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When I dream, when I lie in that twilit space between sleep and wakefulness, when I am least conscious of myself as distinct from the world, that is when I hear it.

Voices chanting in chorus.

Govinda, Govinda, Govinda

I know it should mean something to me, that name. Some part of me remembers, and responds --- else why should my hands tremble, my cheeks bead with tears, my heart fill with joy and a profound sense of loss, all at once?

Yet that is not all his name brings to me. Somewhere amidst the joy, the loss, is a sense of betrayal. Like the sting of a bee.

Govinda!

My husband does not like that name. I wonder if Govinda was an old lover, a brother, or a friend. Ever since the ceremony, the treatment for some malady I had that my husband will not name --- ever since that my mind has not been what it once was. My past is a jumble of fragments, like a clay water pot that has been smashed on the rocks by the river. My husband tells me the fragmentation will give way to a new wholeness, an entire redefinition of me.

But if I don't know who I was, how can I ever know who I am?

One day I was lying in the swing seat in the inner courtyard. There was a bulbul singing melodiously in the mango tree behind me, and a tender breeze was ruffling the soft grass at my feet. My maids had braided a long garland of jasmine into my hair, and my feet and hands were red with henna. I could smell the flowers in my hair, and the faint perfume of mango blossoms. I heard people in the field beyond the courtyard calling and laughing to each other. Cowherds and their young women, and the cows lowing long, low notes of contentment. I was drugged with sunlight and happiness, and then I heard it again.

Govinda, Govinda.

The sound, the lilt, the rhythm of it! Now I began to say it under my breath myself, Govinda, Govinda. My tongue formed the syllables lovingly, familiarly. I felt my breath catch, and a tear fell shining into the grass at my feet.

Then, without warning, a single disembodied voice:

"Radha, where are you?"

That name! With it, something broke in my mind, and there came a rush of memory. I was --- had been --- Radha once. My husband called me Anamika, but I knew at last what my name had been. Radha.

I sat up, I looked around, and, as I expected, I saw and heard nothing. Except for the breeze sighing in the trees, the sweetness of the bulbul's song, the distant chatter of the cowherds. These voices, were they a strange affliction, an intoxication, a possession? Or were they memory fragments, pieces of the life I had lived before the ceremony?

Where will I find you, Govinda? Where will I find myself?

This is my quest now. As I attend to household matters, console a hurt child, supervise the cook, array myself becomingly for my husband's pleasure, invite the ladies of the royal court when they visit my neighborhood, I say Govinda's name and mine under my breath. I look for him --- and myself --- in the scent of the jasmine bush, in the vast blue cup of the sky, in the secret mist that shrouds a winter morning, in the message the wind writes on the waving grass, in --- yes, in the laughter of cowherds.

My husband is pleased with me now. He nods his approval when I dress well, when I greet the important acquaintances, when I agree to his suggestions without argument. But he does not know that I wear a mask. Sometime, somewhere, it will be Radha who will look out of my eyes, and her gaze will burn, like Shiva's third eye. It will be Radha's voice that says "Govinda!" Not in bewildered longing will she sigh, no, she will call his name out like a command, and make the temple bells quiver with the music of it. Then she will leave these marbled halls and go across the pasture, down to the river to find him.

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