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Begin near the foot of Govardhana, where the path narrows and a tax-keeper has appeared at the toll-gate who is no tax-keeper at all. He has thrown up His arm and barred the way, this cowherd who calls Himself a collector of dues, and He will not let the gopīs pass until the toll is paid. O the audacity of Madhusūdana, to stand in the road and pretend to authority over the very ones for whose sake He breathes. Rādhā stands before Him, surrounded by Her sakhīs, and now upon Her face there blooms the rarest bloom in all the worlds, the bhāva the tradition has tried for centuries to hold in words and never quite contains: kila kiñcita. This is the very mood Rūpa Gosvāmī sets at the threshold of his Dāna Keli Kaumudī, the bhāva that crowns the Dāna-līlā, the tax-play here at the Dāna Ghāṭī. Look at it gather, petal by petal.

First Her eyebrows. They will not stay still. They wander, they arch and curve and unbend again, bhramad-bhrukuṭi: the dancing brow, beautiful in its very restlessness, because behind it seven feelings are wrestling at once and none of them will sit quietly down. Rūpa Gosvāmī names them all in the Ujjvala Nīlamaṇi: garva, pride; abhilāṣa, longing desire; rudita, weeping; smita, smiling; asūya, envy; bhaya, fear; and krodha, anger, all of them braided into a single trembling expression that he calls a stavaka, a bouquet, a cluster of blossoms bound together so that you cannot pull out one flower without the whole bunch shaking.

Then Her lip. The lower lip, ripe and red as the bimba fruit, the cherry-bright adhara, and it is quivering, sphurita, faintly shaking with the words it half-wants to speak and half-wants to swallow. And from between those lips break the sounds. Not speech, not yet, only the small sweet huff of protest, madhura huṅkṛta, and Swami Śrī Hitdas ji is careful to tell us exactly why it escapes Her: Śyāma-sundara has caught hold of Her arm, that creeper-soft bhuja-latā, His hand has closed about it in the love-play, gṛhe, and the sound that comes out of Her at that touch is the most musical scolding ever uttered under the Vraja sky.

And here is the wonder of Her, the divine doubleness no ordinary woman ever achieves. On the surface She is kopākula, churned up with anger, agitated, all reproach and refusal, the very picture of a beloved affronted. But this is praṇaya-kopa, the anger that is itself a form of love, the sulk that is a caress turned inside out. Within Her heart there is no anger at all; within, antarete lālasita, there is only the deep aching desire for exactly this, exactly Him, exactly now. Outwardly the eyes flash and the brow knots and the lip trembles with rebuke; inwardly the smile is already blooming. Rūpa Gosvāmī paints it whole in that opening verse: when Mādhava blocked Her way there was a bright smile waiting in Her heart, antaḥ smera, while Her sweetly curved bright eyes filled with tears that scattered over Her lashes, and the corners of Her eyes grew faintly pink, sprinkled by His cunning, and then shrank as Hari came before Her. The tears are not the tears of one who suffers; they are the overflow of a heart too full to hold itself.

Viśvanātha Cakravartī takes that bouquet and reads it flower by flower, and the reading is itself a kind of worship. The internal smile, he says, is the flowers blooming slightly within; the teardrops are both Her weeping and the honey oozing from the petals; the pinkish eye-corner is white mingled with red, white standing for Her smile and red for Her anger, and in the flower it is a rose, white and red together; "sprinkled by Mādhava's cunningness" is Her hidden longing welling up out of the madhura-rasa itself; the shrinking of Her eyes is Her fear, and in the flower the buds not yet opened; and the sweet crooked curve of Her glance is Her pride and Her envy, and in the flower the blossom that is sweet but bent. So that no one watching can say whether She is furious or melting, and the truth is She is both, perfectly, at once. And Viśvanātha tells us what Rūpa is really praying for when he prays that this sight bring us śrī: he glosses śrī as prema-sampatti, the wealth of prema, the good fortune of pure love itself.

Now turn to the One who is watching, for half the sweetness of this scene lives in His eyes. The mahā-rasika-mauli, the crown upon the head of all who know how to relish, the king of the connoisseurs of love, Swami Śrī Hitdas ji names Him plainly here as Śrīlāljī, stands before Her and beholds this storm of feeling break across Her face, and He looks, both streams tell us, sabhaya, with fear, and kautuka, with delighted astonishment. Think of that. The Lord of all worlds, before whom the cosmos trembles, stands trembling Himself, a little afraid, half-laughing and half-anxious, like a thief caught in his own sweet crime who cannot tell whether the next instant will bring punishment or pardon. And He does not look once and turn away; vīkṣitam, He gazes and keeps gazing, unbroken, drinking and unable to stop, for the moment is so perfect He dreads its ending, dreads a single one of these blossoms falling before He has drunk them all.

O Rādhe, O Vinodini, crown-jewel of all the sakhīs, sakhīra mukuṭa maṇi, this is the face Prabodhānanda holds before his closed eyes in the loneliest corner of the kuñja and refuses ever to set down. He sings of how Vanamālī, the rasika-mauli of Vraja, comes while You are blissfully talking with Your sakhīs and touches Your beautiful limbs, and how the kila kiñcita then breaks out in Your eyes, in the dancing brow, in the slight sweet smile, in the nectarean effulgence, jyotsnāmṛta, of Your bimba lips, in the enchanting huṅkāra. He calls this face a rasāyana, an elixir distilled from the very arts of love; he calls it a ratna-khani, a jewel-mine in which every precious sweetness lies waiting to be quarried; and he says it without flourish, simply, that wherever he is, in whatever solitude, nirantara nirajane, this is what he remembers. Not Her power, not Her glory, not the trembling of the worlds before Her. This. The wandering eyebrow. The quivering cherry lip. The sweet huff of mock-protest. The eyes that flash anger and pour out love in the same instant. And across from Her, the King of all who relish, gone shy, gone wondering, a little afraid, gazing and gazing and never coming to the end.

I hold it with him. Smarāmi tava rādhike: I remember Thy face, O Rādhike, brimming with the bliss of the loving arts, and in the remembering I am made poor and rich at once, poor because I can only stand at the edge of the grove and look, rich because even to be allowed to look upon such sweetness from the very edge is a fortune the gods would beg for.