Nearly everything Chaitanya-charitamrita records about Anupama Mallika's inner life comes from a single conversation, and, strikingly, it is not Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu who tells it but Sanatana Goswami, remembering his youngest brother after his death. At Jagannatha Puri, Mahaprabhu had just told Sanatana that Anupama had died in Bengal, adding a brief epitaph of His own: "Your brother Anupama is now dead. He was a very good devotee who had firm conviction in Raghunatha [Lord Ramacandra]" (CC Antya 4.27). Sanatana's reply, offered in humility and grief together, is the fullest surviving portrait of who Anupama actually was.
Sanatana told Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu that Anupama had worshiped Lord Ramachandra "from the very beginning of his childhood... with great determination," chanting Ramachandra's holy name and constantly hearing the Ramayana (CC Antya 4.30-31). Sanatana and Rupa Goswami, as the elder brothers, lived with Anupama continuously, and, wanting to draw their youngest brother into their own absorption in Krishna, spoke to him again and again about Krishna's beauty and pastimes: "Engage yourself in devotional service to Krishna with the two of us. We three brothers shall stay together and enjoy discussing the pastimes of Lord Krishna" (CC Antya 4.35). Eventually, worn down by love and respect for his brothers rather than any real change of heart, Anupama gave in outwardly: "My dear brothers, how can I disobey your orders? Initiate me into the Krishna mantra so that I may perform devotional service to Lord Krishna" (CC Antya 4.37).
He did not mean it, and he knew it the moment he had said it. That night he could not sleep. Chaitanya-charitamrita describes him lying awake in tears, turning over a single question: "How shall I give up the lotus feet of Lord Raghunatha?" (CC Antya 4.38). By morning he had his real answer, and he brought it back to his brothers directly. "I have sold my head at the lotus feet of Lord Ramacandra," he told them. "I cannot take it away. That would be too painful for me" (CC Antya 4.40). He begged them instead to bless him so that he could serve Raghunatha's feet life after life, saying that even the thought of giving them up broke his heart (CC Antya 4.41-42).
Rupa and Sanatana did not press him further. Chaitanya-charitamrita records that they embraced him instead, and praised the very quality they had spent so long trying to redirect: "You are a great saintly devotee, for your determination in devotional service is fixed" (CC Antya 4.43). When Sanatana finished retelling this whole episode at Jagannatha Puri, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu placed it alongside one other case He considered its equal - that of Murari Gupta, another devotee whose fixed attachment to Lord Ramachandra Mahaprabhu had personally tested and found just as unshakeable (CC Antya 4.45).
It would be easy to read this as a minor family disagreement, quietly resolved. Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition has never read it that way. What the episode actually shows is that even inside the family that would go on to supply the sampradaya with its Six Goswamis, devotion did not mean uniformity of practice. Anupama Mallika lived among Krishna-bhaktas his entire adult life, was tested directly by two of the tradition's greatest teachers, and simply never moved. Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's own verdict, spoken a few verses earlier at the very start of this account, was not a consolation offered after the fact. By the Lord's own measure, it was the whole point: he was a very good devotee.