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Begin with the hour. The great dance of the Rāsa is over. The drum of the feet has stilled, the anklets have gone quiet, and Rādhā and Her Mādhava have withdrawn from the moonlit circle into a deeper hush, into the bower the tradition names Hemāmbuja Kuñja, the lotus-of-gold arbour, and there upon a jewelled sofa They have taken Their rest. The long night of love has spent itself. Now the sky in the eastern quarter goes pale and tender, and the soft southern breeze comes stealing through the grove, gentle as a sigh, setting the blossoming vines to dance, lifting their fragrance into the air, and drawing the early bumblebees down to drink their honey. There is no beauty in all the worlds to rival Hemāmbuja Kuñja at daybreak.

Picture the maidservants now, the kiṅkarīs, stirring from their own short sleep. They rise to their accustomed work, the loving labour that is their whole life: sweeping the yards of the arbours, drawing scented water, folding the betel-leaves, threading the morning garlands, grinding the fragrant unguents. And as they move at their tasks, the sakhīs press close to the lattice of the vines, peering through the little holes between leaf and tendril, to drink in the astonishing beauty of the divine Couple asleep in the first light. They look, and they are drowned. Oceans of bliss rise up and close over their heads. To see Them so is everything.

Now Vṛndādevī wakes, and she sets the parrots to their morning office: to rouse the sleeping Rādhikā and Mādhava with soft sweet verses and sweeter songs. Lift your eyes higher in the grove, then, to the pomegranate branch where the śuka and the śārī wait. Through the whole long night these learned birds kept their watch above the lovers, and being clever past all telling, they listened. They memorised. Every teasing word, every mock-complaint, every laughing protest that Rādhā breathed into the dark, the parrots gathered and kept. And so at daybreak they open their throats and give back the night. They repeat, in their own bright imitation, the very words Rādhā spoke. The cuckoos, the bees, the peacocks, all of them are servants in this love, each adding its note; but it is the parrots, the mimics, who become living memory, who hand the past pleasures back to the sakhīs and the mañjarīs as a fresh gift at dawn, sitting blissful on the pomegranate bough and singing the Couple's words to widen the very ocean of rasa.

And what are the words they carry? Hear them. In the deep of the night Śyāmasundara drew Śrīmatī close, His arms wound tight about Her, His hands laid upon Her breast; and She, half in play and half in trembling, turned His own glory back upon Him as reproach. "Why, O lover, do You set Your sharp nails to my throat? Am I the king of the demons, the daitya-rāja, that You should treat me so? Remember the Tṛṇāvarta who whirled You up into the sky when You were a babe, and how Your small hands gripped his throat and ended him. Do You mean to do the like to me?" And again, laughing, alarmed, melting: "Do not bruise my breast with such cruelty, O Vanamālī, O Vidagdharāja, O crown-jewel of all clever pranksters. I am not Pūtanā, the witch whose life You drank away through her breast when she came to nurse You with poison. You will not finish me so, will You?"

There is a sweetness folded inside the jest that is sweeter still, and the tradition lingers over it. The people of Vraja do not know, in their hearts, that their Kṛṣṇa is God; the Caitanya-caritāmṛta sets it down plainly, kṛṣṇa-ke īśvara nāhi jāne vrajajana, the Vrajavāsīs do not know that Kṛṣṇa is the Lord. So when the boy slays a demon they do not say "the Supreme has acted"; they say, lovingly, that surely Lord Nārāyaṇa, satisfied with Nanda Mahārāja's worship, has lent His power to the child for that moment. This is how they read even Garga Muni's word to Nanda in the Bhāgavata, nārāyaṇa samo guṇaiḥ, that this son is equal in qualities to Nārāyaṇa. And Rādhā too thinks in exactly this Vraja way, which is why Her teasing carries a real shiver beneath the laughter: "When You were a nursing babe You played at Pūtanā's breast, and Nārāyaṇa's power entered You, and she died. So too with Tṛṇāvarta in the air. Now You are grown to the edge of youth and You press my breast just so. What if that dreadful power should enter You once more? What if, in Your play, You undo me as You undid them?" It is dread spoken as flirtation, surrender spoken as protest, the whole helplessness of a love that can hold nothing back made into a single murmured complaint. This is the nectar the parrots stole and kept.

And here is the longing that gives this verse its ache. The one who speaks is the maidservant, the kiṅkarī, broom in hand at the gate of dawn. She does not ask to be Rādhā. She asks for something humbler and, to her, infinitely greater: to be present at the sweeping when the parrot lets the words fall. "O sakhi," she says to her companion, "when, oh when, will that morning be mine, that I am here cleaning the floor of this play-kuñja at first light, and the she-parrot on the pomegranate branch begins to prattle back the words Rādhā spoke to Her Beloved in the night? When will I overhear them?" For when she hears them, goosepimples of ecstasy break across her skin and the marrow trembles, ḍagamagi, and the broom forgets itself in her hand. The labour and the listening are one act of love. The tradition gives this very longing to Śrī Prabodhānanda's own voice, signing it in his Bengali song: when, when will that morning come, that I am lost in listening to these tender pratlings while I sweep the kuñja?

Blessed, says the tradition, are these maidservants. No one else can relish Rādhā's sweetness as they do. They stand near enough to overhear and lowly enough to be trusted, and into that exact nearness the parrots pour the night's whole nectar at dawn. To sweep the floor of the bower is to be inside the rasa without ever grasping at it. That is the whole prayer of this verse: not to be the lover, but to be the broom-bearer at the threshold when love speaks again through the parrot's throat.