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Begin with the hour, for everything turns upon it. It is midday in Vraja, madhyāhna, the cruelest and brightest hour, when the sun stands straight overhead and pours its fire down upon the world. The path is paved with burning sand; the very air shimmers and trembles with heat. No one stirs abroad in such an hour. No one, that is, except a girl whose body is so soft, so impossibly tender, that the tradition can only liken Her to a puppet fashioned of fresh butter. O Rādhe, what carries You out into this furnace? The sand scorches Your lotus feet, the sun beats upon Your head, and still You go, because love has overruled every counsel of safety. Hari, Hari! premaka gati anivāra: the course of such love cannot be stopped, cannot be dammed. She has tasted the touch of Kānu, the rasa of His nearness, and the taste has carried away every grain of Her composure. All discretion is left behind on the burning road.

Follow Her now, as Her own dearest maidservant follows Her, Śrīpāda in his kiṅkarī-form, who clings to Svāminī's heels like a shadow that will not be parted from its body. Through the white blaze They go, Mistress ahead and handmaid behind, until the green shade of the kuñja receives them. And here, the first ache. He is not here. Śyāmasundara has not yet come. The whole of that scorching pilgrimage, and the bower is empty of Him. See how Svāminī's face changes, how impatience and dread crowd into Her eyes. She cannot bear it. So the maidservant, swallowing her own weariness, consoles Her and sets out again into the heat to find Him.

O the labor of love's go-between. She searches and searches and cannot find Him anywhere; at last she comes all the way to Nandīśvara and spies Him there, hemmed in among people, with not a moment's gap to draw near and whisper how Svāminī waits, dying for Him. So she does the only thing she can: unseen by any other, she catches His eye and tells Him everything with a single glance, and then turns back. She returns empty-handed, and Svāminī's grief flares: "You consoled Me, you swore He was coming, and still I do not see Him! Go again, bring Him at once, or I shall not stay alive another moment." And again the faithful one goes; again she cannot reach Him with words; again she signals from afar with her eyes alone; again she comes back without Him. Going and coming, going and coming, yātāyāta-śatena, a hundred times over, until the going-and-coming itself becomes a churning, and the churning lifts the ocean of Rādhā's longing higher and higher.

And know this, O heart: none of this delay is accident. Yogamāyā herself arranges it. She heaps the obstacles up on purpose. She makes this love bahu-vāryamān, hedged about on every side with hindrance; she makes it pracchanna-kāmatā, a love that must hide itself; she makes it sudurlabhā, a meeting precious because it is so hard to win. For the rasa-śāstra teaches it plainly, and Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes it in the Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi, in the Nāyaka chapter: bahu vāryate yataḥ khalu yatra pracchanna-kāmukatvaṁ ca, yā ca mitho durlabhatā sā manmathasya paramā ratiḥ. Where love is much obstructed, where the desiring must be concealed, where the union is mutually rare and hard won: this is the very summit of Cupid's delight. Yet hold the teaching exactly, lest it be misread. The barriers do not weaken the love, and they do not, for one instant, create it either. Jīva Gosvāmī sets this beyond all doubt in the Prīti-Sandarbha: someone may fancy that the obstacles increase the gopīs' love, but it is not so. Their love is by its own nature the highest love there is.

He proves it from the mouths of the great themselves. The Queens of Dvārakā confess in the Bhāgavata that they yearn for nothing so much as the state of the vraja-women, vraja-striyo yad vāñchanti; and Uddhava, wisest of counselors, prays in the same scripture to be born even as a shrub or a creeper of Vṛndāvana so that the dust of those herding-girls' feet might fall upon him, vāñchanti yad bhava-bhiyaḥ. Why could the Queens and Uddhava never climb to that height? Because their love for Him was lawful, sanctioned, smooth, and so it was never tested, never forced to leap a wall. The gopīs' love was strong enough to abandon what cannot be abandoned, dustyajaṁ sva-janam ārya-pathaṁ ca hitvā, to leave behind kin and the very path of the respectable world, and so Uddhava himself praises them for it. As a maddened elephant crashing through a fortress gate does not draw its strength from the gate but only displays the strength it already carries, so the obstacles raised by Her elders do not manufacture the gopīs' love; they only reveal how boundless it already was. This is why the obstruction is sweet, and why the longing it raises is holy.

At last, at last, the maidservant breaks through and makes Śyāmasundara understand: come now, come at once, to Svāminī's bower. And so she establishes the Yugala-meeting. O how sweet is a meeting that has cost so much anguish of separation. He comes, and She sees Him, and He sees Her, and Their faces are two moons rising upon each other, anyonya-vaktra-ullasat-candra. And in that mutual gaze the sea of Their amorous love swells and breaks and floods on either side, ocean upon ocean. Hold the word anaṅga gently here, O heart, for it does not mean what the world's coarse appetite means. Here it is the pure, the boundless desire of each to make the other happy, a wish so vast it can be measured only in oceans, many vast oceans of the longing to delight the Beloved. This is not hunger taking; this is love giving, and giving without floor or shore.

The maidservant, wise in her service, reads the moment. She knows the divya-adbhuta-krīḍā of the Yugala is about to begin, the divine and wondrous play, and that this is not hers to stand within. So she withdraws from the arbour, and the divine Pair pass to the wonderful, transcendental love-bed laid upon the talpa within the inner cottage of the grove, antaḥ-kuñja-kuṭīra. And here is the secret tenderness toward which this whole remembrance aches. The fortunate handmaid, who labored through the burning noon, who went and came a hundred times, who suffered every refusal and every silent glance, now has her recompense. Through the gaps in the woven vines of the bower, through the small openings between the creepers, she may keep her loving watch upon the divine play. She cannot enter; she would not enter; but she may witness, and above all she may hear. She hears the soft music of the mañjīra, Rādhā's anklets; she hears the sweet ringing of the kāñcī, the kaṭi-kiṅkiṇī, the girdle of little bells at Mādhava's waist, mingling together very sweetly as the movement of the play, the very yātāyāta of vihāra, sets them sounding. And by that music she serves even now, for the sound is her signal. By the rhythm and the falling-still of those bells she knows precisely when the love-play has reached its rest, when the moment has come for her to slip back inside the kuñja and resume her sevā, to fan Them, to bring water, to dress Their hair, to do the thousand small offices a maidservant lives to perform.

This, then, is the whole of the prayer, and it is breathtaking in its humility. Śrīpāda who sings it does not ask to be the lover. He does not ask to be Rādhā, nor to be Mādhava, nor even to behold the play face to face. He asks only this one impossibly precious thing: kadā nu śṛṇuyāṁ, when, oh when, will I be granted to hear that jingling? To stand outside the bower in the role of the lowliest servant, and to be near enough that the music of Their anklets and waist-bells might reach my ear, so that I too might know the rhythm of Their joy and ready myself to serve. The section is rightly named the longing to hear the nūpura-dhvani, the anklet-sound. O Rādhe, O Mādhava, when will this servant be so fortunate? When will the bells reach me?