15

Picture the bank of the Yamunā in the late forenoon, the dark water lying still and bright, the air heavy with kadamba scent and the warm dust of Vraja. A parrot has flown into the meadow where Śyāmasundara grazes His cows, carrying a single piece of news: Rādhā is coming down to the river to bathe. Feel how the heart of the cowherd boy leaps at the word. He finishes the milking; He turns to the laughing knot of His friends with a light excuse, saying only that He wishes to wander a while and drink in the beauty of the gardens of Nandīśvara Hill, and so He slips away alone and comes to the Yamunā's edge. He has not come for the gardens. He has come for Her.

And She comes. From a short distance Svāminī lifts Her eyes, and there, across the bright air, hangs the moon-disc of Rasikendra's face, the king of all relishers, the connoisseur of every sweetness. Only a moment before, the blackish water of the Yamunā had set passion stirring in Her, wave upon wave, for that dark water wears the very color of Her beloved. And now it is no reflection, no longed-for image. It is Him, standing before Her in the flesh.

See what that single glimpse does to Her body. The instant Her gaze meets His, a shyness sweeps over Her whole frame and Her eyes drop, drop all the way down, until they come to rest on the small painted nails of Her own toes. O Radhe, how can one downward glance be so unbearably sweet? It is as though sweetness itself were brimming over the rim of You and spilling onto the ground at Your feet. The tradition gives a name to this transfiguration of Her limbs: it is one of the twenty bhāvālaṅkāras, the natural emotional ornaments that adorn Her not from any jeweller's hand but from the inner fire of feeling, and this particular one is called vilāsa. Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes its meaning in the Ujjvala Nīlamaṇi, saying that when the gait and the standing and the sitting, the play of the face and the eyes, all become suddenly extra-special, made strange and radiant simply by the nearness of the beloved, that wonder is vilāsa, priya-saṅgajam, born of the lover's coming. It is beauty no mirror could teach Her and no maid could arrange; it is the meeting itself, blooming outward through Her limbs.

And so Her walk falters. The straight path becomes a crooked, halting thing the moment She sees Him before Her. Watch closely. She is stunned; She bends Her head aside; She draws the edge of Her blue veil partly across Her face, half hiding the moon of Her own countenance behind a thin screen of dark cloth. The pupils of Her wide eyes will not be still; they tremble and dart and slide sideways, the gaze gone large and curving. The Govinda Līlāmṛta sets the whole picture down for us, that when Rādhā sees Kṛṣṇa before Her Her gait grows crooked, Her face is veiled, Her eyes restless and wide, and that thus beautified by the ornament of vilāsa She gives Her beloved great pleasure. This is not awkwardness. This is the highest art love knows.

And how much pleasure? Let it sink all the way down. In the Caitanya Caritāmṛta Śrī Kṛṣṇa Himself confesses it, that when He sees these moods rise on Rādhā's face and flicker in Her eyes, the joy He receives is a million times, koṭi-guṇa, greater than the joy of direct union with Her. Hold that and do not hurry past it: the shy downcast glance, the faltering step, the half-veiled face, these give Him more delight than embrace. The bashfulness is not less than the meeting. It is more.

Why should this be? Because every motion of Her body is, at its root, an offering for His happiness. This is the very work of mahābhāva, the tradition tells us: to make Kṛṣṇa happy. When loving attachment, anurāga, grows past all measure and bound, it rises like a powerful sun in the soul and burns away the darkness of every private desire from the cave of the heart, until even the subtlest, most hidden corners are flooded with a single longing, that He be glad. That risen sun is mahābhāva, and Śrī Rādhā's very form is composed of it. She is not someone who happens to feel a great love; She is that love taken on a body. So when She casts down Her eyes, when Her step turns crooked, when the bells at Her ankles sing, none of it is for Herself. It is mahābhāva itself gushing from Her transcendental limbs, and its whole work, its only work, is the pleasure of Śyāmasundara.

Now listen to the anklets. As She steps, bashful and faltering toward the bower, the nūpuras at Her feet ring out their small bright jhaṅkāra, and the tradition says those rasika ankle-bells are pulling at the very strings of Śyāma's heart, twanging them with rasa as a master's fingers wake a vīṇā. Each soft chime tightens a thread in Him. And She, moving toward the nikuñja, has become caritābhirāma, enchanting in Her every gesture and every turn of character, ravishing the eyes and the mind of Her dark beloved and of every maidservant blessed to watch. The Rādhāvallabha singers name this section the darśanābhilāṣā, the longing for darshan, and they too see Her so: catching sight of the moon-disc face of Her own rasika-purandara, the chief of all rasikas, He whom they call Śrī Lālajī, She fills with lajjā, sinks Her gaze into Her toes, and walks Her shy walk toward the bower while the anklets ring.

O fortunate kinkarī, standing near enough to hear those bells, near enough to drink in this shyness, counting even her own eyes and her own mind blessed by such sweetness of conduct. She watches, and she serves; for it is the maidservants who will at last accomplish the meeting of Svāminī and Her Nāgara, leading the eager One to the Sweetness He crossed the whole meadow to taste. And the ache in the heart of the one who sings this verse is simply this: bata, karhi Rādhām. Alas, when. When will my own eyes be given this, the downcast gaze, the trembling step, the ringing bells? Not to possess Her, not to stand where Kṛṣṇa stands, but only to behold Her coming, and to be, like that blessed maidservant, near enough to serve. Hāy, will She of the enchanting character ever, ever grant me Her darshan?