The flute starts. And the text does not say they went to him. It says what each of them was holding when they stopped.
"Some were milking cows. But without finishing the milking, they went to him. Some had placed vessels of milk, others had placed dishes for cooking. Without removing these, they departed. Some were serving, but left it incomplete. Some were feeding babies milk from their breasts, but left it. Some were feeding their husbands, others were themselves eating. But they forgot the food and left. Some were smearing or cleaning their bodies, others were applying collyrium to their eyes. Some were adorning themselves with garments and ornaments, but left these in disarray."1
Nine states, and every one is caught mid-motion.
Not they left the house. Instead:
A list of things given up would be a list of possessions. This is a list of interrupted processes, which is a different kind of cost.
A cow left half-milked is not a sacrifice of milk. It is an animal in discomfort and a job that someone will have to finish badly later. Food half-served is a table of people waiting. Collyrium on one eye is not sacrificed vanity — it is a woman who will be seen with one eye done.
⚑ The volume is not measuring what they surrendered. It is measuring how abruptly they stopped, and abruptness is the only thing on the list that cannot be faked by someone who prepared.
Eight of the nine are chores, grooming or meals.
The ninth is "feeding babies milk from their breasts, but left it."
That one is not in the same category and the text does not mark it as different. It sits between the serving and the husbands' meals, in the same grammar, as one more thing that was underway.
⚠ The volume does this deliberately elsewhere, so it is worth recording rather than reading past. At 10(41), when Kṛṣṇa enters Mathurā, the city's women "were feeding their infants, but cast them aside" to see him. At 10(36), Ariṣṭa's bellowing alone is enough that "cows and women miscarried and delivered ahead of their time."
[n≥3 PATTERN] — the nursing or unborn child is this volume's chosen unit of measure: twice for what devotion overrides, once for what terror costs. It is reached for whenever a quantity of harm or of intensity needs to be made legible, and it is never remarked on.
Three of the nine are grooming, and the volume does not drop them.
A body half-smeared. Collyrium on one eye. Garments and ornaments "in disarray."
So the women who reach the forest are visibly mid-interruption. They are not dressed for an assignation; they are dressed like people who stopped.
And the detail carries. Four chapters later, during the dance itself, the text returns to it: they "could not prevent their hair, garments and coverings on their breasts from becoming dishevelled and loosened. Their garlands and ornaments were scattered."3
⚑ The dishevelment is the same dishevelment. It starts as evidence of abandoned grooming and ends as evidence of the dance, and the volume never distinguishes the two states — which means the physical sign the reader is given for erotic disorder is the same sign given for a woman who left in a hurry with one eye done.
One more clause, immediately after the inventory:
"They were restrained by their husbands, fathers, brothers and relatives. However, their minds had been stolen by Govinda and, captivated, they did not return."1
So the departure is not only interrupted work. It is interrupted work plus physical restraint by four categories of male relative, overcome.
This is the second time in nine chapters the volume uses that exact construction. At 10(23) the brahmana wives "were restrained by their husbands, brothers, relatives and sons" and went anyway. Same formula, same outcome, different women, different social class.
The restraint clause is doing structural work in this volume, not scene-setting — it appears where the text wants to establish that a departure was not merely permitted.
You are three paragraphs into something and the phone goes and it is the one call you have been waiting eight months for. Later you come back to the document. The half-sentence is still there. You can see exactly where you were, and you cannot get back into it, and the visible seam is the honest record of what the call was worth.
You leave a job properly — notice, handover, documentation. Someone else leaves the same job in an afternoon. Six months on, which departure does the office still talk about? Not the tidy one.
You are the one left with the half-milked cow. Not the person who ran. The person who has to finish somebody else's interrupted work, and who was never asked, and whose name is not in the story at all.
The volume gives this inventory twice, and the second time it means the opposite.
At 10(44), the women of Mathurā praise the women of Vraja — and the praise is an inventory of the same labour, carried out rather than abandoned:
"While milking, threshing, churning, smearing, swinging on swings, taking care of weeping infants, sprinkling, cleaning and performing other activities, their minds have been extremely attached to him."2
Milking. Smearing. Infants. Cleaning. Substantially the same list, and here devotion looks like finishing the work with the mind elsewhere.
⚑ One chapter praises leaving the work; another praises completing it. Both are presented as devotion, and the text never notices it has given two incompatible accounts of the same labour.
Note who speaks each. The abandonment is narrated by Śuka. The completion is spoken by outsiders about a practice they have not performed — Mathurā women describing Vraja women. That does not resolve it, but it is the kind of detail that has to be on the page rather than averaged away.
(The 10(44) passage is a page in its own right and is built with the Mathurā material; it is cited here, not developed.)
Worth saying plainly: this list makes the rāsa harder to defend, not easier, and the volume supplies it anyway.
Parīkṣit's objection at the close of 10(33) — "by associating with the wives of others, how could he then act in this perverse way?" — is sharpened by every item here. The stronger the picture of a household mid-function, the worse the interruption looks.
A text optimising for its protagonist would have written they slipped out at night. This one writes down the cow.
The strongest support is the specificity. Nine states, individually enumerated, none of them decorative, in a chapter that had no need of them. The list slows the narrative at precisely the moment a defender would want speed.
The tension, preserved. Abandonment and completion are both praised, nine and fifteen chapters apart, using the same labour. Neither passage qualifies the other and this page does not construct the qualifier.
Open question. The restraint formula appears at 10(23) and 10(29), both times with women overcoming male relatives and both times endorsed. Does it ever appear with the restraint succeeding? At 10(23) one woman is successfully restrained — and she dies and is liberated, which is not a counter-case so much as a third outcome. [n=2 SUGGESTIVE] on the formula, and no more is claimed.
Against He Argued Against It First, this inventory is the evidence base for Kṛṣṇa's own objection minutes later. When he tells them "the calves and children are crying. Feed them milk and do the milking", he is reading this list back to them. The lecture is not abstract moralising; it is an itemised response to what the narrator has just described, which is a tighter piece of construction than either passage looks like alone.
Against The Women Who Never Got Out of the House, the pairing is quietly brutal. This page catalogues the cost of leaving. That page reports that the women who could not leave did better. The nine interrupted tasks bought an evening and sixty chapters of grief; the locked rooms bought immediate liberation.
Costly Signaling — the more you are willing to waste, the more credible the commitment, because waste is expensive and therefore hard to fake. Red Bull's two million dollars proves nothing about the drink and everything about the sponsor.
The nine tasks are a costly signal in that exact sense, and the volume is unusually precise about which cost it is counting. Not value — none of these items is worth much. Irreversibility. Milk left standing spoils. A half-milked cow cannot be un-half-milked. The signal is expensive because the process cannot be resumed from where it stopped.
⚑ What neither field gives alone: the costly-signalling literature prices the signal in resources destroyed, and this list prices it in processes interrupted, which is a cost the sender does not pay. Red Bull's two million is Red Bull's. The half-milked cow belongs to a household, the unfed infant is a third party, and the waiting husband did not consent to the demonstration. So the gopīs' signal is credible for the standard reason and is funded by people who are not signalling anything — which is a category the theory has no name for, and which describes a great deal of real devotional and political sacrifice better than the self-funded version does. The tell is that the volume itemises whose work was left rather than what the women gave up.
Sharpest implication. The volume measures devotion in interrupted processes rather than in surrendered goods, and it reaches for a nursing infant to make the measurement legible — twice, in two cities. The cost is real, it is precisely itemised, and most of it is borne by people who are not in the scene.
Generative questions.