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Picture the homeward path at the close of day. The light is going thin and gold; somewhere ahead the cows have already drifted off, untended, far out of reach. A little knot of cowherd boys stands clustered on the road, and at their center, where their Friend should be walking and laughing, He has stopped. He has simply stopped. And now He sinks down. O see Him: the one who holds up the worlds, lying in the dust of Vraja, His eyes wet, His face turned down and dim with grief, rolling on the bare earth without a word.

The boys do not understand. How could they? They saw nothing of what passed a moment ago on the path. They speak the plain emergency that is breaking over them: the cows have gone far away; the day has already given up three of its quarters and only the last sliver of light remains; and they themselves are spent, klānta, unable to take one step in any direction, because how can they leave Him here like this? And there is the worst of it, the thing that twists the knife: Your mother, O Kṛṣṇa. Yaśodā is sitting where the road bends toward home, her eyes laid along the path, watching, waiting, her whole heart aimed at the moment her boy comes back. And he will not come. He cannot. He has gone silent all at once, ākasmāt tūṣṇīke, and the silence terrifies them more than any cry. So they say the unbearable thing, the only thing left to say: if You stay like this, we will not keep our lives. Tvayi nahi vayaṁ prāṇiniṣavaḥ: with You fallen so, we have no wish to go on breathing.

What the boys cannot see, the tradition draws back the curtain upon. This is no fever, no ordinary faint. On this very path, only moments before, Kṛṣṇa's eyes met Śrīmatī Rādhā's, and Her glance went into Him like a spear of nectar, and He could not bear it. Her love struck Him down. He who delights only in Himself, who needs nothing, who is the full one holding everything, was felled by a single look from Her. So He stops speaking. The grey climbs into His face. The tears come. And He goes down onto the ground and rolls there, lost, somewhere the cows and the dying day and even His waiting mother cannot reach.

The tradition holds, in Kṛṣṇa-Bhāvanāmṛta, that this is one half of a single picture. There it is told how on the path the rasika mithunam, the amorous Couple, became stunned together, both of Them gone motionless with the shock of love, while Their dear ones on either side of the road grew frightened for them before strangers' eyes. So Lalitā and her girlfriends gather up Rādhikā and lead Her away toward Her home, and Subala and his friends gather up Kṛṣṇa and lead Him toward His, all of them working with every art they have to keep the two from fainting outright. And the friends know the one medicine that has always worked before. They lean close and whisper the promise: only wait, only hold on; as soon as the sun goes down, You will meet each other again. That word has revived Him a hundred times. But today, O today, none of Subala's consoling lands. The promise of sundown cannot lift Him. He keeps on weeping, His face stays ashen and grey, and nothing his friends can do brings Him back. That failure is the whole weight of the verse. The medicine that never failed has failed, because the wound this time is past all measure.

And here the heart of it opens. What a wonderful, what an unthinkable power Rādhā's love holds over Kṛṣṇa Himself. He is ātmārāma, self-delighted; He is āptakāma, with every desire already fulfilled in His own fullness; He is the self-satisfied transcendental Lord who supports all that is. And He lies in the road undone by Her. The tradition sets this beside another swoon to let us feel its size. In the Bṛhad-Bhāgavatāmṛta it is seen that during the uttara-goṣṭha-līlā, when Kṛṣṇa first laid eyes on His newly arrived devotee Gopa-Kumāra, He embraced him so tightly and was so overcome that He fainted clean away from ecstasy. And the sight of Kṛṣṇa fallen sent a grief through all of Vraja at once: the cowherds wept, the cowherd girls wept, the cows and the birds and the very beasts cried out in sorrow and fear for Him, until at last Baladeva came and lifted the sorrow from them all by bringing Kṛṣṇa back to His senses. So it is here, in smaller compass, on this one road at dusk: the boys who have given Him their whole hearts stand over Him and cry out, save our lives, O Friend, come back to Yourself, quickly, before the light is gone.

This is what their terror measures. The boat of Kṛṣṇa's heart has gone down, all the way down, into the shoreless rasa-ocean of Rādhikā's endless love for Him, so deep that not even His dearest companions can reach in and draw Him back up. The strange wonder the whole verse turns upon is just this: the one who carries the world is here the one who is carried, laid flat in the dust by the fragrance and the glance of His Beloved, the very Prāṇeśvarī whose love is stronger than His own fullness.