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Begin with the secret door in the vines. All morning a mañjarī has been at her quiet work, the way a mother bird builds in silence, choosing the softest grasses, smoothing the flowers, hiding the playbower from every passing eye. For these Two do not meet easily. Though They are one truth wearing two bodies, a single sweetness poured into two cups, the world conspires to keep Them apart, and only love's servants can open a way. So when at last the maidservant draws back the leaves and brings Them together in the leafy chamber, the joy that breaks over Them is not the calm joy of those who are always near. It is the trembling, drunken joy of meeting after the long ache, all the dammed-up longing of the parted hours released at once. This is why the sakhīs and mañjarīs are so glad: theirs is the happiness of those who get to put out the fire of separation, to quench it by arranging the meeting itself.

See Them seated now. Nothing dramatic happens at first, and that is the marvel. A brow lifts. The other brow answers. A glance slides sideways and is caught and returned with interest. Each is the smallest gesture in the world, mithaḥ, mutual, given and given back: a flicker, a half smile, the lashes lowering and lifting. Yet from each one a wave rises. The source counts them in the millions, bhaṅgi-koṭi, an unbroken stream of tiny movements, and every single one carries the full ocean behind it. The Rādhāvallabha reading sees it the same way: from the whole spreading array of Their hāva-bhāva, the play of all amorous expression between Them, the anurāgāmṛta-rasa has begun to flow, and the very dancing of the brows, bhrū-nartana, is the wave. This is anurāga, love that does not cool but climbs, love whose every drop tastes of more love. From the brows of one to the eyes of the other the waves cross and recross, uttaraṅga, high waves, and where they meet They are shaken, kṣubhita bahir-abhyantaram, stirred outside where the body shivers and stirred within where the heart turns over.

O wonder, the heart cries, aho. The mañjarī cannot hold it in. She has slipped out of the bower and stands now at the wall of vines, her eye pressed to a gap between the leaves, watching through the holes in the creepers, and what she sees undoes her. Their eyes are rolling, madāghūrṇan-netram, swimming as if drunk, not with any wine the world knows but with the wine of each other's nearness. They are matta from drinking, says the padāvalī, madhu-pāne duhu matta, both intoxicated; but the madhu is the sight of each other, drunk down until both are reeling, and now the eyes turn slow and heavy and bright all at once, the way the eyes go when the whole self has been poured into looking.

And from this drunkenness the arts begin, racayati vicitram rati-kalā-vilāsam, the wondrous play of love's thousand small skills. Not crude, not grasping, but vicitra, variegated, surprising, each moment unlike the last, a tenderness invented fresh and never repeated. Viśvanātha and Rūpa Gosvāmī teach that the vilāsa lives in the smallest places. Rūpa Gosvāmī sets it down in the Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi, that vilāsa is the heroine's special gestures: in how She holds Her eyes, in Her gait, in the way She turns to sit, in the very abode around Her, in the set of Her face. He answers each with His own, and back and forth the playing goes, and the mañjarī at the leaf-gap drinks it through her eyes and her tears.

The tradition gives her a way to understand what she is watching. Viśvanātha Cakravartī fixes it in the Prema-Sampuṭa, in the words Sri Rādhā once spoke to Kṛṣṇa Himself when He had come to Her disguised. We are, She said, like a single wick that has been split at its tip into two, both halves standing in one vessel brimmed with the oil of love, and so we burn as two spotless flames. Each flame lights the other's shadow; each pushes back the darkness the other alone cannot reach; and together we give joy to every sakhī standing near. But let the strong gale of separation begin to blow, and both flames flicker at once, both gutter, both nearly die together. Then it is our girlfriends who come running, who cup their hands around us against the wind, who carry us back to sukha-sadma, the abode of our happiness. This is why the mañjarī labors so to arrange the meeting: she is the hand around the two flames. She is bringing Them home to joy.

And there is another picture, again from Rūpa Gosvāmī in the Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi, for those wave-making eyes. Once Vṛndā, watching Sri Rādhā behold Kṛṣṇa seated by the kadamba tree, cried to Her: O slender one, when You look upon the prince of the cowherds before You, the waves of Your stares pour out from a very milk-ocean of elegance, and where they fall upon the dark Yamunā they turn her white, they turn her into the Gaṅgā. Such is the spilling loveliness of a single look. Now imagine not one look but a flood of them, given and returned without pause, brow to eye and eye to brow, all afternoon in the hidden grove. This is the tide the mañjarī is witnessing through the leaves.

There is a thirst here that the source names with great care, and it is a holy thirst. The word anurāgāmṛta-rasa, the tradition says, indicates an increase of desire: the longing in this love does not end in satisfaction the way ordinary desire ends. Jīva Gosvāmī likened it to a man dying of thirst in a dream who drinks and drinks and is never wetted, svāpnika pāne yathā pipāsunām, the nectar that swells the very wanting it feeds. And the summit of this unquenchable thirst, the tradition fixes in the Gopāla-Campū, is found in Sri Rādhārāṇī Herself, śrī rādhāyāṁ tu sutarām anirvacanīyam eva sarvam, in whom everything becomes anirvacanīya, beyond all telling. She wants Him more in the fullness of union than the world wants anything in its emptiest lack. That is the height the mañjarī is straining to see.

And so she lets the cry break from her at last, the line the whole heart has been climbing toward: tat kuñje jayati nava-kaiśora-mithunam. All glory, all glory to the ever-fresh adolescent Couple in that bower of Vṛndāvana. Glory to golden Gaurī who shines like fresh vermilion, nava-gorocanā gaurī, and to dark Hari the son of Nanda; glory to the two who raise high waves with Their brows and are shaken body and soul, inside and out; glory to the two whose eyes roll with the madhu of each other; glory to the rasika play that enchants even Cupid, manasija-manohārī, the keli that no eye should grab at and every heart may serve. Their love is equal, doṅhāra samāna rati: as is Hari, so is Hari-priyā, neither above and neither below, a single flame split into two and burning as one. The Rādhāvallabha stream titles this very verse the sarvotkṛṣṭatā of the youthful Pair, Their supreme excellence, the topmost reality reached in this rati-vilāsa-kalā at the heart of the nikuñja; and Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī tells us that all of it, the whole auspicious pastime, has risen and unfolded within his own heart. Jaya, jaya the youthful Pair in the grove.