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The stillness after the long night settles over the kuñja. The bower is hushed, the jasmine spent, the dawn not yet daring to enter. Rādhā and Śyāma are sitting up together upon the bed of petals where Their love has just come to rest, and the grove holds its breath around Them. Off to one side, in the form of a kiṅkarī, the tradition's own servant, Śrīpāda himself in his maidservant-body, has slipped in to wait upon Them. She brings cool water cupped in a leaf, she offers the folded betel, she lifts the fan and moves the warm air gently across Their faces. And from this near and trembling closeness she overhears what is about to be spoken.

O wonder. Śyāma, who is the master of every heart, the thief of all the cowherd girls' minds, sits there as one overcome. He looks at Her, and a thought rises in Him that He cannot push back down: She worships Me with a love so total that I hold nothing equal to give in return. He sees that She serves Him with the pure paraphernalia of mahā-bhāva, that whole inward kingdom of feeling, and that Her service is therefore beyond all measure, incomparable. The waves of that very ocean of mahā-bhāva break over Him, and He understands at last that She is rasānidhi, the ocean of all flavour, and that He stands upon its shore as one who has come to drink and finds he can never drink it dry. "I do not have," He thinks, "this passionate love with which She serves Me. How can I ever reciprocate with Her?"

This is the old astonishment of the Rāsa night returning. There, when the gopīs had given Him everything, He confessed it openly, and the tradition keeps the very words in the Śrīmad Bhāgavata, in the thirty-second chapter of the tenth canto: na pāraye 'haṁ niravadya-saṁyujāṁ, even with the lifespan of Brahmā, He said, He could not repay their spotless loving service. Their connection with Him was flawless and wholly fixed; not even in dreams did they touch another; they had cast off every moral restraint and forsaken happiness in this world and the next for His sake. "I have lovers in other places," He admitted, "and so My love for you is incomplete, while your love for Me is complete. I am forever unable to clear My debt to you, and so I will remain your debtor of love." He took that debt on willingly and carries it still. And now, here in the privacy of the kuñja, the same marvel breaks over Him again as He watches Rādhikā's love rise toward Him wave upon wave.

So He prays. Not commands, not flatters; He prays, the Lord of all turning supplicant to His own beloved. Hear how He calls Her, for there is a secret meaning hidden inside each of the four names.

"O Śyāme." It is not merely that She is dark and lovely. The tradition fixes the lakṣaṇa of a śyāmā-heroine in two verses: śīta-kāle bhaved uṣṇā grīṣme ca sukha-śītalā: she is warm in the winter and cool in the summer; padma-gandhi mukhaṁ yasyāḥ: a lotus-fragrance breathes from her face; and akāle vañjulo yasyāḥ pādāghātena puṣpati: where her foot strikes the aśoka it blooms out of season, and at the touch of her saliva the bakula flowers untimely too. So in this name He means: O crown-jewel of all who love Śyāma, when Your body so much as touches Mine I am made happy and come wholly under Your power, warmed in cold and cooled in heat. When We hide from one another in play, Your foot strikes the aśoka and it blossoms, and the very scent that pours from Your face betrays where You are, so that I can follow and find You. Your every quality makes My passionate love for You increase.

"O Nitya-praṇayini, ever-beloved." The tradition counts, in the Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi, three kinds of Kṛṣṇa's consorts in Vraja: the gopīs who attained perfection through spiritual practice, the demigoddesses ordered by Brahmā to assist His pastimes, of whom the first canto's tenth book speaks, and the nitya-priyās, the eternal lovers whose love has neither beginning nor end. And among these eternal ones Rādhā and Candrāvalī stand foremost, endowed like Kṛṣṇa Himself with deathless beauty and cleverness and every attribute; and between the two of them, again, Rādhikā is the greatest of all, mahā-bhāva-svarūpa, the very form of mahā-bhāva, supreme in every quality. He is naming Her, then, as the highest of the high, and confessing that before such love His own seems small.

"O Vidagdhe, clever one." She defeats Him at dice, She outplays Him on the vīṇā, She surpasses Him even in the arts of love, because Her skill is never mere skill: it is expertise adorned with anurāga, set ablaze by the deep coloured love that saturates everything She does. And He says: even Your cleverness is love wearing another dress, and I pray to You for a single drop of the anurāga that fuels it.

"O Priye, dearest." I am purchased, He says, with even an atomic fraction of love; one particle of true feeling buys Me utterly. And Your love is the very greatest there is. So help Me to receive all of it with a love that can answer it. You are the ocean of rasa, and I have fallen into that ocean and am going under. Reach down, lift Me, carry Me across.

And then the marvel deepens, for Śyāma rehearses everything He has ever done for love of Her and finds it still not enough. The old Bengali song the tradition sings in His voice tells it: tuyā anurāga prema, samudre ḍubyāchi āmi, I am drowning in the ocean of Your passionate love, pick Me up and bear Me across. To meet You I became a yogī and a bhogī, a manicure-girl, a toll-collector at the ford, an exorcist; for Your love I opened a shop, the shop of pearls of which Raghunātha Dāsa Gosvāmī sings in his Mukti-caritra; for Your sake I wander from house to house, and from forest to forest with My cowherd friends I drive the cows, and the whole wandering is only a wandering toward You. And still, He says, when I have done all of this, I feel I have not reciprocated Your love as it deserves. Therefore, O Premamayi, O One made all of love, make My love for You increase, again and again, more firmly, without end.

Now hear Her reply. When these love-anointed words fall from Śyāmasundara's mouth, a slight smile rises on Rādhā's lips, the smile of one gently overtaken. "O Ramaṇa," She says, "O My lover, You keep Me always immersed in a bliss I cannot describe, by Your beauty, by Your sweetness, by Your love. And here is the secret: the very words You have just spoken to Me, I was at this very moment about to speak to You. I too feel I cannot serve You as I long to. I too pray, again and again, that My love for You may only grow. The prayer was already resting in My heart, and as I was about to give it voice, You spoke it first." Two lovers, each certain of falling short, each begging the other for more love, each holding the same prayer in the same breath. The grove cannot contain it.

And the kiṅkarī who has watched all this, the one fanning Them, pouring the water, folding the leaf, lowers her eyes and prays her own small prayer: if I cannot always stand here and look directly upon this smiling ocean of rasa, this Rādhā caught mid-smile in the act of answering Her Beloved, then let Her at least never leave my heart. Let Her play there. Let that one image, the soft smile and the words "those very words were already Mine," shine within me always.

May such Rādhā play in my mind, and in yours, and in the mind of every one of us who wishes only to wait nearby and serve.