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Picture it at the close of an evening's play, when the two of Them have just finished dressing each other. Śyāma has draped and adorned Śrī Rādhā with His own hands; and Rādhā, with Her maidservant's help, has dressed Him in turn. Now neither can look away. Each is drowned in the other's beauty, and there is nothing in the worlds but this drinking of each other's sweetness.

See how the greedy Nāgara cannot keep still before Her loveliness. As He gazes, lost in admiring His Svāminī, She smiles, only gently, and from that lotus mouth the nectar begins to drip. He cannot bear it. He draws Her face close and, with the two cups of His lips, He drinks. And from that touch the first sound comes: kṣaṇaṁ sītkurvantīm, a moment of small, inarticulate, broken cries, sītkāra, the sweet shrieks of one whom love has overtaken. These cries are not weakness. They give great joy to Śyāmasundara, and great joy to the maidservants who stand near and serve.

Then watch how the love moves through Her like weather. kṣaṇam atha mahā-vepathumatīm: the next moment Her whole body trembles, a great shivering that no will can still. kṣaṇaṁ śyāma-śyāma iti: and then there is only the Name, spoken twice, "Śyāma! Śyāma!", the one word left when all other words have gone. And over the whole of Her, pulakitām, the hair stands on end, the skin thrilled into bloom. The Gauḍīya teachers will not let us read these as ornaments of a poem. They are the sāttvika signs, the visible bhāva of love that has so flooded the body that the body can no longer hold it quietly. Love this full simply spills, in cries, in trembling, in the rising of the very hairs, in the helpless calling of His name.

The Rādhāvallabha reading of the Hit tradition gives this storm of states its name: prema-vaicitrya, the wondrous bewilderment of love. It is because the love is so great, so unaccountable, that She passes in a single breath from crying to shivering to calling, indescribable in every turn. And the verse itself is set, the tradition notes, in the śikhariṇī meter, a cresting line fit for a love that crests and breaks.

Hear what Her calling holds. The word the tradition reads here, ālāpa, is glossed by the old maxim cāṭu priyoktir ālāpaḥ: sweet flattering words are called ālāpa. So when She speaks, She is not merely naming Him; She is pouring out the tender, coaxing speech of the beloved. The teachers set in Her mouth the song of Caṇḍīdāsa: "Listen, O Śyāma, I am bound up by Your love, and I care for no one but You. In sleep and in dream I see Your form; in My delusion I draw it upon the earth. If I sit among My elders and only chance to hear Your name, My heart is startled, My body studs with goosepimples, the tears stream down, and I grow distraught trying to hide it. Day or night, O friend, I cannot forget You; I keep You fixed in My heart." That is the speech inside the sītkāra.

And Śyāma cannot leave such words unanswered. The tradition gives His reply in the song of Jñāna-dāsa: "What are You saying to Me, O beautiful one? I too am sunk in remembering Your love. My mind is never calm; I find no rest. I see You in the sky, on the earth, in all ten directions. For Your sake I wander the hills and rivers and forest after forest. Eating or sleeping, I think of no one else. Listen, O Vinodinī, to this love-story: We are one soul in two bodies; gone, gone is all the duality between Us." And when Śrīmatī hears these words of His, a golden luster gushes out from Her limbs, those limbs already adorned with the ornaments of ecstatic love, the bhāvālaṅkāra, and She is overwhelmed, carried wholly into the rapture.

Now the heart of it. mahā-prema kāpi: She is the greatest love, indescribable, kā api, "some girl" past all our telling. And pramada-madana-uddāma-rasadā: She is the bestower of the unrestrained relish of blissful amorous love. Mark who gives and who receives. This madana, this Cupid, is no other than the youthful transcendental Cupid of Vṛndāvana, Śrī Kṛṣṇa Himself; and it is Rādhā who gives the rasa, indescribable (kāpi) amorous rapture, into Him. He is the receiver of love's taste; She is its inexhaustible spring.

And so the maidservant, who stands by and serves and sees this every single day, the dāsī who always experiences Rādhā pouring this rasa into Śyāma, can say it with the certainty of an eyewitness: sadānanda-mūrtir jayati vṛṣabhānoḥ kula-maṇiḥ. All glory to the jewel of King Vṛṣabhānu's line; She is the very form of real and unending bliss. We should know the cost of this certainty, too: when the vision lifts and external consciousness returns, great agony arises in the heart of the one who saw, who laments that by some indescribable good fortune he tasted the Yugala-mādhurī and now by some dark turn is suddenly bereft of it. The glory is sung from inside both the fullness and the ache of having seen.