THE WANDERING MINSTREL

This is Mira's story, a life lived completely in search for God, with absolute and heroic unconcern for the world and worldliness; a life in which a bridal love for God attained its astonishing fulfilment even as it did in the life of the Gopis, a life from which flows an unending stream of inspiration to aspirants who tread the path of devotion to the Lord.

Mira is not just a heartbeat but the very soul-vibration of India. And why should on say'of India'? Mystics do not belong to any race. They belong to God as God belongs to them. Their true language is not just a spoken dialect, but the yearning of the soul.

Now, though we have narrated here some known facts of her life, we must confess, it is beyond our power to present the real Mira. For the real Mira is not the Mira of the happenings of her life, but the Mira of the hastening soul, the Mira of agony and suffering, of bleeding heart and scorched spirit.

The Mira pining and prostrated by separation from the Lord; and again the Mira of resurgence and beatitude in her union with the Lord.

If you want to have a glimpse of this real Mira, you must hear a musically gifted devotee of Krishna sing her song with self-abandon. Then you will hava faint glimpse of the inner being of Mira.

In her devotional songs Mira lives on. As we cannot conceive of the death of electiricity, so we cannot conceive of the death of love.

In bhakti (devotion), the bhakta (devotee) lives. Bhakti is not a one-way traffic. It is a fusion of God's breath to the soul and the soul's response to it; it is the union of bride with the bridegroom; it is the losing of oneself in the offereed embrace.

At the age of four Mira dreamt that the Lord had married her. She could even remember the imposing gate of the palace of God. From this time, when in reply to her question about her 'dulha' her mother had said that the Deity Giridhara was her bridegroom, the one constant strain through her life was:

I have none but Giridhara Gopala,

On whose head shines

The crown of peacock feathers.

He alone is my husband and my Lord.

For this supreme union she had to pass through all sorts of travail which are reflected in her songs. She did not mince matters. She declared her love without hesitation. There was no hush hush. Her agony was too great to allow her the luxury of concern for anything else. It required her to be fearless, to be shameless, to be deprived of everything people hold dear in the world-home, security, prestige-and to undergo all sorts of oppression for the sake of the Beloved. Even then He was not always to be seen. The love was given, but where was the lover? Mira's anguish knew no bounds:

My eyes ache for a sight of you;

Since you have left me, my Lord, I find no rest,

My bosom heaves at your name, your sweet name!

With gaze fixed on your path, I await your return.

The night seems longs as half a year.

Oh, to whom shall I repeat,

The pangs of my separation?

Friends, I feel as if a knife is cutting my eye,

When will you meet me, O Lord of Mira,

You who bestow joy and allay pain?

For you, night after night, I keep vigil

And make the same lament.

In many of her songs Mira thus pours out her flaming agony-her unmitigated yearning for the Lord. There are other songs in which she delineates the sports of the Lord, and in some of them there is inspiring description of nature, and supplication as an aspirant.

Some songs are autobiographical and in others she gives hints for spiritual life. After long separation and suffering there came the great moment of joyous union. And she sang:

Friends, my beloved has come home;

After long separation and agony

I have been united with my beloved.

I have greeted him with the waving of a light,

Ah, this return of the beloved,

In all his grace!

Let us sing the song of the joy of union,

the boundless joy.

My eyes swim in the ocean of his beauty.

Mira's courtyard is bright today.

Mira's bliss could not be taken away from her; her union could not be broken. So she confidently sings:

All-pervading one,

I am dyed with your colour,

When other women's sweethearts

Live in foreign lands,

THey write letter after letter.

But my beloved lives in my heart,

So I sing happily day and night.

After coming through so many trials and such anguish, Mira could at last declare almost triumphantly without the least trace of vainglory:

I am true to my Lord;

Why should I feel ashamed now,

That I have danced in public for my beloved?

I lost all appetite in the day,

And all sleep at night,

Now the arrow of love has transpierced me,

And I have begun singing

Of the knowledge that is divine;

Therefore my relatives have all come,

And are sitting round me like bees sipping honey,

Mira, the slave of Giridhara,

Is no more the laughing stock of the world.

In the beautiful song, Mira gives in arresting language the testament of her faith-

I have none but Giridhara Gopala,

On whose head shines

The crown of peacock feathers,

He alone is ny husband and my Lord.

Father, mother, brother and kinsman

None are mine.

I have flung aside my pride of family.

What harm can anyone do to me?

By keeping company with saints,

I have lost all worldly shame.

I have torn my veil of many hues

And covered myself with coarse apparel;

Pearls and corals I have cast aside

And put on a garland of forest flowers.

With my tears I have watered the creeper of love.

Now that the creeper has thickly speard,

Its fruit shall be joy itself.

With great devotion I have churned milk,

And butter I have collected;

He who wants may have the whey.

I was born for devotion's sake,

But the sight of the world made me captive.

O Lord Giridhara, save me now,

Says Mira, thy maidservant.

That joy, that butter of life-spiritual which Mira had collected with great devotion, waits to be yours, if you would, for your own joy, for yur own bliss, for your own good-whoever may be that you.