who is a match for the people of this country?

They have no learning. They have read nothing. No one ever taught them anything.

They smell of cattle and their hands are dirty and their speech is rough,

and the lord of the three worlds goes out to the field with them at first light

and eats out of their bundle and comes back in at dusk behind their cows.

The rest of us work out methods for reaching him.

They call him by his name across a yard and he turns round.

Sūr says: what was I ever going to be, born anywhere else.

Somewhere in the middle of it a herdsman standing near the front worked out that the song was about him, and put his pot down on the floor, and did not pick it up again until it was over.

Nobody explained anything to anybody. A cowherd in that hall did not need to be told what he had in his village and what the learned did not have, and a man who had come up from Gokul singing about a child in a yard did not need to be told either.

Then the hour came and the hour is the hour. A man came out and stood at the side of the doors. The kīrtan stopped where it was. The flowers were taken off and the last of the people were moved along and out, and one or two of them were slow about it and were moved along anyway.

The doors were pulled to from the inside, one and then the other, and the bar went across, and the noise of the hall was suddenly the noise of a stone room with a lot of people breathing in it, and then that thinned out too as they went down.

The appointment came some days later and took one sentence.

The Ācārya found him in the morning, with other people about, and said that the kīrtan at Śrīnāthjī's was his now, and that he was to do it, and then went on to whatever he had been going to do next. There was nothing put round it. Nobody was called to witness it. He was not given a cloth or a seat or a title, and for the rest of his life the only thing that marked the office was that at every hour when the doors opened he was standing inside them.

Kīrtan is the singing that goes on in front of the image. In that house it is not an ornament laid on top of the service. It is a part of the service in the way the food is a part of it, and a part that cannot be left out or done late, and the man who does it is a servant of the same establishment as the cook and is not a guest artist who has been brought in.

The word for the whole of it is sevā, which is service, and what it means there is the domestic care of a living person: waking him, washing him, dressing him, feeding him at the hours when a person eats, letting him rest when a person rests, taking him out in the evening, putting him to bed. Everything done in that temple is one of those things. The image is the person it is done for, and he is a child, and he is a child of that country and not of any other, and he is treated accordingly, which is to say without ceremony and with a good deal of fuss.

The day begins before there is any light at all.

The hill is coldest then and the stone holds the cold. Somebody comes up to wherever Sūrdās is sleeping and says his name once, and he is generally awake already, because old men wake early and singers wake at the hour they sing. He goes up the path in the dark with a hand on a shoulder. The dark makes no difference to him and makes a good deal of difference to the man in front, who goes slower at that hour and takes the steps one at a time. There are others on the path. You can hear the cooks, who have been up longer than anybody, and the water being carried, and the first of the cows shifting about in the pen.

Inside, the lamps are lit and the smell of the place at that hour is ghee and cold stone and yesterday's flowers being carried out.

Then the doors open, and this first opening is the maṅgalā, and what is given at it is the child asleep and then the child woken.

He is not woken roughly. He is woken the way a small boy is woken in a house where everybody loves him and nobody is willing to let him sleep any longer, with the lamp brought near and a hand on him and a voice going on quietly until his eyes are open. That voice is the singing. A maṅgalā pada is a song for getting a child out of bed: it is morning, the birds have started, your mother is calling you, the calves want feeding, the other boys are already out, get up. It is sung quietly because of the hour, and it is sung to somebody a few feet away who has just opened his eyes, and if it is sung as a performance it is wrong.

The doors close again and he is bathed and dressed, and this is the śṛṅgār.

It takes a long time and is the most particular work in the temple. There is a man whose whole office it is, with others helping him, and they have the clothes ready for the season and the day, and the ornaments come out of the store and are counted out and counted back in. There is a tilak to be put on the forehead and the hair to be seen to and a garland to be made that day and not the day before. In the hot months the cloth is thin and light and there is less of it and the flowers are the cooling kind. In the cold months he is dressed warm, and he is given a wrap, because he complains of the cold and has been known to complain three times running until something was done about it.

When the doors open on the dressed image, the hall fills up.

Sūrdās stood for that at the maṇikoṭhā, the pillared hall inside the gate, and that is where he stood at every hour of every day for the rest of his life. It is the place honoured visitors are brought to when they come, and where a singer stands, and it is enclosed and stone and it holds a voice.

Somebody had to walk him to his place and turn him the right way. Every time. At every one of the eight openings between one dark and the next, for years, a man took him by the arm at the gate and brought him across and set him where he stood and squared his shoulders to the doors, and then went off to his own work. It was nobody's particular job. Whoever was nearest did it. In the whole of that temple nobody appears to have thought it worth remarking on, any more than they remarked on the man who carried water or the man who swept, and they did not stop doing it, and it was done for him on the last morning as it had been on the first.

What he did there is a trade with rules, and he had come to it from another trade with different rules, and the difference is the whole of what he had to learn.

On the pilgrim road a singer sings at people. He has a crowd in front of him that did not come for him and may leave, and everything he knows is bent towards holding them: where to put the big line, when to repeat, how long to let a silence run before it stops being a silence and starts being a gap. He sang like that for a lifetime and was very good at it.

In the maṇikoṭhā there is no crowd in that sense. There are people, often a great many, and they are not being sung to. They are standing behind him and he has his back to them. What he is doing is singing to a child at the other end of the hall who is at that moment being got up, or dressed, or fed, or taken out, or put to bed, and the song is a part of that operation and has to fit it exactly.

So: the rāga of the hour. That he had known since he was a boy, because it is the first thing a road singer learns and the thing he is judged on. Every rāga has its hour and you do not move it. The morning ones are morning ones. Dhanāśrī is for the evening. To sing one out of its hour in front of anybody who knows is to say plainly that you do not know your work, and in a temple it is worse than that, because the hour is not a convention there, it is what is actually happening in the room.

Then the songs of the season, which are a second grid laid across the first. There are padas for the hot weather and padas for the rains and padas for the cold, and a pada about a boy being wrapped up against the wind has no business in the maṇikoṭhā in the month before the rains break.

Then the hour of the sevā itself, which is the thing that had to be learnt fresh. A pada made for the dressing is no use at the putting to bed. It is not a question of taste. The dressing pada is about cloth and ornament and the mother standing back to look at him. The bed pada is about a child who does not want to go to bed and is being talked into it. You cannot use one for the other, and a man who tries it will find that the song and the room are doing two different things and everybody in the hall can feel it.

He learnt the whole grid and then he filled it. That is what the work was. Not a repertory of good songs but a pada for every hour of every kind of day in every season, and then more of them, and then better ones, and then the same hour again from a different side.

At the middle of the day comes the rājbhog, which is the great offering, and it is the largest thing that happens in that house.

The kitchen has been at it since before light. The quantities are the quantities of a household feeding a person of consequence and everybody attached to him, and the food goes in hot and is offered hot, and nothing that has gone cold or been set aside or been looked over by the wrong person goes in at all. The doors are shut while he eats. Then they open, and what is given is the child who has just eaten, and at the end of it the lamp goes round.

The ārtī is the lamp taken round in front of him in the dark of that inner room, and the bell goes, and it is the point at which the hall makes its most noise in the whole day. Sūrdās sang through it. A singer in that position sings to be heard over a bell and a conch and a packed hall, and he had a voice that could be heard across a ford in flood, and it carried.

Between the dressing and the great offering the doors come open once more, and briefly, and that one is the gvāl. It is the cowherds' hour. He has been dressed and fed and is going out with the cattle, and the songs at it are short and are about getting a boy out of a gate: his stick, his blanket, the other boys already gone on ahead, his mother telling him to be back before dark. The crowd for it is small, because it falls at the hour when the people of the villages are taking their own cattle out.

Then the doors close for the anosar, and nothing at all happens.

The anosar is the interval. The curtain goes across and he is not to be seen by anybody: not by the singers, not by the manager, not by a visitor who has walked from Agra and arrives in the middle of the afternoon and will have to wait. Nobody is exempt. It is the hour when a child in that country is made to lie down out of the heat whether he wants to or not.

The hill in that hour is about as quiet as an inhabited place gets. The kitchen fires are out. The cows are in the shade with their heads down. The stone is too hot for bare feet and people walk on the shaded side or do not walk at all. The singers go and eat, and most of them sleep, because a man who sings at dawn and sings again at night generally has to.

Then, in the late afternoon, somebody blows a conch, and that is the utthāpan, the rousing, and the whole hill hears it and starts moving again.

He is woken from the afternoon sleep the way he was woken at dawn, except that it is harder, because nobody comes out of an afternoon sleep willingly. The songs for that hour say so. He is sleepy and cross and the cows have to be seen to and the other boys are waiting at the gate.

After that the bhog, the evening food, and that hour has a name among the people who go there: it is the hour of the Lord's court. It is the most crowded of the openings and the most splendid, and it is the one where the singing is heaviest. The tāl goes and the mṛdaṅg goes and the kīrtan goes on in front of him for as long as the hour lasts, and the hall is packed to the pillars, and men who have come up the hill after a day's work stand at the back and sing the responses without being asked to.

And then, outside, at the end of the light, the cows come in.

That is the sound that closes a day on that hill and nothing else comes near it. They come up off the low ground in one body with the dust going up behind them, and the whole of it arrives at the pen at once and jams in the gate of it, and the bells on the lead cows are the last thing to settle. Then the milking, and after the milking it goes quiet in stages.

The image on that hill is a herdsman's boy and that is his hour. He is supposed to be coming in with them. Everything sung in that part of the evening is about the return: the dust on him, the feet of him, the mother at the door counting the cows and then counting him, the flute stopping at the edge of the village.

Then the lamp again, the sandhyā ārtī, the evening one, with the doors open and the hall full of the smell of the fresh flowers that were put on at dusk.

And last, the sen. The final food is set out, light, the kind a child is given before sleep, milk among it. The bed is made ready. The small things are put where he will want them in the night. The doors open for a short time and are shut for the night.

What is sung then is one voice and not much of it. Nothing loud, nothing clever, no turns in it, no conclusion. A boy is being talked down into sleep and the song has to go to nothing and leave him there, and the singer has to stop before the child does.

That is one day. Then the same again, and the same again.

Over the top of it runs the year, and the year is why the work never became a routine.

In the rains the swings go up, ropes over a branch and a board across, and the country sings on swings for a month and the songs are swing songs and go with the movement of it. The boy's birthday falls in the dark half of a monsoon month and is kept at midnight, in the wet, with the whole hill awake and nobody sitting down, and what is sung at that hour is the prison and the chains and the river going aside. In the autumn the hill is fed. A mountain of cooked rice is built in front of it and every household in that country brings what it has, and the hill is the one being offered to, because the hill is what he lifted and the hill is him. In the spring colour is thrown, and it is thrown inside the temple as well as outside it, and the singers get it in the face like everybody else and go on singing. After the rains come the clear nights and the biggest of them is a full moon, and what is remembered on that night is a dance on the sand by the river, and it is sung all night.

Each of those wanted padas of its own and got them.

He made them the way he had always made them, which was without a pen and without anybody's help, standing or sitting, turning a thing over until it was right and then holding it. Nothing was written down for a long while. A song came out of him at the hour it was wanted and the other singers had it off him by ear, the same way he had taken songs off other men on the road all his working life, and if a line was changed the next time nobody minded, because the first thing that mattered was that it fitted the hour.

On a night in the cold weather the whole business ends early and ends quickly.

The wind comes off the open country onto the top of that hill after dark and there is nothing to break it. The stone gives back the cold through bare feet. The last doors are shut and barred from inside and the sound of it goes through the empty hall, and the men still in the court put out what needs putting out and pull their wrappers over their heads.

The singers go down the path together, not talking much, one lamp among them at the front where it is no use to the men at the back. Their voices are gone for the night. Below them the cows are packed in the pen and breathing, and there is smoke sitting on the villages at the foot in a flat layer, and the whole hill smells of woodsmoke and cold rock.

Somebody has Sūrdās by the arm, going down.

He came up the hill again in the cold weather, on foot, the way he came everywhere.

There was no procession. A man went ahead to say he was coming and a man walked behind him with the bundle, and that was the whole of it, and the people at the gate knew him before they were told because of the way he went up steps, which was steadily and without looking at them. He was old by then and it had not altered the pace at all. He had spent his life going round the country on his two feet and leaving the round wherever a summons found him and going back to that same place when he was free, and he was still doing it. He came from Aḍel, or from Gokul, or from somewhere further off that nobody on the hill had heard of, and he stayed some days and did the things he did, and went down the other side and was gone for a season.

On a visit he did the same things in the same order. He looked at the image. He asked how the service was being done and listened to the answer all the way through. He went round the kitchen and the store. He sat where they put him and people came and sat in front of him in twos and threes with whatever they had brought him, which was usually a question about their own households, and he answered in a sentence or two and did not make speeches. In the evenings somebody sang to him. If a thing was wrong he said so at once and by name, and if it was right he said nothing, and everybody on that hill understood the arrangement perfectly and nobody found it cold.

He went to the image before he went to anybody. This was known and nobody was offended by it. The first question he asked in a house was about the service and not about the people in it, and the people in it had got used to the order those two questions came in.

What he was like to deal with is best seen in small things.

Paramānanddās was on the hill once when a rājā's wife came for darśan and would only come if her veil was kept, so the crowd was cleared out for her, and then Śrīnāthjī threw the doors of the lion-gate open and the whole crowd came back in on top of her and the veil was pulled off her and she was shamed in front of everybody. Paramānanddās made a line about it on the spot, which was: what kind of a way of playing is this. And the Ācārya said: no. Say, good is this way of playing. And Paramānanddās sang it again with the line turned round.

That is the whole exchange and it is worth having. A man had made a good line out of a real thing that had just happened in front of him, and in the hearing of it he was told that one word in it was the wrong way up, and he did not argue and the Ācārya did not explain.

He could be harder than that. He sent three times to a woman called Rajo for ghee for the Lord, and each time he told the man carrying the message to say that he was angry. She refused him three times, because the ghee was put aside for a feeding of brāhmaṇs, and she sent back word that she was nobody's serving-woman. That night she came as she always came, with sweets she had made, and he sat with his back to her and would not turn round. She asked what her offence was. He said that he had sent for ghee for the Lord and had not been given it. She said: you had ghee of your own in the house, why did you not give it to him? And he had nothing to say to that, and he turned round, and he ate what she had brought, on a day he had no business eating twice.

He had cut a man off once, in a house at Thanesar, with water poured into the man's own hand and a mantra said over it, and never took food or water in that town again, and he had been overruled about it by the Lord himself, who had gone on eating at the cast-off man's house and said so plainly. He took that. He did not soften afterwards. What he did was make a rule out of it about how a man is to speak to a devotee, and he gave the rule to one man once and never said it again.

Then he went to Banaras.

He had a Vaiṣṇava hire a boat for it. It was the city he had argued in when he was younger, against the hardest men in the country, and it is a city built along one bank in a curve, with the steps going down the whole length of it into the water and the smoke off the burning grounds lying flat over the river on a cold morning. There were people with him. There were always people with him.

He took the ochre at the end and he kept it about six weeks. He had spent a lifetime telling householders to stay in their houses and keep their trades and their wives and their cattle and their shops, and to cook for the Lord first and eat what was left, and never to go into a forest to burn anything off themselves. When they asked him about the ochre he said that he was doing it for their sakes and not for his own, and that was the whole answer and there was not a second one.

Near the end he stopped speaking, and did not eat, and sat on the steps at Hanumān Ghāṭ, and his two sons came to him there. He would not break the silence, not for them either. What he did instead was write on a piece of paper, and what he wrote was three verses and half of a fourth, and that is the whole of what he left his sons in his own hand. It is not a long document. It says that the Lord will do it, that he will do it himself, and that a man who has given himself over should not worry.

It is called the āsura-vyāmoha-līlā, the play by which he confounded the ones who could not see.

He went down the steps in the morning. There was the usual crowd on that bank at that hour, people bathing and people carrying water up and people sitting with their knees drawn up waiting for the sun, and the boats going across, and the birds. He went down into the Ganges and he did not come out of it. The men standing on the bank saw a light go up out of the water and go on up until they lost it.

Sūrdās was not there. He was on the hill.

Word came up the road in the ordinary way, with somebody who had been at Banaras and had walked back, and it took as long to arrive as a man on foot takes. It went round the yard in an afternoon. The cooks heard it at the fire and the cowherds heard it at the pen and the men who swept the hall heard it with the brooms in their hands, and the whole place stood about for a while in the way a place does, and then the hour came round and the doors opened at the hour they open and the singing was done, because on that hill the doors open whatever has happened anywhere else.

Viṭṭhalnāth was the second son. There was an elder brother, Gopīnāth, who was a grown man with a name of his own and had been sent about the country on the family's business and had done it well, and who did not have long. The service came to Viṭṭhalnāth. He had it for the rest of his life and the shape he gave it is the shape it has.

He was not his father.

The first thing the old men noticed was that he would not let them put their heads on the ground in front of him. Dāmodardās had been the Ācārya's own man, the one nothing was kept back from, and when he came to make his daṇḍavat Viṭṭhalnāth stopped him and would not have it, and the reason he gave was that his father's own form was living in that man's heart and had never left it. Acyutdās was stopped the same way and given a different reason, which was that the Ācārya's grace was already on him and that settled it. He went further with Dāmodardās. At a śrāddha he asked him, as the fee for it, to explain the second verse of what the Lord had spoken at midnight at Gokul, and then he sat and said nothing at all while the old man went through the whole path from the beginning in front of him.

He travelled the way his father had travelled, which is to say on the road and into people's houses, but what happened in the houses was different. At Agra he came to a disciple's house and asked where the wife was, and was told she was keeping out of sight because she had nothing fit to come out in. So he went and cooked the meal himself, quickly, dāl and rice and four or five vegetables, and she came out only far enough to roll the bread. When the leaf plates ran out and the couple brought the Lord's own metal dishes for him to eat off, he refused them and said these are the Lord's vessels, how does one eat out of them, and he gave way only when they promised to buy new ones. Then he slept on the bedding they gave up to him and told them, when they pressed more food on him, that he would eat what he felt like eating.

He divided the week. Three days on the hill and three days at Gokul, and he went between the two the whole year round, so that neither house ever had him for long and neither house ever went without him.

He sat down and worked out what the place owed people. Every man inside the temple and every servant outside it had a due, and he fixed it, one by one, and saw that it was paid. This is not a thing anybody sings about and it is most of what he did. A temple that has grown is full of men doing work that nobody has ever put a figure against, and the ones who are quiet about it get less than the ones who are not, and the whole thing goes sour from underneath without anybody being able to say where it started. He went through it name by name. He put new men into the inner service and told them what they were to have. After that the service was done properly, which it had not always been. When he put men out of a service he found them another one. The Bengalis who lost Śrīnāthjī's service asked him what they were to eat now, and he gave them the service of another image and told them to eat whatever came.

His anger, when it came, was not a blow. It came out as a kind of upset, a man put out of countenance by something, and the people it fell on could tell the difference. There was a man at Nāroḍā who had been authorised by the Ācārya to give the name of God to others, and who kept telling the Vaiṣṇavas there that the name he gave was the same name Gusāīṃjī gave, and that he would give it to them himself at home. Gusāīṃjī heard him say it and gave them the name on the spot, and then said to him: what my father did for you stands and will stand; but the ones who took the name at your hands will not be ours. The reason he gave was that a sense of being a master had got into the man, and that it had spoiled the souls, and not the man. Then he did the whole lot again himself, and the man stood there and let it be done.

For the singers, everything got larger.

The service got larger first. There were more hands in it, more cooks, more cows, more of everything, and more people on the hill on any given day than there had been. Then it got tighter, because he ordered it. An hour that had been kept roughly was kept exactly. A festival that had been kept because somebody remembered it was put in its place in the year, and the year filled up, one thing after another all the way round from the colour to the swings to the birthday at midnight to the mountain of food in the autumn to the clear nights after the rains, and the year that came out of that is the year they keep now.

And the year has to be sung. That is the part that landed on the line in the maṇikoṭhā. A festival is a day with its own songs, and if there are more festivals there is more singing, and somebody has to have made the songs. He brought in four more poets, Govindswāmī and Chaturbhujdās and Nanddās and Chītswāmī, put into a line that already had four old men standing in it, and the eight of them between them covered the hours and the days and the seasons, and what they made in those years is what that temple has been singing ever since.

Sūrdās was the senior of them.

That is a strange sentence to write about a man who had been picked up off a sandbank, a find of the Ācārya's, with a thorn hut and some attached men and a good trade at a ford, and who had answered the first serious question ever put to him by saying that he did not know how. He had come up the hill knowing nothing about any of it. Now there were men in the line beside him who had been children when he arrived, who had learnt their first padas by standing behind him and listening, and who had never in their lives heard that temple sing anything that was not partly his.

Nobody made him senior. There was no order about it and no seat and no title. It happened the way it happens in a trade, which is that men doing the same work know who is best at it and arrange themselves accordingly without discussing it, and a young man starting a line in the wrong rāga looks sideways at the old man before he looks at anybody else.

Nothing about his day changed.

The conch went for the utthāpan in the afternoon, the way it goes, and the yard emptied itself towards the doors. Somebody came for him and he got up off the stone with a hand under his elbow and went in and was set down in his place with his shoulders squared to the doors. The drum started. The hall smelled of the ghee from the morning and of the dust the crowd brought in on its feet. In front of him, a few paces off, was the face that everybody else in the room was looking at.

He sang what the hour asked for, in the rāga that belongs to it, and put his name in the last line, and stood there while the next man took it up.

The line formed itself in the maṇikoṭhā the same way every morning and nobody had ever written the order down.

It formed at the śṛṅgār, when the image had been bathed and dressed and the doors came open on him in whatever he was wearing that day, and it formed again at the rājbhog, and again in the afternoon when the conch went, and again at night. Men came in off the yard wiping their hands, and found their places without looking, and the ones who had been standing in the same place for years and years stood in it out of habit and would have been put out if anybody had moved them. The drum came in. The cymbals were in the hands of whoever had picked them up. Sūrdās was walked to his place and squared up to the doors and left there, and from that moment he needed nothing further from anybody.

In the cold months the stone under their feet was cold enough to be felt through the whole of the first song, and the breath of the men standing at the back showed in the lamplight, and a sparrow or two that lived somewhere up in the beams came down into the hall and went out again. In the hot months the doors opened onto a wall of light off the yard and the whole place smelled of rose-water and of the ghee from the morning. In the rains the drum went soft and had to be held near a fire, and everybody complained about it, and it was held near the fire, and they sang anyway.

There were eight of them whose songs that house used, and the eight are still what it uses. Four had been taken by the Ācārya himself. Four came in afterwards under his son. The four of the first lot were old men by the time the four of the second were standing beside them, and there was no trouble about it, which is unusual in a choir.

They are called the aṣṭachāp, the eight seals, because the name in the last line of a pada is the seal on it, and there are eight men whose seals are on the songs sung in front of that image every day of the year. The older name for them in the house was simply the eight poems. It came with a judgement attached, which was that the utterance of all eight is of one rank. Nobody inside the house has ever been willing to grade them.

Kumbhandās farmed.

He lived at Jamunāvato, which is a village at the foot of the hill, and which is called that because the river ran close by it once, a long time before anybody now walking about there was born. He had land at Parasauli, out on the flat by the Chandrasarovar, and he worked it, and when he was not working it he went and sat in it. He did that most days of his life. He came up for darśan once and went down again and was in the field by the middle of the morning, and men looking for him on the hill were told, without any particular emphasis, that he was at Parasauli.

He made a new pada for the image every day and Śrīnāthjī went to his house and played there and talked to him.

A singer at the emperor's court had got hold of some of his padas and sang one of them, and the emperor heard it and was struck by it and said that the man who made such a thing must have been dead a long while. He was told that the man was alive and was at Jamunāvato by Govardhan. So men were sent with a palanquin and a horse. Kumbhandās was not at home. He was sitting at Parasauli, and they found him there and told him, and he said, brother, I am not the emperor's servant. They said it was an order and that he could ride in whichever of the two things he preferred. He said he had never sat in one and was not going to start. Then he put his shoes on and walked, with the palanquin and the horse going along empty beside him the whole way, past the hill and out of Braj and up into country he had never had any reason to go into, and the men who had been sent for him had to walk too, because they could hardly ride while he did not.

At the new city he was put in a tent with jewels worked into it and a fringe of pearls round the edge, and he sat in it and was miserable, and what he thought about was the thorn thickets at home, which he preferred, because Śrīnāthjī plays in them. They asked him for something about God. He worked out where he stood. His voice belonged to the one who held up the hill and was not to be spent here. But he could not walk out of the place without singing, so he would sing something that would ensure he was never sent for again. Then he made it up on the spot and sang it.

What business have devotees at Sikri.

My shoes wore out coming and going and I forgot the name of Hari.

I have had to put my head down in front of a face it is a misery to look at.

Kumbhandās: without the boy who lifted the hill this whole place is a lie.

The emperor was not offended. He had asked for a song about God and he had been given one, which was more than most of the men in that tent would have risked, and he sent him home with honour. Two days gone off the hill had felt to Kumbhandās like two ages, and he got the whole of them back in the first moment of looking at that face.

A rājā came round the hill once and found him at Parasauli after his bath. Śrīnāthjī was standing there at the time, about to tell him something, and when the rājā's party came up he moved off a little way and waited. Kumbhandās kept looking past the rājā at him. The rājā offered him a gold mirror, because he had asked his niece for a mirror to put his tilak on with and the calf had drunk the water. Kumbhandās said, brother, what would I do with it, the houses here are thatch, somebody would kill me for it. The rājā offered money. He said he did not want money, he had the field, its produce came in, and he ate. The rājā offered him a village. He said, brother, I am no brāhmaṇ, to be taking your water from you. The rājā put his hands together and begged for some order, any order at all, that he could carry away and obey. Kumbhandās said: do not come to me again. The rājā went down and Śrīnāthjī came back and finished what he had been going to say.

Kumbhandās had seven sons and one field, and the field was not enough, and everybody on the hill knew it. Sitting with Gusāīṃjī one day he said he had one and a half sons. He was asked what the half was. He said the whole son was Chaturbhujdās, who did the service and sang as well, and the half son was another Kṛṣṇadās, not the one who ran the temple but a cowherd of the temple's herd, who did the service of the cows and nothing besides, and so was a half. That one was killed by a tiger at the tail of the hill, going after a cow that had strayed, and he did not let go of her. Gusāīṃjī said that the only sons are the ones who belong to God, and what use is a lot of the other sort.

Paramānanddās was a brāhmaṇ out of Kannauj and had been a master before he had a teacher, with his own troupe, his own following, and people calling him svāmī and taking the name of God from him. He held an all-night vigil at Prayāg once and sang separation songs at it until four gharīs before dawn, and one man in the Lord's service who could not get a boat and could not wait tied his clothes on top of his head and swam the river across in the dark to be there. That is the kind of singer he was before anybody had explained anything to him.

At Govardhan they sent him milk one evening after the last ārtī, and it was scalding, and he had to stand there cooling it. He remarked to the man who had sent it that he did not see how Śrīnāthjī drank his milk that hot, and that cooler would be better. The man said he was a servant of God and it would be as he said. The next morning at the first darśan, with the whole household standing there, Paramānanddās asked the image straight out why he drank his milk hot, and Śrīnāthjī said: they offer it to me, so I drink it.

Kṛṣṇadās ran the place.

He was a śūdra and he was the adhikārī, which means he held the authority, and he held it over a temple full of brāhmaṇs and over the money and the stores and the servants and the order of every hour of the day. He was hard enough for the work. Bengalis had the service when he came to it, and they were spending what came in and keeping a small image of a goddess in their topknots and giving her the food after it came away from the Lord. He got his permission and then he went up and burnt their hut and put them off the hill, and when they came at him he gave them each a few strokes of the stick, and they went to Mathura and complained. A learned man there asked him who a śūdra thought he was, to be beating brāhmaṇs. Kṛṣṇadās said that he was indeed a śūdra, and that the man shouting at him was no sacrificer either but a Kāyasth, and was making brāhmaṇs prostrate themselves to him every day of the week. The man did not answer. Before the officer in Mathura he would not take them back. They were our servants, he said, and we put the service into their hands, and they walked away from it. If their hut burnt we would have thatched them another.

He went to Agra with a cart to buy for the store, and in the bazaar there was a woman dancing and singing to a crowd, and the crowd opened up and let him in and she danced in front of him. What went through his mind was that she was fit for Śrīnāthjī. He paid her on the spot and told her to bring her musicians to him that night, and that night he paid her again and told her that her singing was good and her dancing was good but that his master would not care for the kind of songs she had, and he sat down and made her a pada and taught it to her. Then he took the whole party back to the hill. At the utthāpan he kept the singers out and brought her in instead, and Gusāīṃjī was inside swinging Śrīnāthjī, and she danced in the maṇikoṭhā and sang what she had been taught. On the line in which Kṛṣṇadās gives his life away as an offering her breath went out of her and she went into the Lord's play. Her musicians stood about afterwards, worrying aloud about their living, and he took them down below and gave them a thousand rupees and sent them off.

He quarrelled with Gusāīṃjī over a remark at a meal and told him not to come up the hill, and Gusāīṃjī turned round at the foot of it and went and sat at Parasauli and said nothing, and it was six months before he came up again.

Then the four Gusāīṃjī had brought in, who were younger and had come to it by a different road.

Chaturbhujdās was Kumbhandās's son, which meant that two men out of the same thatched house at Jamunāvato stood in the same line, the father who had come in off his own field with a voice nobody had trained and the son who had been hearing that voice since before he could talk. The difference between the two sets of four is in that sentence. The first four had all arrived from somewhere else and had all given something up: an establishment at Prayāg, a following at a ford, a field, a trade. The second four had grown up inside the thing. They had learnt the shape of a pada by standing about at the back of a line while old men sang, and they knew the eight hours of the day the way a boy knows the rooms of his own house, and not one of them had ever had to be told what Braj was.

You could hear it in them. A young man who has grown up in a temple sings the turn of a line the way the men in front of him sing it, and he does not know he is doing it, and it takes years to get out of him if it ever does. The old ones corrected them on the stairs and in the yard and at the store, not kindly. Govindswāmī, Chītswāmī and Nanddās came into a line that already had its habits and did not much want new ones, and they learnt the habits and then started quietly putting their own work into the hours, which is how it is always done. Between the four of them they carried the load of the year, because by then the year had a great deal in it, and the men who had built it were old and some of them were on the hill less and less.

Kṛṣṇadās made padas, a great many of them, and made them well.

Sūrdās said to him one day that the padas he was making had Sūrdās's shadow on them.

Kṛṣṇadās said that this time he would make one with no shadow of his in it.

He went off and sat down by himself with paper and ink and a pen. He was a man who got through half the work of the place before noon on an ordinary day, and on that day he did none of them, and anyone who came looking for him about the stores or the kitchen was sent away.

He got three lines done.

The fourth would not come. He turned it over and could not get it, and turned it over again, and put a word in and took it out, and tried the thing from the far end, which sometimes works and did not work. The morning went. The doors were shut by then and the curtain was across and the hill had gone into the flat silent stretch it goes into after the rājbhog, when there is nothing required of anybody and the cattle stand in the pen with their heads down and the only sounds are kites and somebody hammering a long way below. He was hungry. He decided to leave it and come back to it later with a clearer head. He put the paper down where he was, and the ink beside it, and the pen beside that, and went off to take his food.

While he was eating, Śrīnāthjī wrote three more lines on the paper in his own hand, and went away.

Kṛṣṇadās came back and saw it. He was overjoyed, and what he said to himself was that when Sūrdās came he would let him hear it.

They blew the conch that afternoon for the utthāpan, the rousing, and the doors came open, and the line formed in the maṇikoṭhā, and Sūrdās was walked in and turned and left standing. Kṛṣṇadās came up to him and said that he had made a new pada and that there was no shadow of Sūrdās's in it.

Sūrdās said: sing it and let me hear it, then I shall know.

So Kṛṣṇadās sang it to him, there, with the image in front of them both and the drum not yet started and everybody in the place listening, because a thing like that gets about a temple in an hour and there was nobody on that hill who did not know what was being settled.

He comes in off the field with the cowherd boys.

The dust the cows kicked up has settled into his curls.

Look at him coming. Look at him.

Bangles. Armlets. Arms hanging down to his knees.

The ring going round on his finger.

The row of his nails throwing light off itself.

Kṛṣṇadās keeps in his heart the boy who held up the hill,

whose toenails throw their moonlight out and the dark gives way.

Through the first three lines Sūrdās said nothing.

He did not nod and he did not move. The men in the line knew what that meant, because they had all sung to him and all of them had had the grunt out of him at a line he liked, and there was no grunt. Kṛṣṇadās got to the end of the third line and went on into the fourth.

Sūrdās put his hand up and stopped him.

Kṛṣṇadās, he said. My contest is with you, and not with the Lord. I know the Lord's own voice when I hear it.

And Kṛṣṇadās said nothing at all.

The pada stayed. It is sung. The seal on it sits where the seal always sits, in the last line, and the name in the last line is Kṛṣṇadās's name, put there in the half of the pada that Kṛṣṇadās did not make.

The drum started after that and the darśan went on and the hour was kept, because the hours are kept whatever has just happened in the room. Eight men, and a line that formed without being arranged, and one judgement about them that the house has never gone back on, which is that the utterance of all eight of the aṣṭachāp is of one rank.

The curtain came across at the end of the rājbhog ārtī and the hill went quiet.

That is the hole in the middle of the day. The image has been fed and the doors are shut and the curtain drawn, and for some hours nothing at all is required of anybody. This is the anosar. The cooks sit down. The cows come in out of the sun and stand in the khirak, which is the cow pen, with their heads low and their tails going. The men who have been on their feet since before light go off to eat and then to sleep in whatever shade they can find, and the hill, which has been noisy since the doors first opened, makes only the sounds a hill makes: kites, a dog, somebody hammering something a long way down the slope.

Sūrdās did not sleep in the afternoon. He went and sat on the north side where the wall threw a strip of shade by that hour, and put his back against the stone, and stayed there.

The stone holds the heat. It goes into a man's back through the cloth and it is not unpleasant if you are old. The flies are bad at that hour. There is a smell off the bhaṇḍār of ghee and of the smoke of the morning, and under it the smell of the cattle, and under that the smell of the hill itself, which is dust and dry grass and the sourness of stone that has been rained on and baked again for longer than anybody can think about.

He was working on the hill going up.

It is the thing that happened on the ground he was sitting on. The rain had been sent to drown the place and the boy put his hand under the hill and lifted it and held it there for seven days, and the whole village went under it with the cattle and the carts and the churns and stood there dry while the water came down outside like a wall. Every child in that country knows it. Every man who walks the round of the hill barefoot is walking round the thing that was lifted. He had sung it before, more than once, and this was another one, and there is nothing strange in a man making a fourth song about a hill when he is sitting underneath it.

What he was making was a pada.

A pada is a short song. Short is the first thing about it: you can sing one through in the time it takes to walk from the gate to the cow pen, and if you spin it out you are repeating yourself, which is allowed, because the repeating is part of the pleasure. It is made in a named rāga, and the rāga is not a decoration laid on afterwards. It is the first decision and it settles most of the others, because a rāga belongs to an hour and a good many of them belong to a season as well. Vibhās belongs to the dark before sunrise and will not do at any other time of the day. Bilāval and Rāmkalī are for the morning. Sāraṅg is the middle of the day and goes thin and flat and high, the way the light does at that hour. Dhanāśrī is the evening. Malār is the rains, and no singer in that country would open Malār in the hot weather any more than he would put on a quilt in it. So a man who has settled that he is making a rains song about a hill has settled a great deal before he has a single word.

Then the words, which are few. The first line is the one that comes round again and again, and the singer goes back to it between the others and leans on it, and everything in the song is built to make that line land differently the last time than it did the first.

And then the last line has his name in it.

That is the rule and it is not a signature added at the bottom. The name goes inside the sense of the line, holding the rhyme down, carrying part of the meaning, so that you cannot lift it out without breaking the best line in the song. Sūr, in his. Sometimes Sūrdās. Sometimes it is not a statement about himself at all but a way of pointing at the one he is singing to, the lord of Sūr, which puts the two names in the same breath at the end and lets the song stop.

A pada made that way will go anywhere and arrive with its maker's name still on it, which is what happened, and it is the reason anybody knows there was a man at all.

The man who wrote for him came over while he was still turning the second line.

He was one of several over the years. The arrangement was never formal. Somebody who could write and who had nothing pressing in the anosar would come and sit down with the paper on a board on his knees and the ink in a little pot wedged between two stones, and an old man would say a line and he would put it down. The paper came up the hill with everything else that came up the hill. The pen was a reed cut at a slant and it needed cutting again about as often as a man needs to shave.

Sūrdās could not write. He had never been able to write and never learned, and which was not remarkable, because hardly anybody around him could write either. The cowherds could not. Kumbhandās, who had a field and seven sons, is unlikely to have troubled about it. What was different about Sūrdās was only that he could not check. A man who can see the paper can look down and find out whether the fourth line is the one he thought he made. He had to ask, and then he had to believe the answer.

So the two of them argued.

Read it back, he would say. The man read it back. Say it again. The man said it again and Sūrdās sat with his head slightly to one side and then said, no, you have given me two words that start the same way and they are knocking against each other, put the other one in. Or: that is my word and you have written the one people say instead of it. Or, most often, just: again.

There was an afternoon that went on a long time over the rain. There is a word for rain coming down straight and a word for rain coming in sideways on a wind, and he wanted the second one, because the point of the line was the cattle crowded right in against the rock with their rumps to the weather. The man writing had put down the first, which is the usual one and the one that sounds better on its own. Sūrdās made him take it out. They went round it twice more and he made him take it out again.

Then he sang the whole thing through once at half voice with his hand going on his knee, and it was done, and the man read it back one more time and he said yes.

Seven days it stood up on his hand and did not come down.

The water went past the edge of it in a sheet, sideways, and never once inside.

The cattle stood in against the rock with the rain at their backs.

The lamps did not blow out. Nobody's fire went out.

The boys said, are you tired, and took hold of the underneath of it with sticks,

and he let them think they were helping.

Sūr says the hand it stood on was the hand of a child of seven.

This was not the work of an afternoon. This was the work of an afternoon, and another one the next day, and one the day after that, and so on through the hot weather and through the rains and through the cold and round again, for as long as he had a voice, which was a very long time.

He was not writing a book. He never sat down to a book and there was no plan of one anywhere and nobody involved in it thought in those terms. He was making a song for a morning. In the morning the doors would open and the image would be bathed and dressed and the men would stand in the maṇikoṭhā and something would have to be sung, and it might as well be a new one. Then there was the next morning. The mornings did not stop. They do not stop for anybody in a temple, and a temple in that country has eight of them inside one day, the waking and the dressing and the food and the rousing and the rest of it, and every one of those is a door opening on a man standing there with his mouth ready.

Put a good singer in that and leave him in it for the working life of a man and you will get what they got, which is a quantity of songs that nobody was counting at the time and nobody could count afterwards.

Some of them were lost the day they were made. There were mornings when something came and there was nobody sitting there with paper. He could hold one in his head, and he could hold two for a while, and holding four was a thing he could not do with a third one arriving. Then the doors would open and he would sing whatever he had, and a week later he would go looking for the one he had not sung and find it gone, the whole of it, or worse, half of it, the first line and the turn in the middle and nothing to join them with. He did not make a performance out of this. He would say that one had got away, in the tone of a man saying a goat had got out, and then he would make another one.

Paramānanddās came and sat down in the same shade one of those afternoons.

He had come to the Ācārya the same way Sūrdās had, which is to say sideways and from a position of strength. They were the only two men in that house who had handed over an establishment of their own, and neither of them had ever mentioned it to the other.

What was said to him was said in the same words. He had crossed the water at first light and found the Ācārya on the bank at his bath, and the Ācārya had told him to sing something in praise of the Lord, and he had sung three, and all three were separation. Then he was asked for the child. And Paramānanddās said: Maharaj, I do not understand any of that.

Go and bathe, the Ācārya said. I will explain it to you.

The difference between the two of them was in what would not leave. Sūrdās came out of the water at Gaughāṭ and the child came into him and stayed. What stayed in Paramānanddās was the after part, the going away and the not coming back, and he could not get out of it for long and did not really want to. At Kannauj, in his own house, with the Ācārya sitting on the seat in the front room after eating there, he was asked for a song and he judged that the man in front of him was already half way to Govardhan in his mind, and he sang one of separation anyway.

The Ācārya went out of himself at the end of it and did not come back for three days. He sat where he was with his breath going and no hold on his body at all. The Vaiṣṇavas came every morning for darśan of him and found him exactly as they had left him. On the fourth morning at dawn he came to.

Paramānanddās was badly frightened and swore off that pada and never sang it again in that house, and went over to songs about the greatness of the Bhāgavata, and it was one of those, a line about going and living at Nandgāon, that got the whole party onto the road for Braj.

The reason the two of them became what they became was the same reason, and it was given to them in the same way. The Ācārya's own name says that he is a man able to churn the nectar-ocean of the Bhāgavata. What he did to each of them, after the name and the self-offering, was to sit them down and recite the contents of the tenth part of it, and by doing that he put the whole of the thing into them as an ocean, and ocean is the word that stuck. After that they were oceans themselves and could not stop pouring, and that is why the collection of the one is called by his name with the word for ocean added to it, and the collection of the other by his. Sūrsāgar. Paramānandsāgar. Nobody sat down and decided on those names. They are simply what the two heaps of songs came to be called by the people who sang out of them.

Paramānanddās did not stay long in the shade that afternoon. Singers do not talk much to other singers about singing. They talked about the milk, which was being sent up scalding, and about whether the new cowherd was any good.

Sūrdās set himself a hundred and twenty-five thousand songs. He got a hundred thousand of them made and he died with the rest owing. The Lord finished the count himself and signed the remainder Sūrśyām.

The curtain went back in the late afternoon and the conch was blown for the utthāpan and the hill picked itself up and went back to work.

He stood where he was put for the evening, and the last thing he sang was the hill. It went well. It was a rains rāga sung in the wrong season, because the song had come when it came and there was no reason to hold it for four months, and the men standing beside him in the line had it off him before the end of it and had it wrong in one place, and he corrected them afterwards outside with his hand on the shoulder of the nearest one.

Then the last darśan, and the food, and the putting to bed, and the doors shut for the night with everybody on the outside of them.

The lamps came down off the walls. The singers went off down the path in twos and threes with one lamp between four of them, arguing about something else by then, and the man with the paper rolled it and put it in the cloth and took it to the store to be put away with the others, and the pile of them there was a little thicker than it had been in the morning. The cattle were settling in the khirak. It was an evening exactly like the evening before it.

There was one more pada in the world than there had been the day before.

The first people were on the path while it was still black.

They come up in the cold with their arms inside their cloth and they do not talk much on the way, and the only lights on the hill at that hour are the two or three lamps being carried and the one that never goes out inside. Under the feet there is the loose stone of the path and the cold of it comes up through the soles. Somewhere below, a dog that has heard people going past starts up and is answered by another dog further off, and then both of them stop.

The hill itself at that hour is only a long black shape with nothing on it. You cannot see the shrine until you are at it. You can smell it before that, because somebody has already lit the fire for the water and the smoke comes down the slope and meets you on the path, and after enough years of walking up in the dark that smell is the thing that tells a man he is nearly there.

Inside, it had been going on for a while already. The water had been drawn. The cloths were out. The men whose work it was were moving about in the near dark of the nijmandir with their voices down, because he was asleep.

Sūrdās was brought in and put in his place in the maṇikoṭhā, and he stood there with his hands at his sides and waited, the way he waited every morning of his life.

Then the conch, and the doors.

There is a bell as well and it is not a small one, and the crowd goes down onto the stone in the daṇḍavat the moment the doors move, the whole length of them, foreheads on the ground, arms out. Then everybody is up again and pushing quietly forward and being held back by a man whose job that is, and the ones at the front have their hands raised and the ones at the back cannot see anything at all and stay where they are anyway.

Maṅgalā is the first of the eight and it is the shortest and it happens in the dark. What the people crowded into the tibārī, which is the three-arched hall outside the maṇikoṭhā, get is the boy just woken, in a plain cloth, with his hair not done, by lamplight, for as long as it takes to look at him properly. The eyes in that image have one thing in them. Everybody in that crowd had walked up a hill in the cold to stand in front of them for the length of time it takes to say four sentences.

The singing starts before the doors open and goes on after they shut. It is not for the crowd. It is for the person in the room, and the person in the room is being woken, and there is a whole kind of song for waking him, which says get up, Gopāl, my boy, it is morning, the cows are out, get up.

He sang that hour in Bilāval, and the first thing he sang was about a child who would not go to sleep.

Yaśodā swings Hari in the cradle.

She rocks it and pats him and coaxes him and sings whatever comes into her head.

Come to my boy, sleep. Why will you not come and lie down with him?

Come quickly. Kanh is calling you.

He shuts his eyes. His lip moves.

She thinks he has gone, and stops singing, and puts up her hand for quiet,

and he wakes in that exact moment,

and Sūr says she begins again, sweeter than before.

There is another of that kind which is nothing but a question and an answer. What is your cradle made of, and the answer is sandalwood cut and turned on a lathe and set with stones, and the cords of it are silk, and the carpenter asked one price for it and Nanda paid him twice, and in between every line there is a word that is not a word, just the noise a woman makes at the back of her throat when she is rocking something. He sang that one too. It takes no thought to sing and it is not meant to.

Then the doors were shut and the curtain drawn, and the bath began.

Behind that curtain a small image is lifted, and warm water is poured over him, and he is rubbed with a paste of oil and meal that takes the dust off, and he is dried in a cloth and set down, and the whole thing is done with the kind of care you would use on a child who is going to complain. The water for it has come up the hill on somebody's head the evening before and stood all night in a covered pot, and it is warmed on a fire that is lit for that and nothing else. The hands doing the work at that hour are cold and they are warmed first, deliberately, before they touch him.

The singing goes on through it. It does not stop when the doors shut. A man outside in the tibārī who has been coming up that hill since he was a boy can tell you exactly where they have got to behind the curtain from what is being sung on the other side of it, and will tell you, whether or not you asked.

He sang the crawling.

Kanh comes across the courtyard on his knees, crowing.

The floor is polished and it holds his face,

and he goes after the face and puts his hand flat down on it,

and laughs, and it is still there, and he goes after it again.

Yaśodā is inside at the cooking and hears him and calls,

and he comes to the sound of her on his knees the whole way,

and she gets him up and finds the whole back of him grey.

Sūr says she beats the dust out of him and asks him where he found so much of it.

That is a child who has been on the floor all morning and a woman with flour on her hands turning him over to look at the state of him, and there is nothing in it beyond that, and it was being sung to an image that was at that moment being washed.

Then the one about the feet.

Gopāl wants his feet under him.

Nanda's queen puts down one finger and he takes hold of it.

He goes a few steps, and sways, and sits down hard.

The anklets go off when he lands.

Sūr says he has the floor now and can get across it,

and the doorsill still beats him.

The doorsill is the thing. He has the whole courtyard and he can cross it in a staggering run with his arms out, and then he comes to the raised bar of wood in the doorway and stops in front of it, and cannot work it out, and has to be lifted over. Anybody who has had a child in the house in that country knows the doorsill. It is the last thing they beat.

The crowd for the maṅgalā had thinned by then. Some of them had gone down to get on with the day and be back for the dressing, and the ones who stayed sat down on the stone with their knees up and their cloth over their heads against the cold, and listened, and the light had not come yet.

He sang the first words.

He has started to say it. Maiyā. Maiyā.

To Nanda it is bābā, bābā, and to his brother it is bhaiyā.

Yaśodā climbs up higher and higher to call him,

saying his name out over the wall so the whole lane can hear which name it is.

Do not go far off, my darling.

Somebody's cow will put you down.

Sūr says he has three words in him now and hers was the first.

The pada is exact about the order in which they arrive and about which one is worth anything, and any woman standing in the tibārī that morning who had got a first word out of her own child knew that it was exact.

One of them said so on the way out, to nobody, in the way people do. She said that hers had gone the other way round and had said the word for his father first, and that she had never entirely forgiven either of them for it. The women she was with laughed at her and told her to keep moving.

Inside, they had come to the hair.

Combing and oiling and tying up a small boy's hair is a slow job and it is done every morning of the year, and while it was being done he sang the plait. There are two padas about the plait and they belong together. In the first the mother is promising. Drink the black cow's milk and it will grow, and it will be the finest head of hair on any boy in Braj. He drinks it. It is too hot and it burns his tongue and he cries about that, and the moment he has finished he puts his hand round to the back of his head to find out whether it has worked.

In the second he has lost patience.

Yaśodā, when is this plait going to grow?

How many times have I drunk the milk now, and it is still short.

You said it would come down like my brother's,

long and thick, so that when you wash it and comb it and let it go

it lies over like a snake.

You keep me on plain milk.

You never give me butter and bread.

Sūr says let the two brothers live long, the pair of them together.

The last line of the first one has the mother laughing at him and not able to stop, and not wanting him to see, and going on with the combing. Somebody at some time must have told him what a woman's face does when it is trying not to laugh at a child, and somebody evidently had.

Then he was dressed, which is the longest part of the morning and the part the whole crowd has come back for. The clothes are cut to fit and are changed with the season, light in the hot months and quilted in the cold, and there are ornaments that go on in a fixed order, and a mark is put on his forehead with somebody's thumb, and flowers come in from below in a flat basket with the dew still on them.

The doors opened again for the śṛṅgār, and there was light in the sky by then, grey, with the hill still black against it, and the crowd had come back and was larger, and there were children in it now who had not been there in the dark.

And after the dressing comes the first food.

What goes in at that hour is milk, and curd, and butter. Butter is what a Braj household has. The cattle are the wealth of the place and everything that comes off them is worked up in the house by the women, and the churn goes in every courtyard in the early part of the morning, and the rope of it slaps, and the buttermilk is poured off, and what is left is put into a pot and the pot is hung out of reach on a sling from the roof beam, because the house is full of children and the butter is the most valuable thing in it.

The sling is the whole argument of the songs. It is a ring of rope with three or four cords going up to a hook in the beam, and the pot sits in the ring at a height that has been worked out by somebody who knows how high a child can get. It can be reached by a woman on her feet. It cannot be reached by a boy standing on the floor, or by a boy standing on the floor on one foot with his arm straight up, and it can be reached by three boys who have thought about it.

He began with the one where the boy states his preference.

Mother, it is butter I want.

Not honey. Not the fried things. Not the sweets you put by for me.

A woman of the village is standing behind him and hears him say it

and thinks, let him come and eat it in my house,

let it be my pot, let me be the one who finds him at it.

Sūr says he knew her mind before she had finished having it.

Then the next one, which is the theft.

The door stood open and there was nobody at it.

He looked one way and the other way and went in.

The churn was standing there. The pot was full.

He got it down and sat with it and started.

The pillar is polished and his own face is in it,

and he talks to the face while he eats.

Have some. It is sweet. Why are you letting it drop.

Take the whole pot if you want it, I have had mine.

Sūr says the woman of that house was behind the door with both hands over her

mouth.

That pada has been sung on that hill every year for as long as there has been anybody on it to sing, and what it turns on is not the theft. It is that a boy alone in a stranger's house with a stolen pot in his lap is lonely, and so he finds a face in the floor and gives it some.

The men standing in the line with him came in on the ends of the lines. That is how it is done. The one who made it leads and the others carry, and by then they had been carrying his work for years and could take a new one off him at the first hearing and have it right by the second.

Then the lie.

The lie is the best known thing he ever made. The boy has eaten the curd. The evidence is on his face. He is holding the leaf-cup he ate it out of. And what he does, given one chance to speak, is not to cry or run but to deliver a complete and orderly and entirely watertight account of why the thing is impossible.

Mother, I did not eat the curd.

Think about it. These friends of mine got together and put it on my mouth.

Look where the pot is. You hung it up there on the sling yourself, this morning.

Look at my hands. Look at the size of them. How was I to reach it?

He is wiping his mouth while he says it

and the leaf-cup is behind his back.

Sūr says the switch went out of her hand onto the floor

and she never noticed it go,

and she laughed, and pulled him in against her throat.

He sang it twice that morning. The second time was because a man who had come up from the villages with a party said out loud, before he could stop himself, that his own boy had said the same thing to him about a pot of oil, and everybody in the tibārī laughed, and the men in the line looked at each other, and Sūrdās turned his head about a hand's width towards the noise and waited for it to go down and then sang the whole thing again from the top.

After that he went to the dirt.

The boys of Braj play outside the gate. They are small and none of them has any sense, and one of them puts mud in his mouth, and the others run in to tell.

Yaśodā, I saw it myself. Your boy has just now been eating dirt.

She came at a run and got hold of his arm

and had the switch up in her other hand.

I will beat you for this. Spit it out.

You never listen to a word I say.

Open your mouth. Open it and show me.

Sūr says: he opened it and showed her.

In his mouth she saw the three worlds. She saw heaven and the underworld and the earth between them, the forests, the hills, the rivers, the sea going round the outside of it, the moon and the sun, and the capital city of the whole of it. The switch went out of her hand and she did not know that it had gone. She let go of his arm. Then she was not seeing it any more. She picked him up.

The next pada in that set has her telling Nanda about it that evening, and Nanda hearing her out and saying that who knows what she saw, and that she should let him alone and stop running at him with a stick.

By the time that one was finished the light was properly up. The sun does not come over the hill from that side, it comes round it, so the yard gets bright before the wall does and the last of the cold goes out of the stone about an hour after that. The doors were shut. The cows were being let out of the khirak and a man was shouting at them from behind. Somebody put a brass tray down on stone somewhere and the noise of it went across the whole yard.

Sūrdās was led out and taken round the corner to the step where his sandals were, and he sat down on the step in the first of the warmth with his hands on his knees.

A boy brought him something to eat and sat down next to him.

The boy wanted to know whether the woman in the pada had ever got her butter back, and Sūrdās said that she had not, and that she had not wanted it, and that this was the entire point of the story and he was glad somebody had asked.

There would be the rest of the day after this. The doors would open again in the middle of it for the food and the drums, and again in the afternoon when the image was roused, and again in the evening, and each of those would want something. He had until the middle of the morning.

He said the line about the pillar over again to himself, twice, changing one word in it the second time, and then said it a third time with the old word back in. Then he went quiet. The boy knew that look well enough to take the dish and get up and leave him on the step.

You could hear the women before the turn in the path, because they talked the whole way up.

They came in ones and twos out of the villages under the hill and joined each other at the bottom and went up together, and every one of them had a pot on her head and a hand up to steady it, and that is a posture that makes a woman walk slowly and leaves her nothing to do but talk. What was in the pots was milk and curd. That had been the arrangement since before there was a temple, when the image sat on the hill under a thatch the Braj people had put up over it and they brought it milk and curd because that was what they had, and when the big temple went up on the rock nobody saw any reason to change. The milk still came up the hill in the morning on the heads of women out of the same villages.

Some of them had small boys with them. Boys of that age cannot be left and cannot be carried, so they come, and they go up a hill faster than their mothers and then have to be called back down again twice.

The doors opened at the śṛṅgār.

He had been bathed and dressed by then and the ornaments were on him and the morning was already warm on the stone. The women set their pots down where the pots were taken and went and stood where the people stand, outside the pillared hall where the singers were, and looked at him, and one of them had a boy on her hip and turned him round by the shoulders so that he was facing the right way.

Then the singing began, and it was about a woman with a child in the house.

She is at work when it starts. That is the part people forget, and Sūrdās never did. Yaśodā has a household to run and it is the headman's household, which means it is large: there is grain to be looked over, there are the pots, there is the curd to be set at night and the churning to be done before it is hot, there are people in and out of the courtyard all day on her husband's business, and there is milk on the fire, and milk on a fire has to be watched. Into the middle of this comes a child who will not stay where he is put.

He cannot be put down anywhere. He cannot be left in the courtyard, because the courtyard has a gate and the gate is how you get to the lane. He cannot be shut in, because he can be heard being shut in. She hangs the butter high, on the sling, up where the beam is, which is what everyone does and which works until he learns to climb. She worries about the well. She worries about the cattle in the lane and about the carts, and about what he puts in his mouth, and about the sun, and she worries in the specific way of a woman whose child is admired, which is that she thinks somebody will look at him too long.

What she does all day is her work, interrupted.

And once a day, at least once, she comes back into the courtyard and he is not in it. Then she does the thing that every woman in those villages knew how to do, which is to go along the lane counting houses and listening at each one, because a boy of that age is never further away than a few doors and is usually behind a curtain being fed by somebody who has no intention of saying so. She found him most times in under the length of a lane. It was the times she did not find him at once that she was still thinking about at night with the lamp out.

The women came for her in the morning, in a body, with a list.

They came early, before it was hot, which is the hour when a village has its arguments. They would come up the lane in a body and into the courtyard and stand there, and the first one would begin, and the others would put in the parts she left out. Yaśodā knew every one of them. She had been at their weddings. Some of them had fed him when he was smaller and had said nothing about it at the time.

The charge was always the same and the details were always new. He had got into a house where the woman had gone to Mathura to sell milk and had asked her neighbour to keep an eye on the door, and he was over the wall before she was out of the lane. He had eaten what he wanted and thrown the rest about. He had broken the pots. There was one old jar in that house, a big one, older than the woman's marriage, and it was now in five pieces. He had flicked buttermilk over the children who were asleep on the floor, and gone out of the door shouting, and been heard laughing in the lane.

He set that one in Bilāval, which was right for the hour, and he sang it in the voice of the woman whose jar it was.

Your boy has eaten my butter.

He found the house in the dark before dawn and let himself in.

He opened the door, and in the middle of the room

the milk and the curd went over.

One jar, older than my marriage, in five pieces.

He flicked buttermilk at the children who were asleep

and went out of my door shouting, and laughing.

Sūr: keep him in, mother, the way you keep an elephant in musth.

They were not really complaining.

Everybody in that courtyard knew it, including the women, including Yaśodā, including the boy, who was behind his mother's leg with one hand in her clothes for the whole of it, looking out at them. A woman who genuinely wants a matter settled does not bring her friends. She does not tell the good parts twice. She does not stop in the middle to correct another woman's version of what he said at the door. What they had come up the lane for was to stand in that courtyard and say his name a number of times and watch him not being punished, and they would have been sorry if it had ever stopped.

The older girls came too, and their complaints were of another kind and were brought with a good deal of care. He waits on the path. He gets in front of you where the lane is narrow. He has pulled the necklace off one of them and torn her bodice in the pulling, and she wants it known, and she is telling it to his mother in front of everybody and is not looking at the ground while she tells it.

There was one who could never get it out.

She had a real grievance and she had rehearsed it on the way up the lane, and she got as far as the courtyard and there he was, standing against his mother with his chin down, gone small, about half the size he had been in her house an hour before. And the woman heard her own voice and did not like it. She got a sentence or two out and then said that it was nothing, really, and that she had only come about the jar, and stopped, and the other women had to take it up for her.

Look, mother, at what this child does.

The woods and the gardens and the river are all taken with that dark body.

He takes the butter by force and eats it in front of you.

He pulls the yellow cloth over his head and smiles out of the corner of it.

What am I to say. I am ashamed to bring the complaint.

He comes and stands in front of you and gets small.

Sūrdās: and Yaśodā looked at his face and asked her what it was she had come to say.

Yaśodā gave as good as she got, and that is the whole comedy: she was not a woman standing there taking it. She would hear out a house or two and then she would put her hand on her hip.

Every morning, before it is light, they are at my door.

All of them, and it is my little one who is to blame.

It is their own youth that is the trouble with these cowherd girls.

Milk, curd, butter: when did he ever come your way for it?

That one goes about drunk on her own dairy,

swaggering, not ashamed of herself, and loud with it.

Sūrdās: and where has my Kanhaiyā got to now.

The last line is the joke and the women on the hill got it, because it is what happens. She has been arguing for a while and she turns round and he is not behind her leg any more.

One of them had got him by the arm on the way and brought him along as evidence, which is the sensible thing to do and is what anybody would have done. She came into the courtyard holding him. Yaśodā came out to look at her son, and what the woman had by the arm was a girl.

She took hold of Govind to make the complaint stand up,

and Yaśodā came out to look at her son,

and what she had by the arm was somebody's daughter.

Look at the face, then. Do you know it?

Listen, friend. This girl you have walked here from your own house.

Is that Kānh?

Sūrdās: he turned into a woman on the road.

The singers went on. The women outside the hall were laughing by that point, and so were the men, and somebody's boy had got loose and had to be fetched.

What is being sung in all of this is vātsalya, the love a parent has for a child, which in that country is one of the ways a man is taught to love God and not a lesser one. It is not devotion dressed up as a family. It is the family, and the songs are about work and pots and other people's daughters and a switch kept behind the door.

Then one day she had enough.

It was not the worst day. It was an ordinary day, which is how it happens. She had him by the arm and she had a switch in her other hand and she was saying, out loud, in front of people, that if she let him off without a beating today she hoped her father would die. She meant it for about as long as it takes to say. And the milk went over on the fire.

She had to go to it. Anybody would. She put him down and went to the fire, and by the time she turned round he had his arm free and a pot was broken and there was butter on his mouth.

So she got the rope.

Today I tie you. Who is going to loose you now?

She took his arm and put the rope round the mortar.

The rope was short by two fingers.

She fetched another and knotted it on, and it was short by two fingers.

She fetched every cord in the house and it was short by two fingers,

and she stood there wet through with her hair down.

Then he let himself be tied.

Sūrdās: his mother's temper was for his own good, and he was glad of it.

The mortar is the heaviest loose thing in a courtyard. It is a block of wood hollowed out at the top, waist high, that two women stand over with pestles to husk the grain, and it takes two men to lift it, and that is why you tie a child to it and to nothing else. It is also in full view of the gate, which is the other half of the punishment, because everybody who goes past can see.

The women came back for him within the hour. They stood at the gate asking her to let him go, and one of them saw the switch still in her hand and started crying, and said that they had tormented him too much and it was their own fault. Yaśodā told them to go home. She told them it was they who had made him bold in the first place, and that they need not come to her now to get him loose, and that she was falling at their feet, and would they please go home. He sat against the mortar with his mouth full of butter, washing it off with his tears, which he was producing without difficulty.

He dragged it out through the door.

He went off across the yard on his hands and knees with the rope round his middle and the mortar coming along behind him, and out of the gate, and down between the two arjuna trees that stood just beyond it, and the mortar went in between them and stuck, and he kept going, and the two trees came out of the ground and went over with a noise that brought the whole lane out. Two men walked out of the wreck of them, bright, and bowed to him, and went away. The boy was sitting in the middle of it with the rope still on him.

His mother came out and found him like that and picked him up.

That is where the name comes from. Dāmodara is the one with the rope round his belly, and it is the name she gave him that afternoon without meaning to give him anything.

The moon was a different matter, because he could not be got round on it.

It was in the courtyard in the early part of the night, low, the way it sits there at that season, and he pointed at it and said he wanted it. She offered him honey. She offered him sweets and fried things, and he said no to all of it. She offered him the toys, the top and the ball and the sugar animals, and he said no. He said he was hungry and would eat it. She said it was a plaything that belonged to everybody and was not for eating, and that it did not belong to her, and that she had been the one who showed it to him in the first place, and that he asked for things that cannot be done.

He went on crying.

So they brought a vessel of water and set it down on the beaten earth of the courtyard where it was flat, and let it settle, and the moon came into it, and she picked him up and showed him.

Take this moon, my boy. Look down a moment.

I have held it still for you in the water.

Put your own hand in, Dāmodar, and lift it out, and do what you like with it.

A bird carried it down out of the sky and left it there for you.

The other one is frightened of your face.

He has gone off underground, and he sends word that he is yours.

Sūrdās: and he was satisfied, and slept, and his mother held him against her.

He said the one in the water glittered and shook when he stirred it. He said the real one was quite close and he could see it and nobody was to stop him. He said he knew perfectly well what she was doing. And then he put his hand in the water, and took it, and was quiet, and the whole household let its breath out and went back to what it had been doing.

At the end of the morning the doors closed and the women picked up their empty pots.

One of them had a boy who had got hold of something on the steps and would not give it up, and she had him by the wrist and was prising his fingers back one at a time, and she was saying what her own mother had said to her and what every woman in that line had said in her own courtyard that week, and it did not occur to her while she was saying it that she had spent the whole morning listening to a song about it.

They went down the hill at noon in the same order they had come up, more slowly, because going down a hill with a pot is worse than going up. The boys went ahead. And somewhere on the path one of them started the one about the rope being short by two fingers, and the others came in on it, and they had it wrong in two places and did not know that they had it wrong, and by the time they were at the bottom it was theirs.

That is how a pada travels. Not on paper. A woman who cannot read carries a handful of lines of it down a hill, sings it at the churning, sings it wrong, teaches it wrong to her daughter, and it is in the next village before dark and over the hill by the rains. The man who made it was sitting in a stone hall at the top of the hill with his hands on his knees and did not know which of them had taken it, and was not told, and did not ask.

The cows had been gone since the gvāl darśan and the hill was quiet in the way it is quiet at that hour, which is not quiet at all if you are listening properly.

The doors were shut. The curtain had been drawn across at the anosar and the image was resting and would be roused at the utthāpan, and in between there was an afternoon to get through. It was autumn and the worst of the heat had gone out of the year, but the rock still held what it had taken in during the day and gave it back all afternoon, and a man standing barefoot on the paving outside the hall stood on one foot and then the other without thinking about it. Flies. A stonecutter somewhere down the slope. Water going into a jar. The flag on the temple made a noise like cloth being shaken out, and stopped, and did it again.

Sūrdās sat where they had put him, in the shade on the north side, with his hands on his knees.

The cattle belonged to the temple and there were over two hundred of them. They had come in twos and fours and tens from Vaiṣṇavas all over the country after the word went round that the image had asked for cows, and the first two of them had been bought with the price of a gold ring off the Ācārya's own hand. They lived in the pen on the north side. They went out in the morning and they were brought back in the late afternoon, and the men and boys who took them out were ordinary herdsmen out of Anyor and the villages under the hill, doing what their fathers had done, except that these cows were his.

The pen was a serious operation. They were counted out in the morning and counted in at night, and the counting was done by a man who did not use numbers for it but knew the animals, and if one was missing he knew which one and went back out after it. A cowherd of that temple had once gone off round the tail of the hill after a single strayed buffalo and stayed out looking until somebody had to go after him. The milk from that pen went into the sevā and what was over went to the household, and the whole day of the temple was built around animals that had to be let out, watered, brought in and milked, which is to say that it was the day of a cattle station with a stone building in the middle of it.

The herd comes back before you see it.

First there is nothing. Then there is something that you would not call a sound, a change in the air on the side the wind is coming from, and you find you have turned your head. Then it is a sound and it is one sound, low, without edges, and then it comes apart into the parts of itself. The hooves, which are not hooves but one long dragging shuffle with knocks in it. The bells, which are not together and never will be. A calf, which is a separate and higher noise and always sounds like an emergency. A boy shouting at another boy. A stick on a rump. And under all of it the breathing of a great many animals walking at the end of a day. It arrives at you in that order. Only afterwards is there anything to see, and what there is to see is dust, a long brown wall of it coming up the track with the low sun in it, and the first cows are inside the dust before they are out of it.

They blew the conch for the utthāpan while the herd was still on the track.

The doors came open and the lamps went round and the singers stood up in the pillared hall, and Sūrdās was walked up and set on his feet at the end of it, and what he sang, with the cows coming in at the pen behind the temple and the men shouting at them and the dust hanging over the whole north side of the hill, was the day the boy went out with the cattle for the first time.

He had been wanting it for a long time. Every boy in that village went out with the herd when he was old enough, and he had watched them go out at dawn, and he had decided that he was old enough, and he opened the case himself and put it to his mother directly and would not be put off.

Today I am going out with the cows.

I will eat the fruit of the wood with my own hand, every kind of it.

Do not tell me I am small. Look at me properly.

Your feet are that size. How will you walk, and get home in the dark?

They go out at first light with the herd and they are not back till dusk,

and your face will be burnt dry in the middle of the sun.

By your life, mother, the grass does not touch me and I am never hungry.

Sūr: he would not be talked out of it, and had his own way.

She went at it from every side. She said his feet were too small for the stones, and she wanted something on them, and he would not have it, because the herdsmen's boys went barefoot and he was not going to go out on his first morning looking like somebody's pet. She said the sun would burn him. He said that nothing burnt him. She said he would be hungry by the middle of the day and there would be nobody to feed him, and that was the one that got a concession out of him, because he said in that case she had better send food.

Then he told her who he was going with, by name, the way a boy does when he wants a thing to sound settled. Śrīdāmā. Subal. Manasukh. His brother.

She sent butter and bread up with him and cool water.

What it cost her to do that is the thing every woman standing at the back of that hall was doing arithmetic about. She had kept him inside a courtyard for as long as a child can be kept inside one. Now he was going out of the gate before it was light and coming back after dark, into a country with a river in it, and cattle, and a well at every village, and whatever was in the woods, and she was not going to be there. She went after him down the lane on the first morning and caught him up and took him by both arms, hard, and it was his brother who got her to let go, saying that he would be with him and that they were going now. She told the brother to keep looking at him. Then she let go.

What he did with the food is a thing they all knew. He would not eat it by himself. They sat down on the bank in the middle of the day with the cows standing in the shallows, and he mixed the curd into the rice with his hand and went round the circle giving it out, to this one and that one, and took his own share last and ate it sitting in the middle of them.

And in the evening they came back.

Bring them round, he said. It is getting late. Turn them towards Braj.

They took the cows up out of the wood,

the calves in front, the boys on all four sides of him and him in the middle.

Flute and horn going, and every one of them singing his own tune,

and the cows answering, and the dust coming up under their feet.

The peacock feather, the wood garland, the yellow cloth.

The dust of the cows lay on him and was cool on him like moonlight.

Sūr: and the women of Braj stood in their doors and looked and did not blink.

The men who brought the temple's herd in that evening were on the other side of the wall while he was singing it, and could hear it, and got on with what they were doing.

After that the day went the way it goes. The bhog, with the drum and the cymbals and the singing in front of him, which is the hour they call the hour of his court. Then the lamps at the evening, and the doors closed, and the hill going dark from the bottom up.

It was one of the full moons of the autumn and the whole of the country under the hill was lit.

There is a small window in that temple that faces Parasauli. On a night like that one you can stand at it and see the ground out there whitened all the way to the trees, and it is flat ground, and the river is beyond it. The singers did not go down. They sat where they were, outside, on the north side where it was cool, and one or two of the household came out and sat as well, and somebody brought a pot of water, and it was the sort of night when nobody suggests going to bed. This is the night the songs are about. What he sang next, in Bihāgaṛo, which is a night rāga, was the flute.

The flute in these songs is not music the way the singing in that hall was music. It is not a performance and there is no audience for it. It is a summons. He puts it to his lip in a wood at night and what comes out of it is names. Not one name, and not a general call over the villages: their names, each woman's own name, and each of them hears the one that belongs to her and knows that it is not for anyone else in the house.

The wood in flower, and the white of the moon lying on the ground,

and the sand at the river, and the wind coming three ways.

He set the flute against his lip and played it properly

and took the names one by one, all the cowherds' daughters,

and each of them heard her own name come out of the dark.

Sūr: they got up and left the house and the people in it and went.

The women could not stand the flute. It is one of the running jokes of the whole thing and it is not a joke at all if you are the one making it: the flute is a girl, a thin brown girl he carries about in his waistband and puts to his mouth in front of everybody, and she is a rival, and she has done something to get where she is. She knows charms. She is nothing but a piece of cane with holes in it and she has the run of him day and night, and she sits in that waistband while they are indoors doing their work and waiting, and when she finally does speak she is speaking to all of them at once and every one of them still has to go. The songs about this are not gentle. The flute is called an enemy and worse.

They were in the middle of their work. That is the point of it and the songs will not let it alone. It is evening in a village and the evening in a village is the busiest part of the day. One of them is eating. One has just put the starter into the milk to set for the morning and has her hand still in the pot. One is feeding a child on her lap. One is talking to her husband. And the sound comes round the back of the house.

They heard it and every one of them went out of her mind.

One stands staring at the ground and one at the sky.

One lets the pot go straight out of her hand.

One is eating, and looks up at her husband, and does not know him.

One leaves the starter standing in the milk.

One does not hold on to the child in her lap.

It is behind the house and it is calling them by name.

Sūrdās: they went out with the ornaments on the wrong way and the bodice at the waist.

That last line is not decoration. They dressed in the dark and in a hurry and they got it wrong, and they went out into the lane and down to the river with their clothes on backwards, past the elders, past the gate, and not one of them turned round.

The women in these songs are gopīs, which only means the women of the cowherding villages, the same women who had come up that hill with milk on their heads in the morning. They are not a class of being. They have names and houses and mothers-in-law and a great deal to say for themselves, and they are not interchangeable, and Sūrdās keeps them apart from one another the way a man keeps apart the people in his own street. One is frightened. One is furious. One has been on the point of going for a month and has not gone, and goes.

There was one he asks about.

He came out of the lane one day with his stick in his hand and the yellow cloth over him, going somewhere, and there was a girl on the path with her friends coming the other way, and she had a blue sari on and a mark on her forehead and very large eyes, and the two of them stopped.

Who are you? Where do you live, and whose daughter?

I have never seen you in this lane.

Why would I come into your part of Braj?

I stay and play at my own gate.

What I hear with my ears is that the headman's boy is a thief.

And what would I take from you? Come and play. We will make a pair of it.

Sūrdās: he talked her round with looking, and then with looking and talking.

Her name was Rādhā and she was Vṛṣabhānu's daughter and she did not live in that village.

Now the rās.

That is the word for it, and it means the dance, the circle one, the one thing in the whole of this that everybody in Braj can name. They came down to the sand by the river, all of them, out of several villages, on the night of the full moon in the autumn, and he was there, and the dance was a circle. The way the circle was made is the whole of it: one woman, then him, then a woman, then him, all the way round, so that every one of them had him on her right hand and on her left and had not been given a share of him and was not standing next to anybody else's. Each of them was dancing with him alone. Every one of them knew this, and every one of them was right.

The river stopped. The wind that had been coming three ways stopped. The animals that had been moving in the wood stood where they were. The moon went up to the top of the sky and stayed there and did not carry the night forward, and that night was not measured by the measure nights are measured by.

Then it was morning on the sand and they went home.

He sang it on the flat stone on the north side of the hill, with the country white below him and the hill behind him warm, and nobody said anything when he stopped.

One of the herdsmen from the pen had come round and sat down on the edge of it somewhere in the middle and had stayed, with his stick across his knees, and did not get up when the others did. He had been out on the hill all day with two hundred animals belonging to a boy who lifted the hill, and had brought them in at dusk through his own dust, and had then sat out in the moonlight and heard the sound of it given back to him in his own language, exactly right.

The lamps had been out a long time. They got up after a while, and one of them put a hand under his elbow, and they went down the hill in a loose line, feeling for the steps, and the moon was still up over Parasauli.

The doors close on the hill a little after the rājbhog ārtī, and for a stretch of the afternoon nobody in that country can see him at all.

That is the anosar. The food has been offered and taken away and the last lamp has gone round, and then the curtain comes across the front of the inner shrine and the doors are shut on the curtain, and the image is left to rest. Nothing is sung in that hour. The singers put their instruments down where they are standing. The men who dress him and the men who cook for him go off to their own work, and the people who came up for darśan start down the path again, and the hill in the middle of the afternoon is as quiet as a field.

Sūrdās used to be taken out to the north side and set down on the stone where the wall throws shade, and he stayed there until the conch went for the utthāpan.

There were always women waiting in that shade. They came up from Anyor with milk and curd in the morning and they could not go home until the pots came back to them, and the pots did not come back until the anosar was over. So they sat with their knees up and their empty baskets beside them and talked about their own affairs, and when the singer was brought out and put down among them they stopped talking about their own affairs.

One of them asked him that afternoon for the chariot.

He said: not that one.

She said it anyway, the way a woman says a thing to a man she has been bringing milk to for years. She said her mother-in-law had heard it at the bhog once and never got over it and was now too old to climb, and she was asking on her account.

So he sang the chariot.

He began the night before, because the thing does not work if you begin in the morning. A man had come up from Mathura with a chariot and an errand, and the errand was from the king, and the king wanted the two boys of the cattle-station brought in for the sacrifice of the bow that he was holding at his court. What was waiting for them behind the sacrifice was the wrestlers. The man who had been sent was a Yadu of good family, an uncle of theirs in fact, and his name meant the man who is not cruel. He had been well received. He had eaten in Nanda's house. He had been given the best place to sleep and he had lain awake in it.

The mother is standing out there crying and I have got the reins in my hand.

These are children. They eat butter and they get butter on their faces.

I am carrying them in to a man who keeps wrestlers for the pleasure of it.

Muṣṭika is waiting and Cāṇūra is waiting, and I know what they are for.

Shame on me and shame on the work. Why did I not die before this came to me.

Turn the horses round and put them back in the cattle-station and let the king

do to me whatever he does.

Sūr says: he thought all of that, and the rein did not slacken in his hand.

He kept Akrūr whole and would not let anybody have him as a villain. The women in the shade would have taken a villain, which is a more comfortable arrangement for everybody, and he did not make it available. What he made available was a decent man on a job, who could see the size of what he was doing, and did it, and went on doing it all the way down the road.

Then the morning.

Morning came to the people of Braj.

The word went from house to house that he is going to Madhuvan today

and the son of Śvaphalka is out in the lane putting the horses to.

They came out of one door and then the next door and then the one after that.

There was a noise all over Gokul and it did not stop.

The cows were standing about with the milk still in them and nobody went near

them.

Sūr says: the load was being tied on and the headman was getting ready to go

with him.

He gave that hour in pieces, the way a village receives it. A girl runs in with the news and is not believed. Somebody says it is a lie put about by people who enjoy that kind of lie. Somebody else has gone to the lane to see and comes back and says the horses are in and the bundles are on and there is a crowd at Nanda's gate. Yaśodā is in the courtyard on the ground with her hands out and women trying to lift her. And through the middle of it the boy himself is perfectly calm and is saying the things that get said, which are that it is a short road and he will be back and there is no call for any of this.

Then the cart goes.

Look there, sister. That is it going.

The lotus-eyed one is out past the gravel and his yellow cloth is blowing.

It has gone behind the rooftops now and there is nothing where it was.

He has taken the honey off us the way a man takes it out of a hive when he

knows there is nobody to stop him.

Sūr says: from here on every one of them belongs to the parting.

The women went after it.

They went out through the lane and out past the last house and onto the open road, and they ran, and they kept up with it for a while because a chariot on that ground cannot go fast, and then they could not keep up with it. That is the part people came back for, and it is why the rest of it exists. He would not make it heroic and he would not make it pitiful. He made it exact.

My eyes are going backwards and my feet will not go forward.

I did not manage to turn into the wind.

I did not manage to turn into the flag on the chariot,

or into the cloth of it, or into the dust that gets round his feet

and goes wherever he goes and is not asked whether it may.

Stand up, sister, and tell me the way a person gets to Gopāl.

Sūr says: he was taken off to Mathura and the girl of Braj was left holding

the knot.

Then they stopped running, because you do stop.

Every one of them stayed standing exactly where she had stopped.

Look at them now and they are figures somebody has drawn on a wall.

The faces are dry and the water is coming out of the eyes and going down.

They are holding each other up by the shoulder, like trees after a fire has

been through the creepers.

The son of Śvaphalka has left them the way milk is left when the curd has been

lifted off it.

Sūr says: by the kindness of Akrūr they were given as much as a body can

carry.

The dust that a chariot puts up on that road hangs for a while and then it comes down, and it comes down on whoever is standing in it. It settles on the feet and in the parting of the hair and on the wet parts of the face. After that the road is a road. It goes off between the fields in the ordinary way and there is nothing on it.

What starts in that road is viraha, the pain of being apart from the one you love, and it is the weather of everything he sang after it. The whole of the rest of the Sūrsāgar is standing in that road. The rains come and the peacocks start and are unbearable. The moon comes up and is told to its face that it has no business being cool. Travellers going through get stopped and given messages. Autumn comes and he has not come. Viraha is not grief, because grief has an end in it somewhere and this does not. The term he named when he looked back from the chariot runs out, and is not mentioned again by him, and is counted by them every day.

Nanda came back with the cart.

He had gone on to Mathura with them, because a father does, and stayed as long as he was let, and then the boy came and sat down in front of him and told him in a level voice to go home. He was somebody else's son. Another tie had come and settled on him and there was nothing to be done about it. Nanda had been good to him and it could not be repaid. Meeting and parting go like this in the world.

Get up and go back quickly to Braj, Nanda.

I was your son and another tie has come and fallen across me.

You brought me up and there is no way of paying it and I am not going to

pretend there is.

Wherever I am put I am still yours, so do not go home and forget me.

This is how it goes in the world, the coming together and the coming apart.

Sūr says: they heard him say it without a tremor in it, and the water stood in

their eyes and would not fall.

Nanda got up to answer that and could not. He stood there. He said the little he managed, which was that whatever was owed was owed on his side, and then his legs went and he was shaking like a leaf with the wind under it, and the cowherds took him out.

They came up the road to Gokul in a body and nobody had any sense of himself. Men stumbled on flat ground. They kept turning to look back at Mathura and then turning again and walking on.

Yaśodā had been watching the road since first light, which is what she did every day after that as well. She saw the dust and she came out ahead of the house and started down towards them because she could see Nanda and she could see the cowherds. She got close enough to count.

How did you turn your foot round, Nanda, and come back up this road.

Where have you put the two of them.

Are you drunk on something. Has somebody let you off a debt.

The son of Śvaphalka has turned out to be our enemy and he has carried off the

root of the thing.

And you have never heard, I suppose, what Daśarath did.

Sūr says: hearing that, Nanda went down where he stood.

That last line of hers is a knife and she knows it is a knife. There was a king in another age whose son went away and who died of it, in the proper manner, not having survived it, and she is telling her husband to his face that he has come home alive and a better man would not have.

Then there was the house.

The house has turned frightening, mother, with Śyām not in it.

Whose face am I to look at now in Nanda's courtyard.

Akrūr took him and took the breath out of the body along with him.

Who is going to help me get through one day in my own house.

I have churned the butter and it is standing there covered.

Sūr says: without the sight of Mohan the comfort and the property are a dream

somebody had.

That is the point at which the women in the shade would be quiet for a while, because every one of them had a gopī's share of that road in her own life somewhere. Then somebody would ask what happened to him at the other end, and he would go on, because there is another half and it does not match.

At the other end of the road, on the way in to the wrestling, a woman met them coming the other way with sandal paste for the king. She was a servant in the palace and she was bent, crooked from birth in three places, and she was the kind of person that nobody in a story gets asked about. He stopped and asked her who the paste was for and she told him, and she gave it to him instead. He put his hand on her and straightened her. She stood up to her full height in the road in front of everybody, and afterwards he went to her house.

Who has luck like the hunchbacked woman.

She was carrying sandal up the road to the king and he met her coming the

other way.

He took what she had in her hands and put his own hands on her and made her

straight.

A crore of austerities does not get Murāri and she had done none of them.

He went to her house and he was content there and he stayed.

Sūr says: the reckoning everybody else uses is not the one he uses.

He sang a good many of those. Grace arriving at the one address in Mathura where nobody would have thought to send it, and the men and women of that city standing about asking each other what she can possibly have done to deserve it, which is the correct question and has no answer.

And he sang the other kind.

We have had the news, sister, and we know his business.

Some slave girl out of the king's household has been favoured and is sitting

up as a queen.

Kubjā, they call her. Crooked, dirty, bent since the day she was born.

He made her beautiful with his own hands and took her indoors.

Now she is the new bride and she sits there telling them stories about Braj.

Sūr says: how is anybody to get at Śyām now, with that clever one in the way.

Both of those are his and he went on singing both of them for the rest of his life at the same hours of the same days in front of the same image, and he never put them together, and there is no pada anywhere in which the two are made to agree. The woman in Mathura is a case of somebody getting what nobody would have given her. The woman the village talks about is the one who took him. Braj is not asked to be fair about her. Braj is a place where people say what they think of the woman who has got what they have not got, and he knew that country, and he wrote down what was said in it.

The conch went for the utthāpan while he was still going.

The women picked up their baskets and the pots came back to them and they went off down towards Anyor with the light behind them. Up on the hill the doors were being opened and the curtain was being drawn back, and he was got up off the stone and turned round and walked in to stand in his place, because the interval was over and there was singing to be done.

It began at the śṛṅgār on a day with nothing else in it.

The image was dressed and the doors were open and the singers were standing in the maṇikoṭhā in their line, and it was Sūrdās's turn, and what he started was not what anybody expected at that hour. The śṛṅgār wants something about the dressing. He sang a man arriving in a village with a message.

He got through several of them before the hour ran out and the tāl stopped him. He came back at the bhog and did more. The next morning he began again where he had left off, and by the afternoon of that day there were people sitting outside on the flat ground who had no business on the hill and had come up because of something they had been told down in Anyor.

It went on for days. Nobody has ever been able to say how many.

What had happened was this. The man in Mathura had a friend, a Yadu of his own household, a clever man, a man with reading behind him, and after the business with the king was finished and the city had settled down, he sent that friend north with something to say to the gopīs he had left in the cattle-station. The friend went willingly. He had a chariot and he had the message in his head and he had the affection of the man who sent him, and he came up the road in good faith.

The message was philosophy.

Listen, cowherd women. This is what he wants you told.

Sit down. Get hold of the breath. Go inward and hold yourselves there.

He was not made and he does not end and he is not in one place more than

another.

He is in every vessel there is and he fills it, and the books all say the same

thing,

which is that there is no getting out of this without that knowledge.

So let the form go. Let the colour and the name and the face of it go,

and put one mind on the thing that has no form and keep it there.

Sūr says: they heard him out, and a woman drowned in a place with no water in

it.

He believed it, and that is the fact the whole thing runs on. He was not sent to be cruel and he was not enjoying himself. He had watched his friend go quiet in the evenings in Mathura and he had worked out what was wrong in the north and he had come up with the only medicine he had. He thought it would help. He was about to say so to a yard full of women who had been counting days since the chariot went.

They had already had the worst thing that happened to them that season, which was the chariot itself coming up the road. Somebody on a rooftop saw a chariot on the Mathura side and said the word, and it went through the village the way that kind of word goes, and they came out of the houses running and got as far as the lane. Then it was said that it was not him. They went down where they stood, all of them, each one on the spot she had reached, and the thing they had spent the morning building came apart in their hands. Everything after this is said out of that.

So when Uddhav got down and began, they would not argue with him.

They were perfectly polite. They gave him water and asked after the health of everybody in Mathura, one name at a time, working through Vasudev and Devakī and Akrūr and Balrām, and putting Kubjā in the middle of the list in exactly the same tone. Then they sat down in front of him and let him talk, and did not look at him, and did not answer.

A bee came down into the yard.

Just then a bee came down.

It did what a bee does, which is come in close and make the sweet noise.

They turned on it at once and started putting questions to it.

Did she send you. The one in Mathura. Are you hers.

Or is this the message you have carried up here from that dark handsome

person.

Sūr says: and from that moment there was nobody else in the yard they would

speak to.

The thing has a name. It is the bhramar gīt, the bee song, and that is what it was being called on the hill before it was over. Everybody present understood the arrangement inside a breath, including Uddhav. The bee is black. The bee has come from the place where the other black one is. The bee goes from flower to flower all day and has never stayed anywhere. From then on every word is addressed to an insect on a stalk, and every word lands, and nothing that is said can be reported, because nothing has been said to anybody.

Whose friend were you ever, bee.

You go about leaving every flower you have finished loading off.

You were on a lotus this morning and you are on a ketaki now.

Four days of it, take the sweetness, off somewhere else.

You have never let go of a thing out of love, because you never knew love,

which is a different matter from letting go.

Sūr says: you got off the lotus feet and went and sat down on poison.

That is the first move and he made a great many padas out of it. The messenger and the message and the man who sent both are collapsed into one small black thing crawling about on a flower, and the gopīs are not obliged to say which of the three they mean, and do not.

Then they got to the yoga.

Uddhav had the whole apparatus with him, because a man carrying that message carries the equipment that goes with it, and the equipment is what they went for first. The ash. The matted hair. The deerskin. The horn. The clay plugs that go in the ears of a man who has finished with hearing things. He had laid it out in front of them in the way a man lays out what he is offering, and they looked at it, and they were the wrong audience for it in a manner that had not occurred to anybody in Mathura.

What is anybody supposed to get out of sweet talk.

That same Mohan who put the earrings into these ears with his own two hands

has sent us clay plugs for them, by a bee.

He spent a whole day in Vṛndāvan once doing this hair a dozen ways and pulling

it about,

and now he sends word that it is to be worn matted on the top of the head.

He put the scent on us and the ornaments on us and he took half of us for

himself.

Sūr says: tell him to change his name as well while he is about it.

A woman from Jamunāvato who had come up with her sister and had not meant to stay sat through that one with her water jar between her feet. Partway into it she worked out what she was listening to, which was a man giving her the look that came over a woman's face at the word, the set of the mouth, the hands going still in the lap, and the man giving it to her had never seen a face. She did not say anything about it. Nobody up there ever did.

What they kept coming back to was that the thing had been brought to the wrong door. They are gopīs. They get up in the dark, they milk, they churn, they carry the pots to market on their heads and they come back and do the rest of the work, and nobody in that yard had an hour in the day to sit still with the eyes shut, and nobody had been taught a single word of the vocabulary, and they said so with a straight face and a great deal of enjoyment. Take it to Banaras. The people who buy that are all in Banaras. There is a city full of widows and scholars down the road who would be delighted, and there is not one qualified person in this village.

And then, having made him small, they asked him the question.

This formless one of yours. What country does he live in.

Explain him to us properly, bee, because we are asking in earnest

and laughing while we ask.

Who is his father. Who is his mother. Who is his wife and who does the work in

his house.

What colour is he. What does he wear. What does he like.

Who has seen him. Name one person who has seen him.

Has he ever wanted anybody, and did he get her, and what did he do afterwards.

Sūr says: the poor fellow stood there with his mouth shut and every clever

thing gone out of his head.

They ask it exactly the way that village asks about anybody. It is what is asked at a well about a stranger and what is asked in a house when a marriage is proposed. Whose son. From where. What does he look like. Has there been anyone. Every one of those questions is a question a person can answer about a person, and the thing Uddhav has brought is not a person, and that is the whole of what he came to say about it, and the questions are put to him one after another in a friendly voice and he cannot answer one of them. He cannot even say that they are the wrong questions, because they are the only questions Braj has, and he is standing in Braj.

He said nothing. Sūrdās put him down as standing there with his wits gone.

That pada took a long time to get through, because the gopīs in front of him on the hill laughed all the way along it and he had to wait for them.

Then the arithmetic.

Minds are not handed out in tens and twenties, Uddhav.

There was one. It went to Mathura with him. Who is left here to worship your

God.

If a second one had been given we would have handed it over to your formless

thing gladly.

The maker did not give a second one, so there is nothing we can do for you.

The senses have all gone slack without him, the way a body goes slack without

a head.

Sūr says: and you are the friend of Śyām, of course, and the lord of all the

yogas.

Sit down and meditate, he had said. With what. The instrument the practice requires is not in the village any more. It went down the road on a chariot and they watched it go. It is a household calculation made by women who count things for a living, and it is put to him without heat, and there is no answer to it either.

Neither is there an answer to the next one, which they made out of their trade.

You have set up shop in Braj, Uddhav.

You brought the stock up here expecting a profit and every item is overpriced.

We are cowherds. We churn butter and sell it and each of us has her line and

her customers.

Who in this market is going to take a bale of unmarked goods with no name on

it.

There is a large city back the way you came where a trade like this might have

fitted.

Sūr says: there is no buyer in sight and it is going to hang round your neck.

He liked that one and he made more of them. Dry leaves offered in exchange for a pearl necklace. A man walking into a place where there are grapes and pomegranates on every tree and trying to sell bitter neem berries out of a bag. A great merchant come up to the cattle-station with his sacks, unloading in the lane, and not one woman in the lane so foolish as to pour away her own milk and go and drink the brackish water out of a well.

Underneath all of it, and coming up through it every little while, was the other thing, which was not an argument at all.

Some people have it written on the forehead, Uddhav.

You have come up here to teach us the vice called yoga, and the maid has

snatched the wifehood.

He has made the hunchback his chief queen and is handing us renunciation.

The servant girl's drum is being beaten all over the world.

Gold with glass. A swan with a crow. Camphor with a lump of chalk.

Sūr says: he has put the sugarcane down and gone off to chew something clever.

They are not above it and he did not put them above it. The woman in Mathura is low-born, she is crooked, she was somebody's servant, she was carrying paste up a road when he met her, and they say all of that and they say it with relish and they come back to it again and again in the middle of the philosophy. Somebody asks whether the time he is spending in her house is a religious observance. Somebody asks why a man who is called the lord of the cowherd women is called the lord of the cowherd women. Somebody says that if he can be pleased by a hunchback he might at least have the decency to change his titles. It is jealousy, and it is contempt for a class of person, and the two are in the same breath and the same line, and he wrote it down as it came.

What they set against Uddhav in the end was not a rebuttal. It was a statement of who they were, and it is as plain as anything in it.

We live in Nanda's cattle-station and that is the whole of what we are.

Our name is Gopāl. Our caste is cowherd and our line is cowherd and the one we

worship is Gopāl.

He holds the hill up. He takes the cattle out. He will not live anywhere but

Vṛndāvan.

Our king is Nanda and our queen is Yaśodā and our water is the Yamuna.

Our friend is the one with the lotus eyes and there is nothing else to know

about us.

Sūr says: the powers and the treasures can stand at the door as long as they

like.

There is a bird in that country called the hārīl, and the poets of that language all say the same thing about it, which is that it takes one stick in its claws when it is young and carries it about for the rest of its life and will not put it down, and hangs upside down off a branch rather than drop it. Everyone listening knew the bird. He used it and did not explain it.

He is the hārīl's stick to us.

Thought, act and word, we got hold of Nanda's son and we shut the hand.

Waking, sleeping, dreaming, day and night, it is Kānh and Kānh and Kānh.

This yoga of yours goes down the way a bitter cucumber goes down.

Somebody has sent us a medicine for an illness he has not looked at.

Sūr says: take it to people whose minds spin about, and leave ours where they

are.

And then they turned the thing over, and this is the place where it stopped being a quarrel.

You are a very fortunate man, Uddhav.

You have stayed clear of the whole business. The thread of it never once got

round you and dyed you.

You are the lotus leaf that sits in the water all its life and comes out of it

dry.

You are the oil jar standing in the pond that not one drop has got into.

You have never put a foot in the river of love, not so much as a toe, and

nothing has ever stained you.

Sūr says: we are foolish women and we are the ant that walked into the syrup.

Not a word of it is discourteous. Every word of it is a compliment, and the man it is said to has to stand there and hear his whole life described as the thing he had been proud of, by somebody who is not attacking him.

After that they took him out.

They walked him out over the fields, which were the actual fields, and they showed him places. Here. And here. And along there, on the far side of that, and under that tree, and this is the field. They were not making a case any more. They were doing what people in Braj do with a visitor, which is point, and the visitor was a man who had heard all of it as stories in a city and was now standing on it in his sandals with the dust of it on his feet and the gopīs telling him which tree.

It took him apart.

He got down on the ground. He rolled on it, which is not a thing a man of his household does in front of women, and he lay there, and the thing he had brought up the road with him went out of him and did not come back.

I am a sacrifice for the people who live in Braj.

He is with them the whole time, the one who picked the hill up.

In this house he is a thief. On that road he collects a toll he invented

himself.

With these he takes the cattle out and with those he sits on the riverbank and

blows on a flute.

I came up here with a doctrine and I could not get it as far as the door.

Sūr says: you are my teacher and I am your servant, and I have said it out

loud where everyone can hear.

He said it more than once and he said it in more than one way. He said he would be a sacrifice for the peacocks in that country and for the creepers and for the dust of Vṛndāvan, where a boy went about barefoot every day of the year after the cows. He said that what he had told them had not got through, and that looking at them had made devotion his own, and that he had come to teach and had been taught.

Sūrdās did not hurry that and he did not decorate it. Uddhav says what he says and the padas go on past it without a pause, because there is still the return journey and the gopīs have a message to send back.

Go back to that country, bee, and go the way he wants people to go.

Tear the clothes. Put the ash on. Let the hair mat on the top of the head.

Take the horn and the deerskin and the plugs and the whole of the rest of the

equipment.

Then stand up in front of him in that costume and put our question to him.

Ask him for what reason the lord went off and left us standing here.

Sūr says: carry it in those clothes and see whether it goes down any easier.

It went on through the hot part of that season. It came at every hour when the doors were open and it went on outside on the stones in the intervals when they were shut, and men who had come up for a day sent word down that they were not coming back yet. The people from Anyor stopped pretending they had a reason to be on the hill.

A man who had been at Gaughāṭ in the old days, singing his own wretchedness at a ford for coppers, stood in one place on a hill above a village for the whole of that season and gave a few hundred arguments to a crowd of cowherd women, and lost on purpose, every time, on behalf of a bee.

The way a pada got out of Govardhan was that somebody standing in the crowd heard it twice.

There were men of the trade in every crowd on that hill. They came for the festivals and they came on ordinary days at the bhog hour, when the doors opened and the tāl and the mṛdaṅg started up inside and the whole place turned into the court of a small king holding audience. A professional singer standing back in the tibārī with his eyes shut and the beat going on his fingers against his thigh will have a new pada by the end of the second hearing. He has the words and the turn of the tune and the place where the voice goes up and the place where it drops and waits. He takes it away with him the same evening. He sings it at his own place, wherever that is, and the men who hear it there take it off him, and none of this requires anybody's permission.

Nobody at Govardhan tried to stop it, and there would have been no way of stopping it if anybody had wanted to. The padas were made to be sung in front of an image at a fixed hour by men standing in a fixed place, and once made they behaved like any other good thing left out in the open. A trader picked one up at a halting place and had a better version of it off somebody at the next halting place. They went up the roads with the carts and down the river with the boats.

What they could not do was take the name off. It sits in the last line, inside the sense, holding the rhyme down, so a man who wanted the pada without the maker would have to break the best line in it, and nobody ever did. So his name went where the padas went, and the padas went everywhere.

They were sung at the fords. They were sung by men who had never been up the hill and had no idea what the image on it looked like. They got into houses where the household served somebody else entirely, and into the repertoire of singers who belonged to other teachers and other lines and who would have argued, if you had asked them, with every word of what they were singing. That is the way of a good pada. It is portable. A man learns it because it is better than what he has, and he sings it for that reason and no other, and the theology comes along behind it like a dog following a cart.

A court is where the best singers in a country end up, because that is where the money is.

The emperor was Akbar, and he kept musicians the way he kept horses and elephants and falcons and painters, in numbers, by name, and with a ranking that everybody in the establishment understood and nobody wrote on a wall. There were men there from Gwalior and men from the Deccan and men whose families had sung for other dynasties before this one. They were paid. They were also, being of the trade, listening all the time to everything that came in off the roads.

One of them was Tānsen, out of Gwalior, and Tānsen knew the work. He had said so, in a verse of his own about Sūrdās, which is how one professional pays another in that trade. It cost him nothing and it was the truth and he said it in public.

So a pada of Sūrdās's was sung at the court one day, by somebody who had it well and sang it well, and the emperor asked whose it was.

He was told the name. Then he asked the question that gets asked about anything good, which is whether the man was still alive, and he was told that the man was alive. Blind. Very old. He lived at Govardhan and sang before the image there morning and evening, and had done for years.

Word was sent. The emperor was coming to Mathura, and Tānsen, who knew the old man's work, would bring the two of them together there.

They came up the hill and gave him the message. He did not argue with it. There was nobody there to argue with, because the men carrying a message of that kind are never the people who thought of it. He told the household he was going, and he went down to Mathura with them, and that day the kīrtan was sung by somebody else.

There is a particular indignity in being fetched, even a short way, and it falls hardest on the old. He was put on the road with people holding him at the elbow, and when he came in among the tents every surface under his feet was one he did not know. He had spent a long time in a place where he could tell the hour by the sound of it and the distance to a wall by the way his own voice came back off it. Now there was canvas cracking overhead in the wind, and horses being walked past, and men shouting in languages he did not have, and cooking smells that were not the cooking smells of the hill, and nothing at all underfoot that told him where he was.

He was put in a place and left there, and fed, and moved, and put in another place. He heard money being counted behind a screen, and a horse being shod, and a child crying somewhere and being carried off. Twice in one day he was walked past a doorway where the air went cold and sweet for three steps and then turned hot again, and nobody told him what was in there.

Then his turn came, and they led him in and put him down on a carpet and turned him to face the right way, because somebody always had to turn him the right way.

The floor under the carpet was boarded and hollow, and he would have known that at the first step. Voices in that room went up and stopped, the way voices do where there is cloth overhead instead of stone. A great many people were breathing in it and not talking. Somewhere off to one side a man was writing, and the pen going across the paper was the steadiest sound in the place.

The emperor was a man in the middle of a working day. He had come from other business and he would go on to other business, and there were people standing behind him waiting for him to be finished, and he did not waste words.

He said: God has given me a kingdom. Every man of skill in this country sings my praise. You will sing mine too.

It was not a threat. It was not even unreasonable by the accounting he used. He had the country. He had the roads and the revenue and the peace such as it was, and the men who made things under that peace had the habit of saying so, in verse, at length, and were fed for it. A singer of Sūrdās's quality praising him would be worth having, and he saw no reason on earth why he should not have it, and he asked for it directly instead of going round the houses, which was a courtesy of a kind.

What he was asking for was a piece of work in a trade with rules. A praise poem is a made thing like any other, and the men who made them were craftsmen and were paid at craftsmen's rates. You take the patron's name and you set it beside the sun, or a lion, or the sea, and you find a turn nobody has found before, and the better you are the more exactly you flatter, because a lazy comparison is an insult and a precise one is a gift. There were men in that camp who could do it in three languages and do it well. The emperor was not asking for a lie. He was asking a very good workman for a piece of work in a form the workman had never used and would have used better than anybody then alive.

Sūrdās said nothing about the request one way or the other.

He put his head down a little, the way a man does when he is going into the first note, and he sang in Bilāval, and it was morning.

Mind, take your love to Mādhav.

Hold him at night and hold him when you wake and the rest holds itself.

The world will go dry in your mouth. Let it go dry.

Be afraid of the company that walks you away from him.

Want his people the way a thirsty man wants water, and want nothing else.

Keep the love where you put it, down at the feet, and do not lift it.

Country, house, name, the rest of it: none of that was ever yours.

Sūr says this to his own mind, and his own mind is slow.

It was a courteous refusal and it was also not a refusal at all, because he had been asked for a song and he had given one, and it was a better song than anything that had been sung there that year. The emperor would have had to be a fool to miss what had happened, and he was not a fool.

There were men in the tent who worked out what had been done before the last line was finished, and one or two of them will have been pleased about it, in the way of professionals watching somebody take a risk they would not have taken themselves. Nobody said anything. The emperor sat through it without moving, and when it was over he gave no sign of being offended, then or at any point afterwards.

He let the court get on with its morning. The business went past, and men came and went, and the old man was not dismissed and was not sent for either. He sat where he had been put. Somebody put water by his hand and told him it was there.

Most of that day had nothing to do with him. Revenue was discussed. A dispute came in from a long way off, was heard, and was sent back unsettled. One man was given something and another was refused, and both of them went out past the old man on the carpet without seeing him, because a blind singer sitting quietly is furniture. The heat came up through the middle of the day and went off again, and the flaps were let down on one side of the tent and raised on the other, and the light and the air in the place changed, and he could feel both of them change.

Towards evening the emperor came back to it.

He said it again, and more plainly than before, because he wanted to be sure the old man had understood him the first time.

He said: you have sung me something about God. I have heard it, and it is better than what I am usually given. Now sing something of mine.

Sūrdās sang in Kedāro.

There is no room left in my mind.

It was a small house to start with and one guest has taken all of it.

He came in dark and he sat down and the doors will not close behind him.

Bring what you like to that door now. There is nowhere to put it down.

I have no second place in there and nothing left over to want.

Sūr: eyes come up in a flood of thirst for a sight like that.

The emperor thought it through while the pada was going on, and what he arrived at was this. Why would he sing my praise. If he wanted anything of mine he would sing it, and he would sing it well, because he can. He does not want anything of mine. These are God's own people.

That is the best thing anybody said in that tent, and the man who said it had nothing to gain by it and did not say it to be admired. It is the ordinary reasoning of somebody who has spent his whole life being wanted by people, and who therefore knows exactly what it looks like when a man in front of him does not want a thing.

Then he went back to the last line of what had just been sung.

He said: Sūrdās, you cannot see. How are you dying of thirst for a sight? And without seeing, you give comparisons. How do you give them?

Sūrdās said nothing at all.

He did not answer. The court waited, because the emperor had asked a direct question and a direct question from that quarter is answered. Nothing came. The lamps had been lit by then, and outside the camp was doing what a camp does at that hour, and inside nobody moved, and the old man sat on the carpet where they had put him and did not speak.

The emperor answered it himself, out loud.

He said: his eyes are not here. They are with the Lord. That is where he is looking. What he describes is what he sees there.

He said it to the room rather than to Sūrdās, in the tone of a man settling a point of fact that had been put to him and that he had turned over and got to the bottom of. Then he stopped, because there was nothing after it.

After that he wanted to give him something, and could not work out what.

He had the resources of a kingdom and the habit of using them, and the habit was not an empty one. Men went away from that court with grants and horses and robes, and the giving was part of the office and the office was real. He went down the list of what he had. Money was no use to a man who did not keep any. Land was no use to a man who did not farm. A place at the court was an insult dressed up. Cloth, a house, the upkeep of a temple, the maintenance of the singers on the hill: he could have done any of it and it would have been received politely, and none of it would have touched the man sitting in front of him, who had come because he was sent for and would go back to the same hill at the same hour to do the same work whatever happened here.

There was nothing he wanted. So there was nothing to give him, and he was the only man in that camp of whom it was true.

Sūrdās made his obeisance and took his leave. It was done properly on both sides. He was given people to take him back and food for the road, which is not a gift but an arrangement, and he accepted it the way he accepted a hand under his elbow. Then they put him on the road and he went home to the hill.

He got there in the ordinary way, led up the last stretch by somebody's hand under his elbow, and the path was hot on the soles of his feet the way it always was, and the flag was cracking somewhere above him in the wind off the plain, and the cows were coming in. Inside, the sevā had gone on without him, because the sevā goes on. The doors had opened at dawn and been closed at the anosar when the curtain came across, and opened again on the conch, and the image had been dressed and fed and put to bed every day he was away, and other men had stood in the maṇikoṭhā at the śṛṅgār and sung, and they had sung his padas, because there was nothing else to sing.

At the next śṛṅgār somebody put him in his place in the line and turned him to face the doors, and the curtain went back, and he sang what came next.

They heard the game before they came to it, which is the usual way with that game.

It was on the flat below the hill, on the road that runs between the villages, at the hour when nobody who has a choice is out of doors. There was a tree, and under the tree the cloth was spread in the dust, and round the cloth were the men, sitting on their heels with their knees up round their ears, and they had been there since the morning.

The cloth is a cross. Four arms go out from a square in the middle, and each arm is three columns of little squares stitched in coloured thread, and a few squares here and there carry a mark, and a piece standing on a marked square cannot be touched. Everybody's pieces come out of the middle, go down their own arm, round the whole outside of the cross the long way, and back up the middle to come home. The pieces are turned wood, four to a man, shaped like little beehives, and they are held in the fist and put down hard.

The dice are cowries. Seven small shells thrown out of the hand onto the cloth, and the count goes by how many fall open. That is the whole of it, and it is enough to hold grown men on their heels in the heat all day, because of the way the counting runs. The ordinary throws are worth what they look like and get a man nowhere. The throws that matter are the freaks: every shell falling closed, or exactly one of the seven falling open. Those pay more than any honest count, and they give the thrower another throw, and another throw can give another throw after it. So a man can sit there through the whole middle of the day getting nothing, and then in the space of a minute take the game off everybody and be laughing.

They play it in pairs, partners facing each other across the cloth, so that every man has an ally behind his back whom he cannot see and an enemy in front of him whom he can. A piece that lands on a square where an opponent's piece is standing sends that piece back to the beginning, all the way back, to start its journey again from nothing. That is the heart of it. A man whose piece is three squares from home is the most frightened man at the cloth, because everybody else can count as well as he can, and everybody is counting.

So there is shouting.

They shout at the shells while the shells are still in the air, which is a custom and not a strategy. They shout at the man who threw them. The partner says what to move and the man moves something else and the partner tells the whole road about it. Two or three onlookers squat at the edge with their chins on their knees and give advice nobody asked for, and change sides when the luck changes, and are sworn at. A boy is sent to a house for water and comes back too slowly and is sworn at. The whole of it is loud and none of it goes anywhere, and if you watched them for an hour you would think the world was ending on that cloth.

There were four men at this one. One of them had pulled his turban end down over his eyes against the heat, so far down that he had to tip his whole head back to see the board. An old man who was not playing sat a little off and settled the disputes, and there were disputes.

Sūrdās came along that road in the afternoon with some of the devotees.

They went past the tree and nobody at the game looked up. Not one of them. There was a party of men going by on the road, and one of the men going by was the singer from the hill whose padas were being sung at every ford and gateway between Agra and Mathura, and the players did not know anyone had passed. They were on their heels round the cloth with their heads down over it and the cowries going.

They had been at it long enough that the shade had moved off the cloth and they had shuffled round after it twice without ever standing up.

He stopped and asked what the noise was.

They told him. Men playing caupaḍ, under the tree, and they have been at it a good while by the look of them, and one of them is losing.

Sūrdās stood in the road and listened to it for a moment.

Then he said: a man is losing his human birth over there. It was given to him for sevā and for bhajan, the singing of the name, and for nothing else at all, and there is no other use it can be put to, and he is spending it on the shells.

Then he sang, standing where he was on the road, in Kedāro.

Mind, understand this. Take care. Consider it.

Without bhakti God is hard to come by.

The scriptures do not whisper it. They say it at the top of their voices.

You throw, and the shells come down, and you have what you have.

You have been going round the outside of the cloth your whole life

and you are three squares from home and there is a man counting towards you.

Sūr says: understand, take care, consider, and get the piece in.

Then he did the thing he almost never did, which was to explain his own pada.

He said: there are three things a man must have to play caupaḍ well. Understanding, care, and reflection. Those are the three. And those are exactly the three a man must have to do the bhajan of God, and there are no others, and it is the same three in both places.

The devotees stood in the road in the heat and he took them through it.

Understanding first, because a man who does not understand the game cannot be taught anything by it. He has to know what a throw is worth before it is thrown. He has to know which of his own pieces is standing on a mark and safe and which one is out in the open with somebody counting towards it. A man who does not know that can sit at the cloth from morning to night and the shells will teach him nothing at all, because he has nothing to receive the lesson with. It is the same with hearing. Without understanding, what is the use of hearing anything. You can have the Bhāgavata read out in your house every day of your life and it will go past you like carts going past a house. The words are correct and the reciter is good and nothing happens, because there is nobody inside listening who knows what he is listening to.

Care next. Care is the thing that keeps a player uncomfortable.

The good one is never at ease. He is counting the gap behind his own piece the whole time, and he knows which man opposite is close enough to reach him, and he does not like his position even when he is winning, and that is why he wins. The man who is comfortable at the cloth is the man who is about to be sent back to the beginning. He has forgotten there is anyone else playing.

And it is the same, Sūrdās said, with the world. Without care, no man ever gets tired of the world. A man who is comfortable in it has no reason on earth to get up out of it. He sits where he is because where he is suits him, and every year it suits him a little more, and the thing that would move him is the one thing he has taken care to avoid, which is the knowledge that somebody is counting towards him.

Then reflection, which is the third and the one people leave out.

At the cloth, he said, everything depends on who is sitting where. Your partner is behind your back. The man in front of you is the one who will take your piece. One of the men there will risk anything and one of them will never risk anything, and a player who has not worked out which is which is playing a different game from the one that is going on. The good player thinks about the men more than he thinks about the shells, because the shells cannot be influenced and the men can.

And without reflection, he said, nobody can tell good company from bad. They are not labelled. Bad company is pleasant, or it would not be company. It is the same house, the same food, the same friendly talk, and the only way to know what a man's company is doing to you is to sit down afterwards and weigh it, and almost nobody does. A man will weigh a throw of cowries for a stake of a few coppers and will not weigh the people he spends his evenings with.

So the three that make a caupaḍ player, he said, are the three that make a man fit for bhajan, and those men under the tree have all three and have had them all afternoon.

That was the joke, and it was not a joke, and the devotees standing round him in the road got both halves of it.

They walked on.

It was the hot part of the year and the road was white and the soles of the feet knew it, and somebody had a hand under his elbow. He walked slowly by then. He had walked that road in every condition it has. In the rains it goes to mud and the whole country turns green in about four days and the frogs start up in the fields at night and the peacocks call all day and the paths off the hill run like little rivers. In the cold months the image is given a quilted wrap and the singers stand in the maṇikoṭhā at the morning darśan with their hands stiff and blow on them between padas. In the hot months the stone of the hill burns through the middle of the day and the sevā turns to cold things, water and curd and melon and fans, and the doors are opened early and closed early, and everybody moves at first light or not at all.

The day had its hours and the hours had their work and the work was the same work. That is what those years were, and there were a great many of them. The doors opened at dawn and the image was woken and dressed and fed and taken out and brought back and put to bed again, and the singers sang at each of the openings, and then it was the next day and the same thing happened.

He was in the maṇikoṭhā at the śṛṅgār, in his place in the line, turned the right way by somebody. He was there at the rājbhog and there at the hour when the conch went for the utthāpan, and there in the evening. In between there was nothing much for him to do and nobody expected him to do anything. He ate what was put in his hand and slept where they put him and got up when he was told the hour.

The company was whoever was on the hill. Kumbhandās came up from his field at Jamunāvato, sang, said something short, and went home to his seven sons and his one field and would take nothing from anybody. Chaturbhujdās was in the line and Govindswāmī was in the line. Gusāīṃjī was on the hill three days and at Gokul three days and there was a different weather in the place depending which. Men came up the road from a long way off to stand in the tibārī and look at the image, and some of them came a second time and some of them stayed.

From outside it did not look like much of a life. An old blind man with no property, who was led about by whoever was going the same way, who stood in one place twice a day and sang for the length of two or three padas and was led off again. He had made the songs that half the singers in the country were living on, and he went about the hill like a man who had forgotten it. He asked what the noise was when there was a noise. He was told, and he took it in, and he said something about it, and then somebody took his elbow and they went on.

The light goes quickly on that plain once it starts to go. The cattle were coming back in along the road with the dust up round them, and the smoke was starting in the villages, and a wind had got up off the flat the way it does at that hour.

The men under the tree were still there when the party came back along that road.

The shells were still going. The shouting had changed its object, because by then it was a different man losing.

He went over to Gokul when the sevā let him go, which was now and then, and some seasons not at all.

He started in the dark. A boy went with him, because a boy always did, and the two of them came down the long east side of the hill and out along the flat while the air was still cold enough to want a cloth over the shoulders. The country between Govardhan and the river is open and cropped short and there is nothing on it to catch a foot. They went past Gopālpur and out onto the cart road, and by the time the sun was properly up they were in with the carts, and after that it was dust for a long while and men shouting at bullocks. The boy led him round the bad places. He did not need much leading. The road was one he had gone along since before there was a temple on the hill to go back to.

They crossed in the middle of the day. The ferry at that season was a punt and a chain and a man with a pole, and the water was low and green and smelled of cattle, and the sand on the far side was hot enough that everybody who got off the boat trotted until they reached the shade. Gokul is on the high bank above that water. You come up through the sand and through the lanes and the houses shut you in, and it goes quiet. It is a herdsmen's place and it smells like one. Dung drying on the walls in flat cakes with the print of a hand in each. Milk going sour somewhere in every lane. Children being shouted at. A churn going in a dark room behind a door and the rope of it slapping, and then the water being poured off, and that is the sound of the whole village in the early part of the morning and there is no other sound in it worth naming.

He came for the darśan of Navanītapriyājī.

That is a small image. A child on all fours, going forward, one hand out in front of him with a lump of butter in it. Small enough to pick up and carry on the hip, and light, and handled all day long by somebody.

There is a good deal of history behind that image and the household knew every bit of it. It came out of Mahāvan. A woman of that place had four of them in her house and brought all four to the Ācārya, wrapped and carried herself, and put them in front of him. What he did was give them away. He gave them to four Vaiṣṇavas, one each, and what he said when he gave them was that these were everything he had, that he was setting them on their heads, that they were to do the sevā of them properly, and that on the day they could not do it any longer they were to bring them to his house and not to anyone else's.

Navanītapriyājī went to a man called Gajjan.

Gajjan played with him. That was the whole of Gajjan's sevā and it was enough. He was a cow and he was a calf and he was a horse and he was an elephant, and he went round the floor of his house on his hands and knees with the image up on his neck, and he did it every day and for years, and he wore his knees out doing it. He could not be parted from him for the length of a conversation. In the end the thing that had been agreed was done, and Navanītapriyājī came to the Ācārya's own house.

The Ācārya took him to bed. He had him perfumed in the evening and laid on his own bed beside him and slept there, and one night the image said the bed was too small, and the Ācārya had a bigger one made. That is why there was a large bed in that room.

The image is served in that house as a child of the house. He is woken before it is light and he is bathed and rubbed and dressed, and the clothes are made to fit and are changed for the season, and when it is cold he is covered and when it is hot the doors are opened and somebody stands there with a fan. He is fed at the proper hours and what is put in front of him is what a Braj household would put in front of a boy of that size, which is milk, and curd, and butter. He is swung. He is put down in the afternoon and the room is kept quiet while he is down, and everybody in the house drops their voice on the way past that door without thinking about it, the way people do in a house with a baby in it.

Gusāīṃjī kept to a division of his time that everybody could set their week by. Three days on Govardhan and three days at Gokul, back and forward, and whichever house he was in he ran it. He fixed what every servant was owed and paid it. He settled who was to do what and he did not go back on it afterwards. He cooked his own food and, if the household was short or a guest had turned up and there was nobody free, he cooked theirs, rice and dāl and whatever vegetables were in, fast, and nobody made a fuss about it because he did not.

He was in a good humour with Sūrdās that whole visit.

He had made a pālanā for Navanītapriyājī. A pālanā is a cradle song, the thing a woman sings over a child in a swing at the end of the day, and there were pālanās in Braj by the hundred and they were all in the language the cowherds spoke. This one he had made in Sanskrit. It was his own composition, in the strict metre, and he had made it for an image the size of a lapful of a child who is shown in the act of crawling away with stolen butter, and there is no contradiction in that to anybody who has stood in that room.

He taught it to Sūrdās himself. He said a line and Sūrdās said it back to him. He said the next and Sūrdās said that back. That was the whole of the teaching, and it did not take the afternoon, because the man in front of him had learned everything he knew by having it said to him, and had learned the whole of the tenth skandha that way from a man on a sandbank.

Then he said: sing it tonight.

They put the image down at the end of the day the way they did every day, and the lamps in the room were taken back to the door, and Sūrdās sang it in Rāmkalī, standing where he was put, with his hands at his sides.

He is asleep on a couch of love.

The swing goes and comes and the cords hold.

The hand that took the butter has let go of it.

The breath goes in and out of him and the lamp is carried away.

Sleep, and let nobody in this house speak.

He sang it very quietly. A cradle song is sung at the volume of the room it is sung in and that room was one where a child had just been put down, and a man who has spent his life singing over crowds at a ford and over a hill full of people at the śṛṅgār knows exactly how far a voice has to go and no further. There were some of the household at the door and none of them came in. The swing was still moving a little at the start of it and had stopped by the end.

Gusāīṃjī heard it out with his back against the door frame and did not say anything for a while afterwards, and then said it was better than he had made it.

What came out of Sūrdās over the days after that was all butter and all child. He stayed on some days. He sang in the morning after the image was dressed and again in the afternoon when the house was quiet, and Gusāīṃjī sat down on the floor to listen, which the household noticed, because he had a seat and did not always use it.

The first was in Bilāval.

Look at him. The little red throat,

and the tiger's claw hung at it in gold to keep off harm,

and on the lotus of his face the yellow mark,

put on with somebody's thumb this morning.

The bees have found out the smell of it.

They come round his head and he swats at them and laughs,

and Sūr says they know where the sweetness is kept.

Gusāīṃjī said: the bees. Where did you get the bees.

Sūrdās said that the paste was made of a thing that smelled sweet and that bees went to whatever smelled sweet, and that if you put it on a child and set the child down in a courtyard in Braj the bees would come, and there was no more to it than that.

The second was about a woman at a corner.

Gopāl is standing in the house eating butter.

She has come round the corner of the wall and seen him and stopped.

She does not go in. She stands there with the wall against her shoulder

and does not let her bangles knock,

because if she moves he will look up,

and she is not ready yet for him to look up.

The curd is coming off his chin and down onto his foot.

Sūr says she stayed as long as she could.

Gusāīṃjī laughed out loud at that one. He made him sing it again the same evening, and he made him sing it again when a party came through from Mathura, and he told them beforehand what was coming so that they would not talk over the end of it. The end is the part he liked. He said afterwards to the room that the woman was not a woman of Braj in that pada, she was every person who had ever got as far as the door of the sevā and stood there, and then he said that he was spoiling it by explaining it, and stopped.

The third was in Jaitśrī and it began with the singer saying that he could not get to the end.

How far am I going to get with this beauty.

I start at the feet and the day is gone.

The anklet, and the dust on the instep, and the curl of the toes,

and I have not come up as far as the knee.

A man could sing from now to the end of his life

and leave the greater part of it unsung.

Sūr has taken hold of one hair of it and is holding on.

Gusāīṃjī said nothing to that one at all, and got up when it was over, and went and stood in front of the image for a while, and then went back to whatever he had been doing before.

The last one he made in that house was a riddle.

Riddles were a thing he did. He had made a great many of them by then, padas built so that the name of what they describe is kept out of the whole song and dropped in at the end, and singers in that country loved them and audiences fought over them, and half the pleasure of one is the pause before the answer while everybody in the room is wrong.

This one was in Rāmkalī.

Look, friend, at a strange shape.

In one lotus, twenty drops of curd.

One creeper, and two things that live in water,

and five taken five times over.

Nobody in this house has it yet.

Sūr says it is the child Gopāl, that is all it is.

The room did not have it. Somebody said the lotus was a pond and was told there were no drops of curd in a pond. Gusāīṃjī had it before the end and let the others go on, and when they gave up he put his hand out flat with the fingers spread and turned it over, and then he touched his own face.

The lotus is the face and the twenty drops of curd are the nails, and the rest of it is a small boy standing in front of you with his hands up.

Gusāīṃjī made him sing it twice and then took him by the wrist and led him in to the image and put him in front of it and said, now sing it to him, he has not heard it.

So he sang it to him.

There was prasād after that, which is the food that has been put before him and comes back to be eaten, and Gusāīṃjī gave it out himself, going round the room and putting it into people's hands, and he came to Sūrdās last and put it in his hand and closed the fingers on it and kept his own hand there a moment.

That was the last evening. In the morning the household was up before light for the maṅgalā and the front of the house was full of people out of the lanes who had come in for it, and the doors opened and shut again, and Sūrdās stood through it at the side with his hands at his sides and went out afterwards to the place where his sandals were.

He went back in the morning. The same boy, the same lanes, down through the sand, the punt, the chain, the far bank, and then the cart road with the dust already up by the time they were on it. He was expected at the hill. The śṛṅgār would want him and so would the evening and there was nobody to stand in the maṇikoṭhā in his place, and he was humming on the road, and the boy who had gone with him for years could tell from a long way off which of the new ones it was.

He got up in the dark and did not tell anybody anything.

There was no reason for anybody to notice. He had got up in the dark every morning for as long as any of them had known him, because the doors opened before light and the singers were in their places before the doors opened, and a man who is going to sing at the first darśan of the day gets himself up and out without needing to be called. He folded his bedding. He put his cloth over his shoulder. He went out past the others, who were awake and moving, and one of them said something to him about the cold and he answered it.

The path from the singers' quarters to the temple gate goes up and round and is worn smooth in the middle. The stone was cold enough under the feet to be worth noticing. Somewhere below on the flat a dog was going at something and had been at it half the night. The smoke from the kitchen fires was already coming up over the wall and hanging in the lane and not lifting, which it does on those mornings.

He came to the gate and stopped and stood for a moment, and then he went down.

Over the temple there is a flag. It is on a staff above the roof and it is changed when it needs changing, and it can be seen from the cart road, and from the top of the parikrama path, and from the flat ground on the north side where the cattle are, and from the far end of Parasauli. It is the first thing a pilgrim coming across country picks out and the last thing he loses. When people say they are going up to Śrīnāthjī they are usually looking at the flag while they say it.

He made his daṇḍavat to it. He went right down onto the stone, flat, face to the ground, both arms pushed out in front of him above his head with the palms together, the whole length of the body on the ground, which is the obeisance a man makes with his shoes off and his mind made up. He stayed down a while. Nobody hurried him. The men going in and out at that hour stepped round him, because there was always somebody on the ground at that gate and you learned to step round them without breaking your stride.

Then he got up and went down off the hill by the north path and out to Parasauli.

Parasauli is a stretch of open ground below the hill, on the Chandrasarovar. It is flat and it is mostly bare, with trees along one side of it and the water lying at the edge. Kumbhandās has a field there and goes out to it every day of his life and sits, and has done that for so long that the people of the villages around set their morning by the sight of him crossing. The rās goes on in that field. It goes on now and it has not stopped and it will not stop, and the people of those villages know which part of the ground it is on. There is a small window in the temple up on the hill that faces that way and looks down on it.

The walk out is not far and it is not hard. You go down off the shoulder of the hill and round the foot of it and out along the flat, and the path is sand and then it is trodden earth and then it is grass that has been cropped to nothing by other people's cattle. There were men out already. The cattle were being moved and a woman went past him with a pot on her head and gave him the road, and further on there were two lots of smoke going up straight from the edge of the ground where the huts are. The sun came up behind him somewhere along there and the cold went out of his back.

He walked out along the edge of the water and onto the open ground, and turned and found the hill by the feel of the light on his face, and got down on the grass and made his daṇḍavat again, out there in the field, to the flag he had been under an hour before and could not see from anywhere.

Then he lay down.

He put himself the way he wanted to be, which took him a little while, turning and settling and turning again and getting one arm under his head and taking it out again, until he was lying the way he had come out there to lie, which was with his face towards the hill and the flag on it. Then he stopped moving. He had left a temple that was about to open its doors and walked to the one piece of ground in that country where the thing he had spent the back half of his life singing about was still going on, and he lay down at the edge of it and did not get up again.

The morning came on over him in the ordinary way. The parrots went over towards the water and came back. The ground got warm and then hot and the flies found him. Somebody's boy, driving cattle along the far side, saw a man lying out there and thought nothing of it, because men lie down at the edge of that field and have done for a long time and it is not a thing anybody remarks on.

The doors opened for the maṅgalā at the hour they always opened.

There is a shape to a day in that temple and it does not change for anything. The doors open at dawn for the maṅgalā and the first darśan of the day is given, and it is a short one and the people who come to it are mostly the people of the villages on the hill, and then the doors shut. He is roused properly after that and he is bathed. He is rubbed and dried and the water is carried out, and then he is dressed, and the śṛṅgār takes as long as it takes.

Gusāīṃjī did the śṛṅgār himself that morning, which he did whenever he was on the hill.

It is close work. There is the cloth, which is chosen for the season and the day and is put on in a particular order, and there is the jewellery, which is heavy and has to sit right and is not put on a child by a man in a hurry, and there is the garland, and there is the mark on the forehead, which he drew with the side of his thumb. The bhitariyās, who are the men whose work is inside the shrine, stood by him with the trays. Somebody held the lamp where he wanted it. He worked and did not talk while he worked, and outside the nijmandir the tibārī and the maṇikoṭhā were filling up with the household and the Braj people and the singers went to their places with their instruments, and the tāl started, and then the mṛdaṅg.

He was putting on an armlet when he noticed.

It is not that the singing stopped. There were others in the maṇikoṭhā that morning and the kīrtan went on without a break, and anybody who had walked in off the hill would have said it was a good śṛṅgār and gone away satisfied. What was not there was one voice in the middle of it, a voice that had come in at exactly the same place in exactly the same way every morning for more years than most of the men in that courtyard had been alive, and Gusāīṃjī had been listening to it since he was a boy.

He finished the armlet and set the other one down on the tray.

Then he said: Sūrdās is not to be seen. Why is that.

Nobody answered him immediately. Then a Vaiṣṇava came forward from the side of the maṇikoṭhā, one of the men who had come up from the villages that morning, and said that he had seen Sūrdāsjī going out early, and that he was going towards Parasauli.

Gusāīṃjī understood at once.

He put his hand on the tray and left it there, and then he took the other armlet and put it on, and finished the śṛṅgār, and gave the darśan. And then he turned round to the household in the maṇikoṭhā and said:

The ship of the puṣṭimārg is sailing. Whoever has anything to take from it, take it now.

He said it once. He did not explain it and did not repeat it and did not raise his voice to say it, and it went through that temple and down the hill and into the lanes at the bottom inside an hour.

Then he said the other thing, which was that the rājbhog would be done as it was always done, and that if it was the Lord's will that Sūrdās was still there after the rājbhog ārtī, he would go down himself.

He sent a man out before the morning offering.

The man went down the north path at a run, and out along the water, and came back up by the middle of the morning with his cloth wet through at the shoulders, and stood in front of Gusāīṃjī and said: Maharaj, he is senseless. He is not saying anything.

Gusāīṃjī heard it and nodded and went back to the bhaṇḍār, where the question of the morning was how much milk had come in and whether the cucumbers were fit.

He sent another man after that one. That one came back and said: Maharaj, he is lying the same way. He is senseless and he is not saying anything.

The Braj people had started coming up by then. They came up the way they come up for a festival, in families, bringing what they had, except that nobody was laughing on the path. Kumbhandās came up the hill that morning instead of going out to his field, and he had not done that in a long time. He sat down in the tibārī against the wall with his hands on his knees and he did not ask anybody anything, because he already knew, and once or twice men came and sat near him and he did not say much to them.

Chaturbhujdās came with him. He was Kumbhandās's son, and he was one of Gusāīṃjī's own singers and had been in that courtyard from the time he could carry a tāl, and he stood behind his father with his back to the wall and his arms folded, and twice that morning he started to say something to the old man and stopped. Kumbhandās did not ask him what it was. It had been going round inside the boy since the news came up the path and it was not a thing that would come out in a courtyard. Govindswāmī came. Rāmdās came in from the store and stayed.

Another was sent when the vessels were already going in for the offering. He was a young one and he went faster than the men before him and came back before he was expected, and he was out of breath and the words came out in the wrong order, and what they came to when he had got them straight was that Sūrdās was senseless and was not saying anything.

The men who went out that morning were not all of them sent. Some went because they could not stand about in a courtyard any longer. Each of them did the same things when he got there. Each said his name at him. Each said it again, louder, and then got down and said it into his ear. Each put a hand on his chest and held it there long enough to feel what was going on under it. Then each of them came back up the hill and got his breath and stood in front of Gusāīṃjī and said the one thing there was to say, and it was the same words in the same order every time. Maharaj, he is senseless. He is not saying anything.

There is a window in the wall on that side, a small one, cut where it is because of what it looks at. People at the back of the maṇikoṭhā that morning kept drifting over to it and standing at it and looking out and coming away again. From there you see the north slope and the flat and the trees and the water, and you can make out the ground, and on a still day you can see a man on it if you know that the man is there. Gusāīṃjī went past that window twice on the business of the morning and did not stop at it either time.

The rājbhog is the great offering of the day and it is the hour of the Lord's court. What goes in is cooked from first light. It comes through the courtyard in covered vessels carried on the head, and it comes in quantity, because it is a meal laid before a boy who lifted a hill for the people who fed him and it is laid in the style of the country, which is generous past the point of sense. The rice goes in. The dāl and the vegetables go in. The sweet things go in, and the curd, and the milk, and the butter last. The men who carry it are the men whose fathers carried it, and the order they carry it in is not a thing anybody in that courtyard has seen altered.

He was not hurried.

Everything was carried in and set down in its order and nothing was skipped and nothing was set down in the wrong place, and the curtain was drawn, and the time that is given for the Lord to eat was given in full, and in that time the courtyard stood and waited and nobody in it moved much. It was hot in there by then. The tibārī held the heat and there were more people in it than it was built for and the smell was of marigold and ghee and hot stone and people.

Any man there could have told you what was going on out on the flat, and every man there knew what the answer would have been if anybody had been mad enough to suggest to Gusāīṃjī that the offering be shortened on account of it. There was one man in Braj who had held that sevā up for years by standing in the maṇikoṭhā and doing the thing he was given to do at the hour he was given to do it. He was lying in a field. The hour had not changed.

The curtain was opened and the darśan was given, and the people came forward and took it.

Then the ārtī. The lamp went up in front of the face, and round, and up again, and the bell started, and the cymbals, and the whole of that courtyard and the tibārī and the maṇikoṭhā and the steps outside came in on it at once, and it was very loud and it went on, and Kumbhandās got up off the floor to stand for it, and Chaturbhujdās took his father's elbow and was shaken off.

The lamp came out to the people and went round the room and everybody put their hands to it.

Then the prasād of the rājbhog was given out, and the trays went round, and the noise came down, and the bhitariyās began to bring the vessels out, and Gusāīṃjī went in and stood a moment in front of the image with his hands at his sides the way he did at the end of every rājbhog, and came out, and the doors were closed.

They close two leaves and drop a bar across and the sound of that bar is the sound of the middle of the day on Govardhan. After it the temple is quiet for hours. The image rests. Nobody plays anything, nobody sings anything, the vessels are washed at the back and the men eat and lie down in whatever shade there is and the hill goes to sleep around the closed doors until the conch at the other end of the afternoon.

The bar went across.

Gusāīṃjī turned round in the courtyard and looked at the men standing in it, and he did not have to say anything, because every one of them had been waiting for the bar since the morning. Kumbhandās was already at the gate. Chaturbhujdās went past him and out. Govindswāmī had gone for his stick. Rāmdās came out of the bhaṇḍār wiping his hands on his cloth and did not go back for anything.

They went out under the flag and turned down the north path.

They came down off the hill in the worst hour of the afternoon.

The rājbhog ārtī had been done properly and not hurried, because Gusāīṃjī would not hurry a darśan for any reason at all, and then the doors were closed and the image was left to rest and the whole party went down the north side of Govardhan at a pace that had the younger men sweating. Kumbhandās was with them. Chaturbhujdās was with them. Govindswāmī, Rāmdās, and as many of the household as could leave their work. The stone of the path holds heat like an oven at that hour and most of them were barefoot.

Parasauli is not far. You go down and round and out along the flat, past the pond, and there is a stretch of open ground with trees at the edge of it, and that is the place. People who live there will tell you that the rās goes on in that field, that it has never stopped and does not stop, and that this is why nobody grazes cattle there after dark.

Kumbhandās had a field at Parasauli. He was a farmer as well as a singer and had never pretended otherwise, and he went out to that ground most days of his life to sit in it, and had done for as long as anyone could remember. So of all the open country round that hill, the piece Sūrdās had chosen to go and lie down in was the piece one of the oldest men in the choir walked to every morning. Nobody remarked on it at the time.

He was lying on the ground at the edge of it with his face turned back towards the hill.

He had come out that morning by himself, which nobody had thought to prevent, and he had walked to the temple gate first and made his daṇḍavat to the flag, going right down with his forehead on the ground and his arms out, the full one, not the touch of the hand that a tired old man is allowed. Then he had come out here. He had lain down where he could be facing the flag. He could not see the flag. He had arranged himself to be facing it.

The men who had been sent to check on him through the morning had all come back with the same words. He is not answering. He is not saying anything.

Gusāīṃjī came up and knelt down by him and said:

Sūrdās, how are you?

And Sūrdās, who had said nothing to anybody for some hours, got himself up onto his elbows and then further than that, enough to put his head on the ground, and made his obeisance, and said:

Maharaj, I am blind. I have been watching the road for Maharaj.

There is nothing to add to that sentence. It is the only joke of his that anybody kept, and it is not really a joke. He had been lying in a field since morning with his face pointed at a flagpole he had never seen, waiting for a man to come down a hill, and when the man came he said the obvious thing about it, which was that he had been watching.

Then he sang. His voice had gone, but the thing it had been trained to do it went on doing, and he chose Sāraṅg, which is a midday rāga, which was the right one, because it was the middle of the day.

Look at one habit of Hari.

Whatever little a man keeps up, he weighs it against Meru and finds for the man.

Your offences he goes through the way a mother goes through your hair.

His face is pleased when you come in and it is pleased when you stay away,

and it was pleased at the ones who walked out on him and never came back.

He is frightened of being parted from the people who love him.

Sūrdās, to a lord of that kind, which wretch shows his back?

Gusāīṃjī said, to nobody in particular: may the Lord give that much humility to his servants. There is the vessel for it, lying there.

Chaturbhujdās was standing behind him. He was one of the singers Gusāīṃjī had brought in himself, and he had been standing in the same line as Sūrdās for years, and he had heard more of the work than almost anyone alive. He was also Kumbhandās's son, so his father was three feet away from him, and his father was of the older generation, the one the Ācārya had taken himself.

Chaturbhujdās chose that moment to say what he had evidently been carrying around.

He said: Sūrdāsjī has sung a great deal of the Lord's glory. He has never once sung the glory of the Ācārya.

It was not a kind thing to say to a man on the ground. It was not meant unkindly either. Chaturbhujdās had grown up inside the thing and it had made him what he was, and here at the end of it was the greatest of them going out without ever once having named the man who put him here, and he could not let it happen without saying so.

Sūrdās heard him out. Then he said:

All of it was his praise. Every one of them. What is there to set apart and sing separately?

And then, because the boy had asked, and because he was not going to leave him standing there with it:

But since you want it, I will say it with you.

He sang it in Bihāgaṛo.

My trust in these feet is firm.

Without the light off Vallabha's toenails the whole world is dark.

There is no other way in this age, nothing that keeps a man's good so near.

What can Sūr say. He is blind twice over.

He is a slave somebody got for nothing.

He had made that phrase a long time before and had kept it, and that was the once he used it.

After that his breathing changed. It went up into the top of his chest and stayed there and would not come down again, and everyone in that field who had sat with a dying person knew what it was, which was most of them.

Somebody put a cloth under his head. Somebody else began, quietly, to do the thing people do, which is to say the name. Gusāīṃjī stopped them. Whatever was going to be said in that field was going to be said by the man lying in it, and there was not going to be much of it, and he did not want it covered over.

Gusāīṃjī leaned in and asked him the second question.

Sūrdās. Where is your mind?

I am given away, given, given to the girl Rādhā,

whom the son of Nanda took his pleasure with.

She is clever, and you are the crown of all clever people.

How was a love like that ever going to stay hidden?

The gold on the yellow silk was your doing.

The dark of him has come off on her.

Her body shows it. She has only just come in.

She looks down at herself and understands.

Sūr's wise one: when the girls asked her, it all came out,

and she laughed.

He had been at Parasauli since the morning and his mind was in the field he was lying in, at night, some other night, watching a woman come in late with the marks of somebody on her and get found out by her friends and start laughing. That is where it was.

Then it moved off the field and went up the hill. What he had in front of him now was the face of the image, and the eyes of it, which are large and heavy-lidded and are full of one thing, and the one thing is pity. The men who dress that image every morning of their lives will try to tell you what is in those eyes and will not manage it.

Gusāīṃjī asked him the third question.

Sūrdās. Where are your eyes?

The wagtail eyes are drunk on the taste of that beauty.

Lovely, restless, sharp at the corners,

and they will not fit in the cage of the eyelids.

They keep going off towards the ears.

Sūrdās, it is only the kindness of the collyrium holding them.

Otherwise they would leave now.

That was the last thing he said. He did not finish it with anything. He did not say goodbye to anyone or give an instruction or ask for water. He put the seal on the pada, which is where a poet in that language puts his name, and the name in the last line of the last pada was his own, and then the eyes went.

Nobody moved for a while. The field went on being a field. The light came round and the shadows of the trees at the edge of it got longer and reached him and went past him.

Then Gusāīṃjī got up and took the whole household back to Govardhan, because there was a sandhyā ārtī to do and the doors open when they open.

The next morning the doors opened at the usual hour and the maṅgalā darśan was given, and the image was bathed and dressed, and at the śṛṅgār the singers stood in the maṇikoṭhā and sang, and there was a gap in the middle of the line where a man used to stand who needed somebody to put him in place and turn him the right way.

They sang his padas. There was nothing else to sing. Every hour of that day, in that temple, at every one of the eight times the doors opened, what went up in front of the image was work of his, and it had been that way for years and there was no plan to change it, and it has not changed.

A blind man came up off a sandbank and gave a religion its voice, and then he went and lay down in a field at the end of it, and said he had been watching the road.