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Begin with the grove. It is called nava-kuñja, a new bower, and the word matters: this love is never the love of yesterday. Picture a green chamber of leaves deep within Vṛndāvana, vṛndāvana-antara, far from any road, where the vines have woven themselves into walls and a roof so that the bower itself has become a house, a gehe. No one built it; it grew up around Them out of tenderness, as if the forest could not bear to leave such love uncovered. And inside it, tan-nīla-pītaṁ mithunaṁ cakāsti: that blue-and-yellow Pair shines forth. He is the dark one in yellow, She the fair one in blue, and even before any name is spoken They are simply the dark-and-fair couple, as though the names themselves should hush before something this private.

See what They are doing, which is nothing and everything. Parasparaṁ prema-rase nimagnam: They are immersed, both ways, mutually, in the rasa of each other's love. Not performing. Not winning. Not glancing once at any watcher. They have gone under, the way one goes under a flood, and the flood is the sweetness of loving one another. And from that drowned sweetness pours aśeṣa-sammohana-rūpa-keli: endless enchanting forms of play, each new shape lovelier than the last, never repeating, as fresh as the grove that holds Them. The play does not end because the love does not end.

Now stand close and watch what this much love does to the very senses of the One who loves most. Jīva Gosvāmī sets it down in his Gopāla Campū, in the Pūrva division, that when Rādhā is held in Kṛṣṇa's own arms She feels far from Him, and when He is taken from Her She feels joined to Him. Her home seems to Her the forest, and the forest seems home. A single moment swells into an age, and an age shrinks to a moment. Her sleeping is a waking and her waking a sleep; the cold is heat to Her and the heat is cold; Her joy is a grief and Her grief a joy. And at the far edge of it, O Rādhe, You feel that You are Your beloved and Your beloved is You. The tradition does not call this confusion. It calls it the last fruit of absorption in prema-rasa, the place where love has grown so total that every opposite folds inward and the self loosens its own grip, no longer able to tell where She ends and He begins.

And who sees this? The mañjarī, the maidservant, stands as the direct witness of this sweet bewilderment of the kiśora-kiśorī, the eternally fresh adolescent Pair. She is the one near enough to behold the divine delusion and yet servant enough never to disturb it. This is the place she is given, and it is the highest place: to keep watch over a love she will never interrupt.

But mark this, and let it widen your heart: the enchantment does not stay sealed inside the bower. Not only are Rādhā and Mādhava enchanted by Their own prema-rasa; the whole world is enchanted by it. Not only the sakhīs and the mañjarīs are caught in its sweetness, but even the practising devotees, far from the grove, are caught the instant they hear and chant of these pastimes. And here is the quiet miracle Jīva Gosvāmī presses to the very end: even a neophyte, a raw beginner, finds the old fever of lust driven swiftly out of his heart, the heart's long disease cured, simply by hearing and chanting of this play sincerely and without offence. The same sweetness that floods the grove reaches all the way to the doorstep of the one who only listens. To hear of this love rightly is already to begin to be healed of every counterfeit of it.