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Begin with the evening in Yāvat. The heat of the day has gone soft, the cattle are folded in, and Śrīpāda, in his kinkarī-form, moves through the inner rooms doing the small endless work of Śrīmatī's service. Then the moon lifts over the kadamba tops, the Malayan breeze comes cool and sweet from the south, and every silver moonray, instead of cooling Her, kindles Her, until each beam is a finger pointing toward the grove where Śyāma waits. Her heart begins to tilt and to gather, the way water gathers before it runs.

And then, far off, the flute. It is not loud, it does not call by name, and yet it undoes the whole arrangement of a woman's composure. Śyāma plays His enchanting bansuri from a trysting bower, and Rāi is no longer in the room. She is gone, out the door, into the dark, to meet Him: this is abhisāra. And the maidservants run after Her like Her own shadow stretched thin across the forest floor.

Watch Her go and you will understand the whole verse, for She is not walking, She is flowing. She has become a river. The night is black as a heap of collyrium, the path is slippery underfoot, the wild dark of the forest is coiled with serpents, and none of it can dam Her course. Tigers and bears, the great buffalo and the boar, they catch one glimpse of this passionate Rāi pouring toward Her Beloved and they scatter from the bank. And when a snake lifts its hood and the jewels upon it blaze in the dark, She does not flinch. She lays Her own soft hands over the gems to hide their light, so that no flash will betray Her to the elders at home. O Rāi, what shall any servant say of Your passionate love for Mādhava? The river does not negotiate with the stones in its bed. It simply goes.

This is why the tradition calls Her Surataraṅgiṇī, and the name folds two meanings into one breath. Surataraṅgiṇī: the river of the gods, the Gaṅgā herself walking the earth of Vraja. And surata-raṅgiṇī: the woman wholly given to the play of love. She is both at once, the holiest of rivers and the most abandoned of lovers, and in Her there is no contradiction, for Her abandon is Her holiness. See how the comparison deepens. When the rains come, a river floods both its banks, both its du-kula; and She too overruns Her two du-kula, the two households that fence a married woman in, Her father's family and Her husband's family, the whole careful architecture of name and duty. She does not break it in anger. She simply rises past it, the way swollen water rises past the line of stones, because the sea is calling and the sea will not be refused.

And mark well what kind of river She is, for the maidservant marks it as she runs: viśuddha-rasa-vāhinī, a stream through which only utterly pure rasa flows, and flows, and never ceases. Pure here does not mean cold or careful. It means there is not one drop in Her that runs for Her own pleasure. Every current of this river runs to satisfy Him, to delight Kṛṣṇa's senses, to be His joy. This is what divides Her love forever from the love a worldly heroine bears her paramour, where the self still wants its share. In Śrī Rādhā there is no share kept back; Her love is the very essence of the selfless love of Vraja. And even now, mid-flight, She is not thinking of Her own reward but of His waiting: how eagerly must My rasamaya prāṇakānta be looking down the path for Me. She carries Him already in Her breast, the king of all amorous rasa held warm against Her heart, and so She runs to the One She is already holding. This is the iṣṭa-paratva of the verse, the whole self poured toward the one cherished Beloved and no other.

Now look closely at the river itself, feature by feature, as the maidservants behold it. Her face, lasad-vadana-paṅkaja, is a blooming golden lotus floating upon these pure waters, and from it the honey of pure love for Kṛṣṇa drips, drips, drips into the current. Her navel, nava-gambhīra-nābhi, fresh and deep, is the turning whirlpool of the stream, the eddy of rasa that constantly sucks down the blades of Kṛṣṇa's grass-like thoughts and longings; the deer of Mādhava's enchanted mind comes leaping and is taken under and cannot climb back out. The Saṅgīta-Mādhava sings it so: nipatita mādhava mugdha mano mṛga nābhi sudhārasa kūpam: the deer-like mind of enchanted Mādhava falls into the nectar-well of Rādhikā's navel and never again finds the shore. Her hips, nitamba, are the bright sandbanks, the gleaming pulina that hold the river's rushing shape. And along those banks runs the music of Her kāñcī, Her waist-sash jingling, mukhara, sweet-voiced. The Gauḍīya stream hears that sash as a flock of lordly swans cooing on the Gaṅgā's banks; the Rādhāvallabha reading sees in that same kādambinī a garland of rain-clouds gathered low and murmuring over the bank, the very clouds whose rains swell the river to its flooding. Both hear one sound: the nectar-music of Her flight toward the Kṛṣṇa-ocean.

So the maidservant, breathless, keeping pace as best she can, lifts up her glorification of this Gaṅgā of passionate love. All glory to the celestial nectar-Mandākinī of love that dwells forever in Vṛndāvana, whose smiling lotus-face never stops blooming and never stops delighting the eyes. Glory to that deep navel-whirlpool whose mere sight steals away the mind and the very breath. Glory to those bank-like hips that carry the swan-sash of jingling bells. And Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī sets the last word upon it: the nectarean name of Rādhā is a spotless and fathomless river that raises the waves of itself and goes like one gone mad with love, always, always pouring into the union of the Śyāma-sea. The servant, running in the dark behind Her, asks for nothing but this: to follow the river, to be carried in its flooding, to be one more drop that reaches the ocean only because She is reaching it.