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Begin with the longing itself, for that is where this verse lives. Not "I serve" but "When, oh when shall I serve?" Kadā. The whole heart leans forward into a day it has not yet been given, the way a flower leans toward a sun still below the horizon. This is the cry of one who has caught the rumor of the Rāsa and now cannot rest, who walks the daylight world half-here, the other half already loitering at the rim of that nighttime grove, waiting to be called in.

And what is it she waits at the edge of? Picture it. The flute has sounded. Somewhere in the blue dusk of Vṛndāvana the Rasika of all rasikas set His lips to the bamboo, and the sound went out and found Her, and Śrīmatī has gone mad after that sound. Helpless and royal at once, She has gone out to meet Vaṁśīdhārī, the flute-holder. They say the Rāsa unfolds every night in Vṛndāvana, even now, even tonight, just behind the thin curtain of our waking eyes. The sakhīs gather and stand in a ring, and within that bright circlet She dances, and Vrajendranandana, the darling son of Vraja, dances with Her. See how He shines there, bhrājat, Madhupati, the Kṛṣṇa-bee come to the honey of Her presence, and how the sakhīs ring Him close. The Rādhāvallabha singers love this picture: the girlfriends gathered around Śrīlālajī are radiant about Him like a kaṅkaṇa, a jeweled bangle clasping the wrist of the dance, and within that bangle, with Her happy-hearted Kānta, Rādhā turns.

O the wonder of it, the adbhuta of it. For He is one, a single dark-sweet form in the center like a great emerald, mahā-marakata, set in a band of gold, and yet by His own inconceivable potency He is also with every sakhī at once, so that each gopī in the ring is certain He embraces her and her alone, that He has eyes for no one else. How amazing is this Rāsa. The tradition holds the mystery tenderly and does not force it. Some among the great ones, hearing Śuka Muni speak of yogeśvareṇa kṛṣṇena, the Lord of all mystics, and of His emerald form, said He multiplied Himself within the circle, and Śrīdhara Svāmī assures us this is no astonishment at all, for the very word yogeśvara already means that nothing is impossible for Him; here, he says, is the meaning of adbhuta. But Śrī Sanātana Gosvāmī and Śrī Viśvanātha Cakravartīpāda, fearing this leans too hard upon His lordly majesty, His aiśvarya, said no: He stayed one, the still whorl at the hub of the wheel of gopīs, expanding within the ring only for the briefest fraction of a moment, His feet lighter than a whirling firebrand. Either way the heart bows, for either way it is past our reckoning.

And do not mistake it for any earthly merriment. When men and women take hands in equal number and turn in a ring and sing, the books may call that a rāsa, and Śrīdhara Svāmī, writing on the Viṣṇu Purāṇa and confirmed by the Alaṅkāra scriptures, names it so: naṭair gṛhīta-kaṇṭhīnām, dancers with arms about each other's necks, circling. The scriptures even add: when one male dances in a ring with many rotating dancing-girls it is a hallīśaka, and when there are varied tunes and rhythms and steps it becomes the rāsa, and such a dance is not found even in heaven, what then to speak of the earth. One might object: but the hallīśaka is danced even in the heavenly planets, so what is so rare here? And Śrīpāda answers in a single phrase, premonmada-rasa-vilāse: this is a rasika pastime in which everyone is intoxicated, drunk to madness, on love alone. The wine here is prema. The main ingredient of the whole festival is Śrī Rādhā's own mādana-mahā-bhāva, the very summit and limit of ecstatic love, that highest mood from which all other moods descend; this is no mundane affair. Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes it in the Bhakti-Rasāmṛta-Sindhu, that rasa is self-luminous and cannot be broken into parts: rasasya svaprakāśatvam akhaṇḍatvaṁ ca sidhyati. And Jīva Gosvāmī gathers it all into one word, rāsa parama-rasa-kadamba-maya: the Rāsa is the aggregate of every transcendental sweetness there is. The limit of prema-rasa is Rādhārāṇī's mahā-bhāva, and all the astonishing rasika pastimes come to their ripening, their perfect noon, here in the Rāsa.

Now look again at Her in the center, my Svāminī, Rāseśvarī, the Queen of the Rāsa. See how She dances. These are no borrowed steps. She learned them from no one, for She is Herself the ācārya, the founding teacher, of all the dancing arts; every grace of movement that has ever been or ever will be emanates from Her alone. The Saṅgīta-sāra tells us there are as many rāgas as there are living beings, and that the gopīs played the sixteen thousand finest of them all, ṣoḍaśa-sāhasrī. Her dance is sva-racita, self-made, springing fresh from the inexhaustible spring of Her own bhāva, and Madana-Mohana, He who bewilders even the god of love, stands enchanted, undone, watching the one He thought He had enchanted enchant Him in turn. And the maidservants, seeing their Svāminī so adored, swell with a shy, happy pride.

And here, O here, is where a small servant's whole heaven opens. Watch Śrīmatī's face as She turns and turns in joy. Fine drops of sweat have risen upon it, beads of effort and bliss, like pearls scattered across a golden mirror. The face glows. And the kiṅkarī cannot bear to let that radiant face go uncooled. She takes up the fan. O fan, lift. O wind from these small hands, rise and go to Her brow, touch Her glowing cheek, lift the loosened curls at Her temple, carry the cool of devotion to the Queen as She dances. This is the service the heart aches toward: not to be danced with, not to be embraced, but to fan; to stand at the rim of the unbearable beauty and be of use to it.

And then the betel. As the divine Couple turn, the maidservant readies the tāmbūla, fresh leaves rolled with their fragrant spices, the nava-tāmbūla-śakalaiḥ, the cool areca, the supārī, into small perfect pieces, and she slips them, mudā, with happiness brimming over, into Their moving hands, onto Their lips, so that They may dance on and chew the sweet pān she has prepared. And when she sees it, when she sees Rādhā and Her Prāṇeśvara accept what her hands have made and dance on with that sweetness on Their tongues, she goes clean out of her mind. There is no holding such joy. To have been used. To have been let near. To have set the cooling wind upon that face and the sweetness upon those lips, and asked nothing, and been given everything in the giving.

This is the whole of the longing folded into one trembling word: kadā. When. When will I, too, be granted only this much, the fan and the betel, the rim of the circle, the privilege of being small near something so vast and so sweet?