#villette

I read Villette towards the end of last year and I absolutely loved it. I didn't think I would, at first, but it reeled me in. With encouragement from my local book club I am now a fully fledged book bedazzler.

I know gothic fiction doesn't seem the type of bedazzling, but I like to pull out details rather than cover the whole book in jewels.

📖 Vilette by Charlotte Brontë

For the past week, I have been trying to make the final chapters last as long as possible, crying myself to sleep night after night over this strange feeling of longing and separation that Charlotte Brontë somehow buried inside a Victorian novel. Reading Lucy Snowe felt like being led deeper and deeper into a solitude so profound that eventually there is nowhere left to run. No distraction. No consolation. No solution. Nothing but the truth of your own heart staring back at you.

And somehow, through all of it, I kept thinking of Radha and Krishna.

I kept thinking about separation.

About waiting.

About looking for signs.

About waking up every morning searching for the white butterflies that have followed me for months now, hoping for that little reassurance that everything is okay, that everything will be okay, that the waiting is not meaningless, that the longing is not wasted.

Not just in the story.

In life.

In devotion.

In that yearning to see God and be seen by God.

How many times have I lived this? In relationships, certainly. But even more deeply in my spiritual life. Hoping He has not forgotten me. Hoping one day He will simply appear and say, “Here I am. I was here all along.”

Then I reached the final chapter.

And Charlotte Brontë casually writes the word Juggernaut.

Jagannath.

I had to put the book down.

I wept.

Not because I think Charlotte Brontë secretly understood Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Not because I think she knew the depths of what that name means.

But because Krishna knew.

For weeks I had been reading this novel through the lens of longing, separation, hope, and devotion. Through Radha. Through Krishna. Through that unbearable sweetness of loving someone who seems absent yet remains more present than anything else.

And then, in the final chapter, there He was.

Jagannath.

The form of Krishna melted by separation from Radha. The Lord whose eyes become impossibly large in ecstatic longing. The form I carry in my japa bag every day. The form before whom I sit and chant.

And there He was waiting for me in the final pages of a novel written in 1853.

Not as literary symbolism.

As mercy.

As if Krishna Himself were laughing and saying:

“You were looking for a sign?”

“Well, here it is.”

“What else do you need?”

“There is no need to search for white butterflies every morning.”

“As long as you remember Me, I am here.”

“As long as you call My names, I am here.”

“As long as you keep turning toward Me, I am here.”

And suddenly all the tears made sense.

The tears of Lucy.

The tears of longing.

The tears of separation.

The tears that Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu speaks of in the Śikṣāṣṭakam:

“O Govinda! Feeling Your separation, I consider even a moment to be like twelve years or more. Tears flow from my eyes like torrents of rain, and I see the entire world as void in Your absence.”

How else can one describe it?

How else can one describe this sweetness that hurts and heals at the same time?

I finished the book.

I closed the final page.

I sat there crying in front of Jagannath.

And just as I finished these thoughts, a white butterfly appeared.