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BIRTH OF RAMA, KṚṢŅA, AND ARIŞTANEMI
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along. Rāma, knowing his brother's strength, looked on like a stranger.
39
Kṛṣṇa grew up there in such a way that the love of the milkmaids became a disease from looking at him. The milkmaids put him in the center and made a ballet (hallisa) around him, like bees circling ardently around a lotus. The milkmaids neither closed their eyes, looking at him, nor their lips, murmuring, " Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa. The milk-pail was knocked over because their attention was fixed on Kṛṣṇa and sometimes they milked the cows on the ground without knowing it. They pretended terror, even when it did not exist, to make Krṛṣṇa face them quickly, when he was going away with his back to them. For he was devoted to comforting the terrified.
Gathering wreaths of the sinduvära, et cetera, the milkmaids themselves placed them on Kṛṣṇa's chest, like svayamvarawreaths. They stumbled at the beginning of song and dance, even when they knew them, eager to sip gracious speech from Kṛṣṇa in the guise of teaching. The milkmaids talked and touched him for any reason whatever, as if he were the lord of the herdsmen, their passion unconcealed. Wearing a peacock's tail, Kṛṣṇa sang gurjaris 174 of the herdsmen, the intervals being completed by the milkmaids without interruption. Kṛṣṇa, being asked, pulled up lotuses growing in deep water, swimming easily like a hansa, and gave them to the milkmaids.
'When your brother is seen, he steals our heart; but when he is not seen, he takes our life," the milkmaids reproached Rāma. Rama's younger brother frequently made Răma laugh, standing on a mountain-peak, playing the sweet-voiced lute, and dancing. Rāma, like an excellent stage-manager, clapped to keep time for the milkmaids singing and the cowherd Kṛṣṇa dancing.
While Rāma and Kṛṣṇa sported in this way as cowherds there, eleven years passed happily like the suṣama-period. 175
174 164. The name of a Ragiņi, a musical mode.
175 169. The time of Bliss in the wheel of time. It is the second-best period, next to Pure Bliss.
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