10

Begin with the night. The vernal moon hangs full over Śrī Vṛndāvana, the springtime Rāsa has come, and Kṛṣṇa's Vāsantī Rāsa unfolds upon the cool sand. In a wide ring the dance has formed, gopī and Kṛṣṇa, gopī and Kṛṣṇa, dark and bright alternating like beads strung on one thread, and from every body there pours such effulgence that the whole grove is lit from within, no lamp wanted, only the glow of love made visible, until Vṛndāvana itself shines. Śuka Muni, who long after would carry this story in the Bhāgavata, lost his composure here and could only reach for a jewel: among the gopīs the son of Devakī shone, he says, like a great emerald set in the heart of a necklace of golden gems. Tatrāti śuśubhe tābhir bhagavān devakī-sutaḥ, mahā-marakato yathā. Hold that picture. Now let it move.

For oh, how the gopīs dance. Their feet place and lift in playful steps; their arms sway and gesture; their eyebrows arch above smiling eyes; their waists bend like reeds; the cloth at their breasts trembles with the motion; earrings swing and brush their cheeks; their faces glisten with the dew of effort; braids come loose and girdles slip in the swift turning, and all the while they sing Him, sing Kṛṣṇa, until, as the Bhāgavata sings it, they look like nothing so much as flashes of lightning quivering within a bank of monsoon cloud. Taḍita iva tā megha-cakre virejuḥ. Lightning among the clouds. Remember that, O heart, because the whole secret of this verse is hidden in a single thread of that lightning.

And in the very centre of the ring, where the bright wheel gathers to a still point, the prince of Vraja dances with one alone. Madhye rādhā saha nāce vrajendranandana, the Caitanya-caritāmṛta keeps it for us: the gopīs danced in a circle, and in the middle the son of the king of Vraja danced with Rādhā. She is the axis around whom the whole wheel of beauty revolves. Now imagine the one permitted to be here not as a spectator but as a servant, a kiṅkarī, a little maidservant whose only happiness is to wait upon Her. Where does such a one's gaze go? Not roaming the spectacle, not grasping at it. It falls, and stays, at Her feet, those two freshly opened red lotuses set upon the dancing-ground, each toe a soft petal, and at the tip of each petal a nail that shines cool and clear like a moonstone, a candra-maṇi, a little moon caught in a gem.

O these toenails of Śrī Rādhā. We have known the other lightning, the kind that splits the sky, and our eyes have flinched and our hearts have shaken with terror before it. But here is a lightning that does the opposite. As She turns and steps, the ten moon-gems of Her toes flash and tremble together, quivering like a vine of lightning, while the jewelled bells at Her ankles ring out their bright answer, and this flashing does not terrify the eye, it heals it; this trembling does not shake the heart with dread, it sets the heart to playing in wave upon wave of blissful rasa. One glance at the trembling of Her toenails and the servant is undone. Forget Her face, forget all the rest of that incomparable form; the maidservants are already drowned, already dissolved, in nothing more than this shiver of light at the tips of Her toes, a light that quietly outshines the effulgence of every other gopī circling around Her.

This is why the one who sees can only stammer it out as it stands in the verse: an indescribable splendour, kim api, from the moonstones of Her toenails, was seen flashing, adarśi, among the gopa-women of Vraja. And from that one detail the whole truth of Her opens. For if the very dust-edge of Her, the radiance of a single nail, is an ocean of sweetness, what then is She? The servants taste the answer in their own swooning: She is the sāra-mūrti, the form of the very essence, of an ocean of pūrṇa-anurāga, of full, constant, ever-renewing love. And when that ocean of anurāga swells with wave upon wave of ever-new bhāva until it can hold no more, it has a name, mahābhāva, the highest reach of love, and Śrī Rādhā is that mahābhāva walking, dancing, breathing. The tradition fixes the word itself in the Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi: sadānubhūtam api yaḥ kuryān nava-nava-priyam, that love which makes the beloved experienced as ever-fresh, and which is itself fresh at every moment, this is called anurāga. In its grip the increase of desire grows so strong that the form and qualities of the beloved are never once stale, never once merely remembered, but always met as if for the first time. And the elders teach that you may measure your taste by your thirst, for one with no thirst would not relish even an ocean of nectar. Look then at the depth of Her thirst, O seeker, and you have looked at the depth of Her love.

The tradition holds out a second way to see this same flash, and it is sweeter still. Recall what came just before, in the verse that goes before this one: Kṛṣṇa, undone by His own longing, had fallen at Her feet before all Her maidservants and begged Her for the festival of a single embrace. Now, says this reading, look again at the ten moon-gems of Her toenails, and see what is mirrored in them. It is Him. In each of those ten polished nails the form of Kṛṣṇa stands reflected, tenfold, to the delight of the eyes of the sakhīs and mañjarīs, so that He who is Himself the essence of the ocean of anurāga-rasa takes shelter at Her feet not once but ten times over, dividing Himself to cling the more completely to Her. And why is Kṛṣṇa here named the very essence of the ocean of anurāga? Because it is with exactly this passion that He kneels and pleads to Rādhā for the gift of an embrace, and it shows on His face, in His eyes, in His every limb, so that to the sakhīs and mañjarīs He looks like the love of Rādhikā made into a person and standing before them. One falling at Her feet does not satisfy Him; so love itself splits Him into ten and lays Him, ten times, upon the cool moonlight of Her toes. For anurāga binds lover and beloved into each other's keeping, makes the two control one another, and Kṛṣṇa, conquered utterly by Śrīmatī's love, is rightly named the cream of the ocean of anurāga-rasa precisely because Her love has made Him captive. See it either way, O heart, the flash that is Her own splendour or the flash that is Him reflected and surrendered in Her; both flow into the same sweetness, and the servant cannot tell, and does not wish to tell, where Her glory ends and His surrender begins.

And then, as suddenly as it came, the vision lifts. The grove fades; the moon-gem light recedes; the one who saw is back upon the hard ground of his own striving, a sādhaka again, with empty hands and a full heart. And out of that emptiness rises the whole prayer of this verse, no longer a description but a cry. She who is all this, the sāra-mūrti of the ocean of full and perfect love, may She, sometime, somehow, ever, turn even upon me Her mercy. Sā rādhikā mayi kadāpi kṛpāṁ karotu. Not "may I seize Her," not "may I attain Her," only "will that Rādhikā ever give me Her mercy?" The whole verse has climbed to a height of unbearable sweetness only to lay itself, at the last, flat at Her feet, asking nothing but that She look down. This is why the Hit tradition titles it simply [कृपā याचनā], the prayer for mercy.