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The love-play has just closed, and the bower has gone still. The flowers of the bed are pressed and warm, and on them lie Rādhā and Madhupati, face to face, having spoken Their last soft romantic words into each other's eyes. Now the words slow, the eyelids lower. The pupils of Their eyes are like two pairs of restless black bees that, drowsy at last, let themselves be folded shut inside the lotus-petals of Their eyelids. They sleep. And at the foot of the bed kneels one fortunate maidservant, doing the smallest work there is: mṛdu mṛdu, softly, softly, she presses Their lotus feet. So gently does she press that the sleeping Pair never even notice her hands are there. That unnoticing is not her sorrow; it is her whole joy. To serve so quietly that the Beloved sleeps right through it, wanting nothing back, not a glance, not a word of thanks: this is the prayer.

This is the rasika sleep of Rādhā's maidservants. The one who sings this has himself sunk; the tradition tells us the boat of Śrīpāda Prabodhānanda's consciousness has gone down whole into the nectar-ocean of the sweetness of his beloved Rādhikā's lotus feet, and from inside that ocean he speaks. So when he kneels at Their bed it is no figure of speech he reaches for. Sitting there at Their feet, the maidservant directly experiences what the Pair are made of: not flesh as we know flesh, but condensed, blissful rasa, the very nectar of prema given a form to lie down in.

Hear the names. Kṛṣṇa is called here Madhupati, and the tradition opens the word as "the very form of endless savour": the unlimitedly sweet and beautiful Dhīra-Lalita hero. But mark what the same name carries. This Madhupati, who maddens the whole world, whether by the lures of the senses or simply by His own beauty, is Himself maddened. He is mad after Śrī Rādhā's sweet love, fully subdued by it, fully won. The maidservant sees this with her own eyes from her low seat at His feet: the maddener of all the worlds, lying conquered in sleep beside the One whose love has conquered Him.

And what of Her, that conqueror? The Pair are prema-pīyūṣa-mūrti, and of Rādhā the tradition says it most fully: Her form is made of the unique nectar of completely selfless love, the love that rises and rises until it culminates in mahā-bhāva. Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes the height of it, that the supreme nectar, "varāmṛta-svarūpa-śrīḥ svaṁ svarūpaṁ mano nayet": this highest nectar, mahā-bhāva, is the very wealth that carries one back to one's own svarūpa, one's constitutional self. Viśvanātha Cakravartī, in his Ānanda-Candrikā, turns the jewel once more: as in all the material world there is nothing tastier than nectar, so among all the loves there is no prema more relishable than mahā-bhāva, and whoever takes shelter of it regains his true self. He reasons it out tenderly. The minds of the mahābhāva-girls of Vraja are made of mahā-bhāva and have no separate existence apart from it; and since the senses follow the mind, their very senses are mahā-bhāva too; and so it stands to reason that Kṛṣṇa is fully controlled by every sense of these mahābhāvavatīs. And the tradition seals it: "mahābhāvojjvala-cintā-ratnodbhāvita-vigrahām," that Rādhā's whole form comes forth from the blazing cintāmaṇi, the thought-jewel, of mahā-bhāva. So when the maidservant cradles those soft feet, she is not merely easing a tired body. She is holding in her hands the living jewel of the highest love there is, and the One whom that love has utterly won lies sleeping at the other end of her touch.

Then the work undoes the worker. As her hands press, mṛdu mṛdu, the sweetness she is serving rises up in her too. The same drowsiness that closed Their eyes now reaches for hers. And she does not fight it. She lets it take her, and she slumps down, patitā, fallen, right there at the end of the bed, at the lotus-footsoles of the divine Couple, and she sleeps. O fortunate one, even your sleep is service. To drowse at Their feet is to stay near, to stay at Their feet, to keep watch in the only way love leaves you when love has spent you. The song that the tradition sets beside this keeps the whole picture: Rāi and Kānu, an ocean of intense delight and the luster of love-nectar, sweetness made a body, asleep on the bower-bed in a jewelled temple; the servant softly pressing Their feet and fanning Them; and then the plea, when will I fall asleep of sheer exhaustion at the end of the bed, and so simply remain at Their feet?