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Picture the kuñja at the appointed hour. The lamps of evening are not yet lit, the leaves hang still and listening, and down the dark path comes a young girl, half-led and half-resisting, Her hand folded inside the hand of Her maidservant. This is Śrī Rādhā, come eagerly to the trysting-place, and the heart is permitted tonight to feel it as Her first coming, for Yogamāyā, the tender illusion-weaver of Vraja, keeps the eternal forever new. Everything here is ancient and everything here has never yet happened. The young Couple's first looks, Their first love, Their first meeting, all of it is being born again at this very breath, fresh as the first morning of the world.

But the girl at the threshold is mugdhā, shy past speaking, frightened and wholly unschooled in love. The maidservant draws Her toward the bower, and Rādhā plants Her small feet and will not go. Hear the substance of Her trembling refusal, the very plea the tradition gives in the pada of Vidyāpati: leave Me be, O sakhi, I offer Him My obeisances from here, I will not go in to where He waits. I do not know the clever words a lover speaks; I cannot read His glances; I have never learned how to hold My pride in love's quarrel. I am dressed by My maidservants; I cannot even bind up My own hair once He has loosed My braid. I have never so much as heard what passes between lovers. How then shall I meet this Mādhava? He is a seasoned nāgara, a rasika who knows every sweetness, and I am a weak girl, abalā, of the slenderest knowing. So She pleads, and Vidyāpati answers for the maidservant: what is there to tell You, dear one? Now is the very time, now is the right meeting.

And so the maidservant bends to her wonderful service, reasoning sweetly, urgently, close to Rādhā's ear. O Rādhe, look: Yaśodā's lad has crossed into His kaiśora, His budding adolescence; will You alone remain a child? You are His prakaṭa-sahajā, born almost at the same breath as He, into this same Vraja, only one year and two weeks after Kṛṣṇa, as Śrī Jīva Gosvāmī reckons it; and a girl's body always ripens a little before the boy's. So You too have entered this sweet and tender youth, ripe and lovely, just like Kṛṣṇa. This is the moment the wise call sādhu-yoga, for when one first becomes fit to taste the very cream and quintessence of rasa, the rasa-niryāsa, at the dawning of adolescence, that auspicious meeting-time is sādhu-yoga.

Do not be shy, the maidservant presses on. A girl's youth is poured out and wasted if she cannot give it to a worthy beloved, and You, O Rādhe, are the most fortunate of all, for the beloved within Your reach is a rasika like Kṛṣṇa Himself. Search the whole round earth and there is no boy so beautiful, no boy so loved by everyone in all of Vraja, as He. And You, You are the loveliest and the most qualified of all maidens; You alone are made for Him. Cast off this fear; You are meant for one another.

And as Rādhā listens, the marvel happens: the age fit for the eternal pastimes rises up within Her like sap mounting a stem. For this kiśora-age is the original age of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa; Their paugaṇḍa, Their boyhood, and Their kumāra, Their babyhood, are only secondary expansions of this one true season. In His baby-age Kṛṣṇa relishes only His mother's love. In His paugaṇḍa-age He relishes the love of His parents and His cowherd companions. But in His kiśora-age He relishes all of it at once, the love of parents, of friends, and of the girlfriends who are His own heart, and so this season alone is the gathered aggregate of every rasa, and lets Him drink the fullness of joy to its uttermost. What service, then, the maidservant renders, when she coaxes that eternal age to dawn in Śrī Rādhikā and unlocks the whole of sweetness for them both. See the limbs of the shy girl quicken; see kaiśora break out tenderly upon each limb, like dawn-light spreading hill after hill across Barsānā.

Then, her work nearly done, the maidservant turns to the dark-blue prince Himself, leading Her trembling treasure forward, and warns Him, again in the tradition's own pada: listen, listen, O Kānu; this girl is terribly afraid. She has never made love; She knows nothing of these ways. O king of clever pranksters, O vidagdha rāy, I am placing this most tender of maidens, this sukumārī, into Your hands. Be gentle in Your eagerness; take such care that She feels no pain. And in the very instant she speaks these words, the curtain falls. The vision shivers and is gone, the transcendental revelation withdraws, and the devotee is left standing outside the closed bower of his own longing.

So Śrīpāda Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī lifts his voice, and his prayer becomes our prayer. O Rādhe, You innocent, unknowing girl: when will adolescence wake in You as I whisper my coaxing, love-filled words at Your side? When will I be the one privileged to arrange Your sweet meeting with Śyāmasundara? When will You become visible to these poor eyes in that very form? Sweet and beautiful kaiśora, he sings, has made its blessed, auspicious entrance into Yaśodā's son, Madana Mohana, the enchanter of even Cupid. O Princess Rāi, by the sheer strength of Your own new-born love, Your nava-anurāga, You will go to Mādhava. O golden lotus Rādhe, O hema-kamalinī, Your age is still so tender as You stand here drinking my words; yet the beautiful age of the eternal pastimes will come of its own accord, and the glory of youth will break forth on each of Your limbs. And then, O when, asks the devotee, will I behold that kiśorī form with my own eyes? That is the whole ache of this remembrance: not to possess, only to behold; to stand at the edge of the bower and pray that the eternal girl, eternally new, will turn for one moment and let Herself be seen.