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Begin with the dusk at Yāvata. The day is folding inward, the light going honey-thick and then blue, and Śrīmatī is in Her own rooms, attended, guarded, watched over by Her elders as a treasure is watched. The servant is there too, in her kinkarī-svarūpa, lost in the small services of evening, smoothing, arranging, waiting. And then, far off among the trees, a flute lifts its first note.

O that flute. They say it sounds in the forest, but that is not where it truly sounds. It sounds inside Her. It is played not in the Kadamba grove at all but in the mind of Svāminī, and it threads straight in and tugs, and there is no resisting it. Morality, propriety, the vigilance of the older women, the safety of the lit house: all of it falls away like a dropped veil. She cannot stay at home any longer. She rises and rushes out onto the path of tryst, onto abhisāra, and the servant, who is nothing but Her shadow, slips out behind Her and follows.

Picture Him now at the foot of the Kadamba tree, Vaṁśīdhārī, the flute-bearer, waiting with an eagerness that will not sit still. And suddenly all of Vṛndāvana goes golden, lit from within, because She has come, and Her radiance breaks like a dawn inside the night. He rushes forward to see Her. But here is the wonder of Her: at the very sight of Him She gathers up Her own nature, Her vāmya-svabhāva, the unsubmissive mood that will not simply yield, and She turns as if to go home again. O the play in this. The anxious young hero will not bear it. He reaches out and catches Her by both hands and draws Her, swiftly, in among the Kadambas.

He is called here kiśora-mauli: the crown upon the head of all adolescent boys. Of all the eternally manifest forms in which the Divine has ever stood, this one, this dark youth at the edge of night, is the most ravishing of all in its sheer power to attract. And it is in this form that He perfects the whole art of love with the beautiful gopīs led by Śrī Rādhā, the form the tradition calls rasa-niryāsa, the squeezing-out of the very essence of the most delicious transcendental flavours, the last sweetness pressed from the fruit of rasa.

And so the eager young Couple passes in among the trees, into a leaf-walled bower, and there upon a bed they are taken up into love that rises like a flood, a mahā-rati, a great fullness of meeting. O the swelling of it. Like an ocean it rises, wave upon wave, and from within that ocean break Her cries.

These are not words. They are smaller and larger than words. They are the śītkāra, the indrawn hissing breath, the half-protest, the sukha-tarjana, the tender chastisement that is not chastisement, the blissful rebuke that means the opposite of what a rebuke means. They scatter from Her lips in the heart of the deepest meeting, broken sounds, sweet inarticulate shrieks, and like waves, vīci upon vīci, they go straight into the openings of Hari's ears.

Hear what happens there. He is called Hari, the one who steals, because by His sweetness and His beauty He robs every heart that exists of its keeping; He is the universal thief. And yet, O wonder of wonders, here is the One who can steal even from the thief: Her amorous cries, Her blissful rebukes, pour into His earholes and carry off the heart of Hari Himself. And She knows it. She knows the power of those small sounds, knows that the stealer of all hearts is helpless before them, and that knowing is woven into the very cries.

Now stand where the servant stands. She is outside the bower. She does not enter; that is not her place and not her wish. She is the one who waits at the threshold, and from there she hears. Only she, only the maidservant, can truly understand how happy Hari becomes when those loving screams enter into His ears. To her it comes as a stream of astonishing nectar, a current of sudhā she drinks through the listening of the heart. And the tradition tells us these sounds have not faded; even now they resound in Śrīpāda's earholes, the cries given off in that grove still ringing on in the one who longs.

And out of that longing rises the whole prayer. O Rādhe, the servant says, this evening the bluish jewel of all youthful boys, Pītavāsa Vanamālī, the yellow-robed One garlanded with forest flowers, most blissfully took Your two hands and led You into the Kadamba grove, and on that play-bed unfolded who knows how many games of love. And Your loving shrieks, Your blissful rebukes in that intense play that was itself an ocean of rasa, those poured into Hari's ears as nectar is poured into a vessel. O moon of Vṛṣabhānu's house, vṛṣabhānu-kulacanda, when, oh when, with this whole aching of the heart, will I be allowed to hear those inarticulate sounds, those sweet broken cries that give Hari such joy? When will they too take shelter in the openings of my ears?

That is the prayer of Śrīpāda Prabodhānanda. Not to be in the love, but to be near enough to hear it. Not to taste the union, but to be permitted to drink the overflow of it through the ear, as the servant who keeps the door.