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Picture it: a kuñja in the late, slow hours, the vines drawn close, the dark river not far off, its waters folding over themselves in long blue waves. Inside the bower, the lovegame of Rādhā and Mādhava has begun. The maidservant does not stand in the center of it. She kneels at the edge, at the lattice of leaves, and looks in through the small gaps where the vines do not quite meet, the way one presses the eye to a chink in a wall to glimpse something too bright to bear all at once. This whole verse is breathed from there, from the threshold, from the servant's place at the holes in the vines.

And from there, what does she see first. Beauty. Not a measured, finished beauty, but beauty rising and rising, saundaryāmṛta-rāśiḥ: an abundance, a heaped-up treasure-mound of nectar, as if loveliness were a liquid being poured and poured and never reaching the brim. O Rādhe, Your beauty is not a quantity that looking can exhaust. It increases. The tradition tells something tender here: Her beauty actually swells in this moment because She has understood that this little servant at the lattice is able to give Her beloved an indescribable happiness during these pastimes. Read that slowly. Svāminī grows more beautiful out of gratitude toward Her own maidservant. The loveliness deepens because the service is near. And on the rising tide of that nectar-ocean, two pairs of eyes are swimming like fish: the long restless eyes of Śyāmasundara, and the eyes of the kiṅkarī at the vines, both carried on the same swelling wave.

Then the second thing she sees: the arts of it, adbhuta-mahā-lāvaṇya-līlā-kalā. There is a luster the old eyes called lāvaṇya, the soft sheen that rises off a pearl, a light that does not belong to the surface but seems to come from somewhere within and pool on the skin. That sheen gushes out from Śrīmatī's limbs, and it is wonderful, and it is great, and it is bound up with kalā, the artfulness of love-play, the thousand small graces of how She moves, how She turns, how She withholds and yields. This is no cold catalogue of techniques; it is the genius of tenderness. And here is the staggering thing the servant understands: this loveliness, this artful sweetness, is able to enchant the very one who enchants all the worlds. Govinda bewitches creation; Her lāvaṇya bewitches Govinda. The enchanter is enchanted, and the maidservant, watching, knows whose victory this is.

Now the glance. O the glance. In the middle of the lovegame Śrīmatī casts one succulent, sidelong look at Śyāmasundara, and the servant at the lattice can scarcely say what she has seen. Kālindī-vara-vīci-ḍambara: think of the Yamunā's most excellent waves, that famous dark-blue beauty, the river's own grand play of swells, its vīci-vilāsa. This glance defeats it. It is darker, more lustrous, more astonishing than the river's loveliest spectacle, and where the river only flows, this glance reaches out and seizes. It falls on the most powerful of all heroes, Śrī Kṛṣṇa Himself, and undoes Him. He who is bliss embodied, who needs nothing, who is the very source of all rapture, swoons; He faints in ecstasy under one sidelong look from His Prāṇeśvarī. O the helplessness of the Lord before that single dark glance from beneath Her lashes. The maidservant sees the all-conqueror conquered, and her own heart breaks open with the wonder of it.

And then the naming. Who is She, finally. Sā kāpi: the tradition lets the word hang there, that certain indescribable One, that "some Her" who cannot be set down in language. Premānanda-ghanākṛtiḥ: the condensed, gathered, solidified form of loving ecstasy, as though all the prema in existence had been pressed together until it took a body, and that body is Hers. And from this dense form there blossoms outward smara-keli-komala-kalā-vaicitrya-koṭi: millions upon millions of varied, tender, delicate arts of amorous play, each one different, each one fresh, a koṭi of graces flashing and unfolding, all of which exist so that Śyāmasundara may taste an endless variety of sweetness and never come to the end of His delight. So vast is She that the Rādhāvallabha reading dares to say it plainly: every other wonderful, every greatest loveliness-pastime is but a single kalā-fragment of Her, a fractional ray; She is the very storehouse, the treasury, the nidhāna in which all līlās lie. She is the inexhaustible play, the artist, and the bliss itself. Kiśorī-maṇiḥ: the jewel set in the crown of all young maidens, the single gem among all the gopīs.

And now the turn that makes the whole thing a prayer and not a painting. How does the servant come to see all this at all. The tradition teaches that when the Gauḍīya sādhaka forgets his bodily condition in deep meditation, he attains the self-esteem of a Rādhā-dāsī, and only then may he taste a little of Śrīmatī's wonderful elegance. Narottama Ṭhākura fixes the longing in the Prema Bhakti Candrikā: sakhīgaṇa gaṇanāte, āmāra likhibe tāte, taba-hi pūrabo abhilāṣa, when You count me among the sakhīs and write my name down among them, then and only then are all my desires fulfilled. That is the whole appetite of this heart: not to be looked upon, but to be enrolled.

So the lovegame finishes. The maidservant rises from her place at the lattice and steps forward into the kuñja to begin at last what she lives for, her service, the cooling of the limbs, the offering of betel, the small attendances of love. And in that very instant the vision vanishes. The grove goes dark; the eyes at the vines see only their own longing. The tradition gives us the servant's cry at this moment, and it is the cry of the whole verse: diśatu me dāsyaṁ kiśorī-maṇiḥ. O Rādhe, do not let me wake out of this with empty hands. No one can please Kṛṣṇa as You please Him. You are the jewel of all the gopīs, and in serving Him You will have need of helping hands. O understand my need by Your own need; let me be one of those hands. Not Your beauty for me to gaze upon, not Your nearness for me to hold, but Your service, the dust-and-honor of being employed at the edge of Your love. The Rādhāvallabha heart names the very thing asked for, dāsyābhilāṣā, the longing for service: grant me my dāsyādhikāra, accept me in the form of a maidservant, a dāsī. That is the whole of the asking.