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Picture it. Spring has come to Vṛndāvana, and the whole forest has answered. At the far edge of winter the warm season slips in like a returning friend, and every bud that had folded itself away through the cold months unclenches at once. The trees and vines, beautiful by their very nature, stand heavy now with sweetly smiling blossom, freshly bloomed and freshly sprouting, and Vasanta Lakṣmī, the very goddess of vernal beauty, walks unseen through the groves laying her hand on flower after flower until the whole of Vṛndāvana is smiling. What an amazing beauty she makes. The bumblebees, drunk and joyful, come back to the open cups of the flowers to relish them again. On the freshly sprouting branches of the mango trees, dressed in new and newer leaves, the parrots and their mates, the śukas and the śārīs, and the cuckoos lift their sweet voices until the air itself seems to be singing. The old song holds it true: at the end of the winter the spring comes, making all the flowers in the forest blossom again, the bees return to the open flowers, and the birds sing sweetly upon the new-leafed boughs. And nowhere is the spring more beautiful than here, on the bank of the Kālindī, the dark river-daughter of the sun.

Here, where the Yamunā curves and the new leaves shiver over the water, a little cottage has grown up out of the living vines. It is a temple, this nava-latā-mandira, a sanctuary woven of green tendrils and trembling blossom, and inside it Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa have come to be alone. The hour is romantic and the place is romantic, and at the sight of such a bower the divine Couple feel Their hearts kindle toward one another. O the sweetness of this. The maidservant, the kiṅkarī whose whole self is given over to this loving, does not intrude. She peers in through the holes in the woven vines, drinking in the sweetness of these pastimes with eyes that have become like two small fishes swimming blissfully in the shoreless ocean of this play. She asks for nothing of her own. She only watches, and serves, and aches to serve more.

Then the love-play comes to its tender rest, the ratāmarda spent, and the divine Couple step out from the kuñja onto the open terrace, the ālinda, where a jewelled throne awaits Them. They are breathing deeply. The endeavour of love has left its mark upon Them, and Their two bodies are drenched, beaded all over with the soft dew of fatigue, śrama-jala, the sweat-pearls of intimacy that no other being in all the worlds is permitted to wipe away. Bharā-pūrṇa-vapuṣoḥ: Their forms are filled, brimming with that loving dew. And here, at last, is the maidservant's moment. Here is the place where the longing of this whole verse lives.

For now she takes up the fan, the sam-vījana, and how she fans Them. Not roughly, not for mere coolness, but with such tender expertise that the breeze she raises does a hidden work: it carries Kṛṣṇa's fragrance to Rādhā and Rādhā's fragrance to Kṛṣṇa, so that even as They rest, each is bathed in the other's sweetness. The wind she makes dries the sweatdrops from Their glowing skin. And under her fanning the Couple begin to taste each other through every sense at once. With the corners of Their eyes They lick the nectar of each other's forms. With Their skins They sense the nectarean touch of nearness. With Their noses They breathe each other in. And the maidservant, who is devotional service itself made into a girl, brings cool sweet syrup and fragrant betel-leaves for Their tongues. The Couple please each other's ears by sprinkling them with the nectar of each other's murmured talk, and satisfy Their tongues with the delicacies she has served. Five senses, five doors of bliss, and through every one of them the divine Couple flows into the divine Couple, until satisfaction overflows and Their eyes drift gently closed, sukha-sparśa-āmīlita, shut by the very bliss of touch.

That is the whole of the prayer. O Rādhe, O Murabhid, slayer of the demon Mura, look how Your eyes are closing. Look how the day's heat is nothing to You now, because there is a coolness in this grove that is atulam, incomparable, a coolness no summer ever owned, the coolness of a love that asks to be served. The breeze upon Your sweat-dewed bodies is not weather. It is devotion taking the shape of wind. And the one who longs to be that wind is not lifting her eyes to be noticed; she would be the most hidden thing in the bower, the fan in the corner, the cool air that has no name, content forever to dry Your dew and carry Your fragrances back and forth between You.

Kadā kuryām, she cries, and the cry breaks open with wonder: ahaha, aho! When? When will this be mine? It is the cry of the whole poem, the cry that turns the heart inside out: not when will I possess this love, but when will I be allowed to wave the fan beside it. There is no higher asking. To stand unseen at the edge of that jewelled throne, to feel the warmth rising off Their tired and happy limbs, to wave an incomparable coolness over Them and watch Their eyes close in peace, this is the maidservant's heaven, and she would trade no throne for it. What a wonderful service this is. How sweet are these forms of the divine Couple to behold. How blessed, how unutterably blessed, is the girl who gets to fan Them.