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Picture it. The vines of the kuñja are heavy and dark, and somewhere inside them the young Couple have withdrawn. After the maidservant was rewarded for her loving service, Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa, overwhelmed at the sight of each other's form and qualities, drawn by the great and risen urge of love, slipped into the bower to be alone. And the maidservant, who can never be far from Them, found the small gaps where the leaves do not quite meet, and there she pressed her eyes, and there her long-cherished wish was granted: to witness the sweet amorous pastimes of her Prāṇeśvarī and Her beloved.

Now the play is spent. "Smara-samara-saṁrambha-rabhasā": the amorous battle, urgent and full-grown, has run its course, and it has left its marks. Their bodies are slackened, "lulita", the limbs gone soft with weariness; and "prarūḍha-svedāmbhaḥ-pluta", they are drenched, every limb wet with the risen waters of perspiration; and "citrākhila-tanū", the whole body is wonderfully, completely beautiful, more beautiful now than before. The clothes have come loose. The ornaments have slipped from their places. The fragrant unguents are washed away in the sweat. And here is the secret the tradition will not let us miss: this disheveled, exhausted, sweat-soaked vision is not a thing to look away from. It is the very thing the maidservants most long to see.

Why should the worn-out, undone beauty of the Couple be the dearest sight of all? Because love does not love only the composed and the adorned; love treasures most the marks that loving itself has left. The tradition fixes this with the prayer of Bhīṣma-deva. As he lay dying on his bed of arrows, the old hero asked for one thing: that his mind stay fixed on Kṛṣṇa, the Supreme Self. And which Kṛṣṇa did he hold? Not the crowned and seated Lord, but the Kṛṣṇa of the battlefield, as the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam preserves it in the ninth chapter of the first book, that Kṛṣṇa whose hair was loosened and greyed by the dust thrown up under the horses' hooves, whose face was adorned with beads of sweat, and who took delight in being pierced by Bhīṣma's own sharp arrows. To Bhīṣma, that dust-streaked, sweat-jeweled, arrow-marked face was the most beautiful sight in all the worlds. In just that way, O Rādhe, the maidservants do not wish to see You powdered and perfect; they wish to see You as love has made You: Your limbs weak, Your sweat upon You, Your garments and jewels undone after the amorous battle. The marks of love are the ornaments love most adores.

And so the service. To relieve Their fatigue, Rādhā and Rasika Tilaka come and sit near the gate of the kuñja. He is named here Rasika Tilaka, the tilaka-mark and crown of all relishers, the greatest taster of rasa; and beside Him is Śrī Rādhā, the wellspring of that rasa. The maidservant takes up the fan. "Sukha-māruti": she sends a soft, joy-giving wind across Their resting forms. She dries the sweatdrops one by one. She asks for nothing; she only cools, only cares. And the Couple, given over to the cool breeze, lean against each other and let Their eyes fall closed, while from every limb Their own natural sweetness gushes out like a fragrance into the bower. To be the small servant at the door who tends this rest: this is the whole of her longing.

This is why she does not call herself merely lucky but "sukṛtinī", the most fortunate girl of all. She has not been made the beloved. She has not been noticed or named. She has only been allowed near enough to fan, and that nearness she counts as the highest good fortune the worlds can hold. "Kadā vā", she sighs, and when, and when will that day be mine? The verse leaves her there at the gate, fan in hand in her imagining, aching toward a service she does not yet have, certain that to win it would be to win everything.