Verses of Raghupati Upadhyaya

Verses from Padyāvalī by Raghupati Upādhyāya:

श्याममेव परं रूपं पुरी मधुपुरी वरा।
वयः कैशोरकं ध्येयमाद्य एव परो रसः॥८२॥

śyāmam eva paraṁ rūpaṁ purī madhupurī varā |
vayaḥ kaiśorakaṁ dhyeyam ādya eva paro rasaḥ ||82||

Black Shyama’s form of all is best;
Of his dhams, Braj outdoes the rest;
Contemplate Krishna in his youth;
his rasa of love’s the highest truth.

इह वत्सान् समचारयदिह नः स्वामी जगौ वंशीम्।
इति सास्रं गदतो मे यमुनातीरे दिनं यायात्॥८७॥

iha vatsān samacārayad iha naḥ svāmī jagau vaṁśīm|
iti sāsraṁ gadato me yamunātīre dinaṁ yāyāt ||87||

May my days pass on the Yamuna banks,
eyes wet with tears, stuttering words like these:
“Here did our master graze his calves,
and here played his flute upon the breeze.”

श्रुतयः पलालकल्पाः किमिह वयं साम्प्रतं चिनुमः।
आह्रियत पुरैव नयनैराभीरीभिः परं ब्रह्म॥९७॥

śrutayaḥ palāla-kalpāḥ
kim iha vayaṁ sāmprataṁ cinumaḥ |
āhriyata puraiva nayanair
ābhīrībhiḥ paraṁ brahma ||97||

The Shrutis are but a pile of husks,
what grains can we find rummaging through ’em?
Braja’s cowgirls have already with their eyes,
gathered up the Supreme Brahman.

कं प्रति कथयितुमीशे सम्प्रति को वा प्रतीतिमायातु
गोपतितनयाकुञ्जे गोपवधूटीविटं ब्रह्म॥९८॥

kaṁ prati kathayitum īśe
samprati ko vā pratītimāyātu
gopati-tanayā-kuñje
gopa-vadhūṭī-viṭaṁ brahma ||98||

To whom do I dare say these words
Who will believe me when I say 'em?
In the gardens of the gopi princess,
plays the playboy Supreme Brahman!

श्रुतिमपरे स्मृतिमितरे भारतमन्ये भजन्तु भवभीताः।
अहमिह नन्दं वन्दे यस्यालिन्दे परं ब्रह्म॥१२६॥।

śrutim apare smṛtim itare
bhāratam anye bhajantu bhava-bhītāḥ |
aham iha nandaṁ vande
yasyālinde paraṁ brahma ||126||.

Let others worship the Shrutis, Smritis,
or the epics – they fear the world, all of ’em!
But as for me, I bow down to Nanda,
in whose courtyard crawls the Supreme Brahman.

तप्तं तपोभिरन्यैः फलितं तद् गोपबालानाम्।
आसां यत् कुचकुम्भे नीलनिचोलयति ब्रह्म॥३००॥

taptaṁ tapobhir anyaiḥ phalitaṁ tad gopa-bālānām |
āsāṁ yat kuca-kumbhe nīla-nicolayati brahma ||300||

Whatever askesis others have performed,
‘tis the gopi girls who got all the benefits,
for 'tis around their ample breasts alone
that Brahman became the bright blue blouse that fits.

Jewels

We were jewels, you and I, not fools,
and we sought the highest love
in God and spirit, far above
the trivial amours of the mundane,
and yet together could not remain
upon that effervescent plane,

I don’t know if to wisely nod or weep,
but I always choose the latter,
and more tears flow when I pretend
that I don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

You and I are jewels, we are pearls
we are gifts of the Almighty;
We could have been empowering,
one another's Shakti.

That is not a role-playing game!
That is the way the dance is danced,
the way that Love is loved
and divine romance romanced.

But then perhaps we have been fools,
for not embracing such a gift
that promised so much, and let ourselves
fall in the well of doubt and drift.

Wounds to lick, lessons to learn,
separation to feel, union to yearn,
We still have Goloka’s perfect love for dhyan,
Vrindavan’s parakiya for our gyan.

Love is lost, better lost than never felt,
That's the way plans and theories just melt
in this the life that we were dealt.

Hot? Waiting for the rains in Vrindavan

Hot? Get up every four hours
to drink a glass or two of water.
Get five drops of urine in the morning,
dripping out as if from a squeezed lemon.

Hot?
At 6 a.m, the water in the rooftop tank is already
the temperature of a sauna.
And if you clean your butt with it,
expect to emit novel sounds.

Hot?
You fill the kettle from the room temp table top water container
and the kettle doesn't go on
because it thinks it has already done its work.

And when evening comes you throw the rooftop tank water
now as hot as the day has made it, onto the stones
to cool them off! Now that is hot!

We await the monsoon,
I was in Bengal, I saw her arrive.
On the train, I delighted in Jharkhand,
green where it had been khaki on the down trip,
luxuriant in its various ways,
it reminded me of Sanatan Goswami walking to Puri
to see the Lord at Rathayatra.

But when we awoke in Uttar Pradesh,
the lands looked parched dry and exhausted,
battered by the relentless, unrelenting sun,
truly tigmanshu.

Now we all await the monsoon. One counts the days
and listens to radio reports and meteorogical pundits
who promise the exact day and time the skies will break.
They tell us June 13, and just saying such a closeby date
brings smiles to people's lips.

One becomes so sensitive to the changes
in humidity and temperature that even a slight adjustment
makes one think the monsoon may finally be closing in.
Maybe this is it, maybe it finally is here.
Yeah, But not today.

Vrindavan Today

My life is up the creek
and I am seemingly indifferent.
I am in Vrindavan, today's Vrindavan today.
and only a few moments away
stares a trip to the West that I do not want.

I am in Vrindavan, today's Vrindavan today.
And it is a mess.
It seems the minute I got off the train
I was invited to a meeting.

One Gosai in his forties reminisced
about bathing in the clear Yamuna and the silky soft feel of the raj
on the Parikrama Marg on an early summer morning.

It is gone! And it can't be brought back!
Are some finally beginning to realize what it is that they have lost?

The closest we can imagine it now
is maybe in some Atlantic City, promenade fashion,
that will amuse German tourists who will wear Hawaiian shirts
and Tilley hats and sandals and smile
at the widows and emaciated sadhus on their way
to the Hotel Nidhivan, AC rooms. So many star hotel.

And for the less worldly, less sophisticated, the believer crowd,
there will be another, grotesque Disney vision of Krishnaworld,
with mechanical Bakasuras swallowing mechanical cowherd boys.
That is the kind of creative thinking
your great government thinks will bring in
the dough and the development.

The Green Temple Initiative wants you to put solar panels on the roof;
it wants you to conserve water and electricity, to plant trees.
Just look at what they are doing in Puri, Shrirangam, Bangaluru,
in Shirdi, in the Punjab! We too can have solar panels!
Oh glory day!

My dear young lady, you have not seen what Kali Yuga
has done to Vrindavan. You are fighting a herd of elephants
with a peacock feather.

Past and Present

It was a visit to a distant past,
my guru's ashram. Strangely unchanged,
though changes are coming, like everywhere,
like a cancer
they spread through every artery
in the shape of fallen trees
and piles of bricks in various shapes and forms,
usually square and shapeless, devoid of love or art.

The local trains are even more crowded
and there are clubs of fellow office workers
who gather and argue the topics of the day
for the two hours to Shealdah or Dumdum
or wherever they will descend, suddenly serious
as the next step in their crusade to find the office
begins. Their crisp shirts already showing the signs
of sweltering.

At other times, it is the endless parade
of hawkers and beggars, and now,
blind singers with portable loudspeakers and electronic keyboards.
Even Bengali begging comes limping into the 21st century.

But Dwadash Mandir sits in obliviousness to the norms
of the modern world. It is dangling with cobwebs
the spaces are just nooks, the women are just cooks.

And the bell rings and the gong chimes
and one or two voices sing the mangal arati
waking up the rest, who slowly drag themselves
into their daily routine of cooking and cleaning

the men are dragging long tubes or piles of wood,
or bringing in mangoes from the orchard
or bringing feed to the cows,
or just standing around in a gamcha
with a neem twig dangling from the mouth.

But now they have taken Prabhu's room
with its 19th century aura of poverty-stricken opulence
and sterilized it with marble floors and tiled walls.
And marble is sneaking in in the Shiva temples
and who knows where else it will end up,
bringing the new concept of mandir here.

Yet the damage is only just beginning
as the Bhaktivedanta Charity Trust
slowly begins to impose its modern vision
of what should be Bhaktivinoda Thakur's glory--
no doubt some kind of skyscraper spectacularness,
which who knows may require a 60-storey glass structure
rivaling the gaudy marvels of Abu Dhabi and Shanghai,
and will bring much needed economic development
and foreign tourist dollars to the region!

Yes, that was the other distant past,
I viewed from the optics of Gadai Gauranga Kunj,
Gadadhar's folly, a one-man diamond Neverneverland,
which stands like one last precarious sentinel
to another way of looking at things,
a crazy, fantastic, maybe even weird kind of
Gauranga prem, but which has been as persistent and
internally evolving as the Ganges itself,
as imagination itself.

And from there you can look out
like Bhaktivinoda Thakur himself
and see the skyline of a glorious spiritual city
the very living manifestation of Bhaktivinoda's prophetic vision,
where Sahebs and the sons of rishis dance together
in ecstatic glorification of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu.
It can be done, it must be done!
Krishna West was Krishna West before it came west,
the karma yoga vision of bhakti,
a religion for doers and go-getters.
creating a new spiritual Kolkata where once there had only been rice fields,
Oh happy day!

Perhaps it is a bridge, but I don't think you get to the other side
until you scrape away at the palimpsest of history
to see what was below, what was Vrindavan,
what was Radha Kund, what was Nabadwip,
what was the Jaiva Dharma world of Lalita Prasad Thakur.
To find out exactly what it is that they had.
How can you have Lalita Prasad Thakur
-- or Sri Rupa or Sri Jiva or Chaitanya Mahaprabhu himself --
without having their world?

Two distant pasts, and both held out their hands
and said, we need you here.

And now the here and now makes a call
and says we need you here and now.
Vrindavan Today was yesterday,
and yet it is still needed today,
or will no one even try to stop the floods of Kali?

But I am one who does nothing, who barely sees at all
what is, much less what needs to be done.

And now, it seems that all these trips to the past
were just baby step preparations
for another even bigger step into the alternate realities
of older matrices, with their abandoned dreams and desires,
betrayals of affection, even bigger ones
than in all these other pasts that litter my present.

May I ever see the past in the present,
may I ever see their newness with new eyes
of experience and revelation.

Let me do nothing

Let me languish a little longer
in silence, in doing nothing,
just watching my breath
and savoring the occasional thought
as it comes flurrying in the wake
of the Name or the Mantra.

Let me do nothing for a few hours more
let me just sit and breathe
and watch my body from the inside
and create a soothing world within
this healthy body
this healthy mind.

Let me waste the day in nirjan bhajan,
contrived nothingness
letting the exhortations of Samuel Smiles
and the dramatic exemplifications of Horatio Alger
-- yeah, the commands of God-on-High to fight --
drift by like leaves in an invisible breeze.

Let me indulge my excentricity just a little longer,
for life itself will not tolerate one so indifferent to Work.

My house, like Gadadhar's, is also situated
precariously on a brief precipice to the
broad and muscular Ganga,
which even in the dry season
powers its way imperially towards the sea.

The house glimmers white in the sun
as you cross the river in a ferry,
seen from all quarters like a lighthouse,
but it is built on sand
and stands there awaiting the next
inevitable flood.

And here in Vrindavan, doom takes another form.
The new teachers of the Gita, teaching Karma-yoga and rajo-guna,
who wanted to turn the teeming, underachieving masses
into a billion worker bees, can now look down from their heavens
and marvel at how their experiment has worked.

And what has been lost as this Kali bursts in
and floods the town with honking horns and herculean hoardings;
another flood to wash away silence
the contemplation is to be erased
from the karma yoga paradise
of the interchangeable
"progress" party.

The fantasy castles are being washed away
the fantasies we cherish here today
are gone tomorrow, with no one to read the eulogy.

Black and white

It is said that prem is so pure a thing
that it can stand no blemish.
Like the whitest of white cloth
is sullied by even the smallest spot of ink.

As one whose white clothes
are always speckled with
spots of turmeric soggy dahl
and grease from bicycle chains,
and splashed mud from India's open drains,

I think I should have been a Tantrik
dressed in black.