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Picture the last hour of the night in sweet Vṛndāvana, when the dark begins to thin at its edges and the grove has not yet decided whether to keep dreaming. Honey oozes from the blooming flowers, and their fragrance pervades the whole forest until the wind itself is one drifting perfume. The bumblebees come quickly out of the half light to drink that honey, and once drunk they cannot keep still; they reel from bower to bower and buzz across the playgrove as though they too were remembering something. The cuckoos call so sweetly that even Cupid grows intoxicated to hear it. Out of the ten directions the songs of the birds and the soft voices of the deer rise up together, and by this very chorus, the old song of Balarāma dāsa tells us, the night knows itself ended.

Now look into the heart of one small grove. There a kiṅkarī, a maidservant of the Divine Couple, has fallen asleep at Their feet while massaging Rādhā and Mādhava's lotus-soles, so lost in that service that sleep overtook her where she knelt. This is the one whose longing the tradition gives us to wear as our own. Around her the eternally-perfect maidservants are waking and slipping into their accustomed loving works. Some pour scented water from golden pitchers. Some weave enchanting garlands. Some prepare the sweet water and fold the betel-leaves. They are love itself walking on two feet, these handmaids, and they ask for nothing but to serve.

O Friend, O Rūpa Mañjarī, the prayer rises of itself, the very prayer that Raghunātha dāsa Gosvāmī set down in the Abhīṣṭa-sūcana-stava: the King and Queen of Vraja, who never leave the inner chamber of my heart, have met at last in the kuñja after long, long endeavour; submit me, O Sakhī, to Their service in the very moment You offer Them the betel-leaf. Through the small gaps in the leafy wall, through the holes in the woven green of the bower, the sakhīs and mañjarīs drink the sweetness of the young Couple with the cups of their eyes. It is as though every beauty the worlds have ever held now lies gathered on a single bed of flowers, taken the form of two bodies. Their garments have slipped away, Their ornaments have fallen; in the light of the little lamps that burn in the bower's corners He shows like a blue lotus-bud and She like the golden bud of a campaka in flower. They have swooned from the touch of one another and lie heart laid to heart, His right foot reaching up to the left thigh of the Kiśorī, the two of Them one tender architecture of rest.

The handmaids gaze without a single blink. They float on oceans of blissful rasa, and softly, softly they tell one another what they are seeing, that the telling may make the sweetness double. Then at Vṛndā's quiet sign a pair of parrots, the green he-bird and his mate, begin the waking-song: rise, O hero, rise; the rascal Creator works You such cruelty, ending the night before You are willing; the Queen of Vraja must soon go to churn the curd. Our clever Lord, hearing this, grows anxious, half-opens His eyes, and the moment He sees His Priyā beside Him He shuts them again, and the hairs of His body stand up in joy. He draws a jewelled lamp near. He takes the chin of His beloved in His hand. Tears stream down as He looks long upon the moon of Rāi's face, and both of Them tremble, Rādhikā and He, shivering in one ecstasy.

When at last the loving Couple sits up upon the bed, the maidservants come forward with scented water and betel, set the garments straight, settle the ornaments, and lead Them to rise and take Their place on a jewelled throne upon the terrace of the bower. And just then the sakhīs come in, giggling, veils pressed to their mouths, sending up a hundred bright waves of teasing and laughter. The kiṅkarī, our maidservant, floats in a sea of bliss as these sweet jokes wash over her, and she takes up her broom and begins to sweep the kuñja.

And as she sweeps she sees it: the bed of flowers laid waste by the powerful motion of Their amorous battle, the blossoms flung and strewn from one end of the grove to the other. This is the prastara, the couch the books call a bed of fresh leaves and flowers, for the Śabda Ratnāvali fixes the word so: pallavādyair viracite śayanīye tu saṁbharaḥ, a couch made of tender shoots and petals; this very bed has been wholly disordered by Their love. And here is the trembling, wondrous fortune of the servant: the unguents from Rādhā and Mādhava's own bodies have fallen onto these flowers, the sandal and the saffron and the dark musk slipped from Their warm limbs in the first rush of Their meeting. The maidservant gathers these and anoints her own body with them. She does not wash them away as refuse; she wears them as the highest decoration, for they came from Them. And the garlands, sweetened by the touch of Their sweet love until the very memory makes her hairs rise, the garlands snapped in the play and scattered everywhere, she patiently collects flower by fallen flower, restrings them with her own hands into new garlands, and hangs them round her own neck in a happiness that has no shore.

This is the whole of her desire, and so the whole of ours. Not to be seen, not to be praised, not to be given any place but the place of the broom in the dawn. Only this: to enter the bower at first light to clean it, and there, kneeling among the scattered petals, to find that even the leavings of Their love are wealth past measuring, the sweepings holy, the dropped flowers a coronation. O wind that carries the grove's fragrance, O dawn that comes too soon, O Rādhe, O Mādhava, let me be the one who sweeps. And then, as it always must, the inner vision lifts and is gone, and the servant of the Lord folds his hands at the feet of his beloved deity and prays, with his whole trembling heart, only that he may be granted this good fortune once again.