Balarāma comes to Vraja. Kṛṣṇa does not. The gopīs greet him and then deliver the only speech in the volume where they attempt to release themselves.
It has a shape, and the shape is the finding.
Enquiry. *"Is Krishna, the darling of the women of the city, happy? Does he remember his relatives and his father and his mother? Do you think he himself will come back and see his mother even once?"*1
Grievance. *"Does the mighty-armed one remember the service we rendered him? For his sake, we abandoned our mothers, fathers, brothers, husbands, sons and sisters. These are extremely difficult to give up. He is ungrateful."*
Analysis of the rival. "How can the intelligent women of the city accept the words of someone who is so fickle? Perhaps they accept them because his words are colourful and charming. Perhaps they are agitated by his smiling glances and desire is ignited in them."
The break. *"O gopis! Why are we talking about him? Let us talk about something else. If he spends his time without us, we should also behave in a similar way."*
The collapse. And immediately, in the narrator's voice:
"But the women remembered Shouri's smiles, conversation, beautiful glances, gait and loving embraces. They started to weep."1
They resolve to stop and fail inside one sentence. The text does not just report that — it specifies what came back.
Smiles. Conversation. Glances. Gait. Embraces.
Five items, named individually. Not they thought of him. Five discrete sensory recollections, arriving unbidden at the precise moment the decision to stop was made.
⚑ This is the most precise description of separation in the volume and there is nothing devotional in it. It is the structure of an intrusive memory: a suppression attempt, followed immediately by return, with the returning content itemised.
Worth noting how sound the attempt is. The gopīs are not being weak-minded.
They have run an accurate assessment — he is ungrateful, he is fickle, the city women probably fall for his manner. They have drawn a proportionate conclusion: if he spends his time without us, we should also behave in a similar way. Reciprocal disengagement, symmetrically justified.
⚑ Everything up to the break is a correct analysis. What defeats it is not a counter-argument. It is a memory of how someone walked.
And the proposal itself is modest. They do not resolve to forget him, or to stop loving him, or to renounce anything. They propose only to change the subject — let us talk about something else — which is the smallest possible version of the move and the one most likely to succeed.
It does not survive the sentence it is in. Whatever is running here does not operate at the level of conversational topic, and the gopīs discover that in the time it takes to finish speaking.
Here is the part the volume does not remark on and should not be smoothed.
The Purāṇa's entire practical programme is remembering him. Smaraṇa is one of the nine limbs. At 10(29) the doctrine is that those who "constantly harbour desire, anger, fear, identity and affection towards Hari eventually become unified with him." At 12(3) the recommendation is to chant "even when he is dying, distressed, falling down, faltering or helpless." At 10(47) the message told them their minds being "completely immersed" in him is the reason they will obtain him.
The gopīs' attempt to stop is defeated by exactly that faculty, operating exactly as prescribed, against their will.
⚑ The volume's recommended practice is here shown running as an affliction, and the text does not notice it has shown this.
Nothing, and the text calls it a skill:
"The illustrious Samkarshana was accomplished in comforting. He assured them by conveying Krishna's message and calmed their minds."1
That is the third delivery of the same message. Uddhava carried it at 10(46)–10(47). Kṛṣṇa sent it originally at 10(39). Now Balarāma, in person, re-administers it.
The dose works. Their minds are calmed. And he then stays two months and never returns to the subject.
And this is the other half of the chapter, which is easy to miss because it looks like a separate story.
Kṛṣṇa promised to return and does not. Balarāma goes. He stays the two months of Madhu and Mādhava, sports with the gopīs, drinks vāruṇī from a tree-hollow, and drags the Yamunā out of her course with a ploughshare when she does not come when called.
He is present, generous and available. He is not the one they asked about.
⚑ Every question they put to him is about his brother. Is Krishna happy? Does he remember? Will he come back? And his only substantive answer is to deliver the other man's message.
The volume runs the substitution experiment it has run twice before — a stand-in supplied so a loss does not register — and this is the one time it fails. The mothers at 10(13) never noticed. The husbands at 10(33) never noticed. Here the substitute arrives in person, is loved, and does not displace anything.
You make the decision at eleven at night and it is a good decision, correctly reasoned, and by ten past eleven you are looking at their photograph. Nothing argued you out of it.
You tell a friend you are done. You mean it. The sentence is still in the air when you remember the specific way they said your name.
Somebody kind turns up and is genuinely good company, and you spend the whole evening asking them about a third person.
The gopīs speak in four separate places — 10(31), 10(47), here, and 10(82). This is the only one containing an attempt to stop.
Consider what is different about the audience.
At 10(31) they address him, and address invites a response. At 10(47) they address a bee, in front of his envoy, and the mode is prosecution. At 10(82) they address him again, at the reunion, decades on.
Here they address his brother — someone who knows him, is not him, cannot be petitioned, and cannot answer for him. There is nothing to be gained from the speech, no defendant and no messenger to carry it back.
⚑ The one time the gopīs have no strategic reason to speak is the one time they try to stop. A grievance delivered to someone who can act on it has a function; a grievance delivered to a bystander is just the state of the speaker, and the state, examined out loud, turns out to include a wish to be rid of it.
The strongest support is the itemisation of the rebound. A text describing devotional longing does not need a five-item list of what returned. That list is the difference between a mood and a mechanism, and the volume supplies it unprompted.
The tension, preserved. Smaraṇa is a prescribed limb of practice and here it operates as an involuntary affliction defeating a considered decision. Both are the volume's, and it never sets them against each other.
A second tension. Balarāma is described as "accomplished in comforting" for administering a promise the volume has already shown Kṛṣṇa knows will not be kept. The competence is real and its object is not, and the text grades only the competence.
Open question. The two months, the vāruṇī and the dragged Yamunā are Balarāma's own material and are not separation content. ⚠ Recorded and deliberately not built here — the Balarāma character thread runs from 10(13) through 10(54), 10(61), 10(65), 10(68) and 10(78), and it belongs wherever that thread is taken up, not in this cluster.
Set against They Started Playing Him, these are the volume's two anatomies of the same condition and they run in opposite directions. At 10(30) the gopīs meet absence by producing him — casting the roles, speaking his lines, walking his walk. Here they attempt to evict him and cannot.
One chapter shows the memory summoned deliberately; the other shows it arriving against an explicit decision. Neither works, and the volume presents them thirty-five chapters apart without comment.
Against He Knows What the Promise Is Doing, this chapter supplies the third data point that turns a briefing into a schedule. Three couriers, one undated message, delivered whenever the effect wears off — and here the volume names the administering as a competence.
Ironic Process Theory: The Rebound Effect of Mental Control — Wegner's mechanism: suppressing a thought activates a monitor that keeps the thought accessible and primed. Suppression and rebound are one system with two phases, and they cannot be separated. The rejection creates the accessibility the rejection was for.
The gopīs' break-and-collapse is that system in two consecutive sentences, and the volume even supplies the monitoring content — the five items that came back are the specific things they would have had to be checking for in order to avoid them.
⚑ What neither field gives alone: the rebound here is not a nuisance thought, it is the object of a religious practice, and that changes what a cure would even mean. Wegner's subjects want the white bear gone and the theory explains why pushing fails; the therapeutic upshot is to stop pushing. The gopīs cannot take that advice, because the content they are trying to suppress is the same content their tradition instructs them to hold continuously, and holding it is what makes them exemplary.
So the ironic-process trap has a second floor the psychology does not describe: a case where the rebound is not merely unavoidable but endorsed, and where the sufferer's own community would classify a successful suppression as a spiritual failure. There is no exit that is not also a defection. That is the structural reason the gopīs never manage it in ninety chapters, and it is a more precise account of their condition than they loved him very much.
Intrusive Thoughts: The Unbidden Guest in Consciousness — thoughts that appear unsummoned, often contradicting the person's values or self-image: the harm image while holding a child, the swerve while driving, the embarrassing memory in a meeting.
The clinical picture turns on contradiction — the thought is distressing because it is not what the person would choose. And the five returning items here are not that. Smiles, conversation, glances, gait, embraces are all things the gopīs value.
⚑ The insight: the distress does not come from the content, it comes from the timing. These are cherished memories arriving at the one moment they had decided to be free of them, which makes the same material intrusive without being unwanted in itself. The intrusive-thought literature is organised around ego-dystonic content and has less to say about ego-syntonic content delivered against the will — and that second category is where most of ordinary grief lives, and all of this chapter.
It also names what makes the gopīs' position unusually bad: they cannot even reclassify the intruder as foreign. A person distressed by a harm image can be told that is not you. Nobody can tell these women that a memory of how he walked is not theirs.
Sharpest implication. The gopīs reason their way to a correct and proportionate decision to let him go, and it is defeated inside one sentence by five specific sensory memories — arriving through the exact faculty the tradition prescribes as its central practice. The volume prints the attempt, prints the failure, itemises the mechanism, and does not notice that it has shown its own recommended discipline running as an illness.
Generative questions.