23

The morning opens, O seeker. It is summer in Vraja, and the heat has not yet broken; the air hangs thick and golden and still. Śrīmatī Rādhā has risen with one wish in Her heart: this morning She will bathe in the Yamunā. Not at the busy ghāṭa where the sakhīs gather and laughter carries across the water, but at a vijana-avatāra, a lonely, secret descent to the river that almost no one knows. She takes only one with Her. One maidservant. And the tradition tells us that this one maidservant is the very heart of the seer, who in a revelation deeper than any dream has been granted a place at Yāvaṭa as Rādhā's own dāsī, and walks beside Her now along the path. The song is set, the tradition notes, in the swaying Vasantatilakā meter, and the heading given to it is sukhada-manoratha, a longing that is itself a sweetness.

O Rādhe, how the servant's heart is undone simply by Your gestures along the way. You walk lightly; You glance back over Your shoulder; and the servant reads the thought behind the glance: "I hope Sundara has not seen which way I am going. I hope dark, beautiful Kṛṣṇa is not watching." And in the very glancing, in the very turning of Your eyes to see whether He sees, You set the whole of Vṛndāvana ablaze with beauty. The leaves lean toward You. The path is honoured beneath Your feet. The servant beside You can barely walk for the sweetness of it.

But the secret is already out, O Rādhe. Far away in Nandīśvara, Śyāma is among His cows with His cowherd friends, His hands at the milking, His laughter mixed with theirs. And a parrot, that small green messenger of love, has flown to His ear and whispered: Rādhā has gone out to bathe at a deserted place by the Yamunā, and She has taken only one maidservant with Her. The moment the words reach Him, the cows are forgotten. He turns to His friends and says, lightly, that He has a wish to wander the gardens of Nandīśvara alone this morning, to drink in their beauty by Himself; and the friends believe Him, and He slips away. He goes straight to the place where He knows She will come down to the water. He finds the tall Kadamba, the ucca-nīpa, standing over the bank, and He climbs, this king of all gallants, up into its thick green crown, folds Himself into the foliage, and waits, hidden, His breath quiet among the leaves.

Now She arrives. The narrow path opens onto the water, and the lonely bathing place receives Her. Her tender body is tired from the walking, so She sits a moment upon the jewelled staircase that leads down into the river. And O the sight: Her golden form upon that staircase lights the whole quiet bank, so that the dark Yamunā shines back at Her. And the very blackness of that water undoes Her, for that blue-black current is the colour of Śyāmasundara, and seeing it She is flooded with love, and now She sees Him within and without, in the river and in Her own heart, everywhere, everywhere but in the one tree where He truly hides. And from the high branches Śyāma drinks Her in, unhindered, unseen, watching the One He has chased here through the parrot's whisper.

Then the servant begins her work, and this is the heart of the longing. First she unbinds the great braid, and it falls loose like a vast black monsoon cloud released across the sky of Her back. She sprinkles the dark mass with fragrant oil and draws a jewelled comb through it, slowly, and O, the servant will tell you: each single hair of Svāminī is dearer to her than millions of lives. When the hair is dressed she gently uncovers Svāminī's limbs to anoint them, and here is the wonder the servant carries forever: this beauty, this form, is not even granted to all-seeing Śyāma in the open; the omniscient One has had to climb a tree and hide to steal a look at what the servant now touches with her own hands. The servant knows the very feeling of Śyāma's touch upon these limbs, and she performs the udvartana, the slow anointing, in exactly that manner, with that same tenderness, so that Svāminī, eyes half-closed, is carried away, absorbed, lost. First the fragrant Nārāyaṇa-oil, then the cool dust of lotus-pollen smoothed across Her glowing skin, while above in the branches Śyāma forgets Himself entirely, staring at the sweetness of each uncovered limb.

O Rādhe, it is as though sweetness itself were a stream, and Your every limb a spring of it overflowing. Your body is as if poured from nectar, and Śyāma drinks that nectar freely with the two cups of His eyes, draught after draught, never filled. The Sudhā-Nidhi itself murmurs the prayer of such a one, may I admire the softness of Your golden limbs, the sweetness of Your smile, the wide largeness of Your eyes, the fullness of Your form; and again it sings that Your body shines like a thousand strokes of lightning at once and Your face blazes with an ever-mounting bliss. This is not the nectar of any heaven. This is the supreme nectar of mahā-bhāva, the highest reach of love made visible as a body upon a riverbank. All of it He gathers through His eyes alone, this morning, from a tree.

And here Your body is named what it truly is: anaṅga-jīvam, the life of Cupid. Listen, O seeker, to what this means, for it overturns everything. The strivers on the path labour from the very first day to be free of Cupid, to put down lust, because lust is the root cause of every grasping, self-feeding desire for sense-pleasure; and the tradition is clear that without pure love this can never truly be done. But here the word Cupid is turned inside out. In Vṛndāvana there is no mundane Cupid at all; there is only the transcendental, ever-youthful Cupid, Śrīman Madana Gopāla, the shelter of all loves, material and spiritual alike. And even He, even Kṛṣṇa the enchanter of Cupid himself, is revived and given His glory only by the sight of Rādhā's form, which is made entirely of pure, causeless love. So the incorporeal Cupid regains a body, and Her body is named anaṅga-jīvam, the life of Cupid. The tradition guards us against a coarse reading: just as Brahmā, praying in the Vraja-līlā, said that the eleven demigods of the senses relish Kṛṣṇa's sweetness through the senses of the people of Vraja, though they cannot truly dwell there and Brahmā only gives a likeness, so too this talk of Kṛṣṇa's lusty stirring at the sight of Her limbs is only a likeness, a way of pointing; mundane Cupid cannot live in Vṛndāvana. Take it as the likeness it is, and the meaning stands clear: Kṛṣṇa can be glorious as the transcendental youthful Cupid of Vṛndāvana only because of Rādhā's sweetness; otherwise His glories are wholly baffled.

The Govinda-līlāmṛta fixes it, O Rādhe, in its eighth canto: rādhā-saṅge yadā bhāti tadā madana-mohanaḥ, anyathā viśvamoho'pi svayaṁ madana-mohitaḥ, when Kṛṣṇa shines beside Rādhā He enchants even Cupid, but apart from Her, He who bewilders all the worlds is Himself bewildered by Cupid. And the Caitanya-caritāmṛta sings that He mounts the chariots of the gopīs' minds and stirs the mind of Cupid himself, and so bears the name Madana-Mohana, the enchanter of the god of love. But She stirs even His mind, and so She is called Madana-Mohana-Mohinī, the enchantress of the enchanter of love, and Her body, fittingly, is anaṅga-jīvam, Cupid's very life-giver. As a dying man is brought back by a single drink of nectar, so Kṛṣṇa, about to perish in the fire of love, is revived by the touch and the vision of Rādhā's divine body. His whole splendour as the gallant of Vraja is borrowed from Her sweetness; take Her away, and even His glories are undone.

And then, the last turn, the tenderest. The servant, kneeling at her loving work, suddenly catches sight of Him: there, in the fork of the Kadamba branch, Śyāmasundara, His eyes drowned in the vision, magna-nayanam, the very word the song keeps. And the supreme king of all the bold ones, the nava-nāgarendra, the crest-jewel of fresh gallants whom the other tradition lovingly calls Śrī-Lālajī, now folds His palms together toward a maidservant and pleads, softly, like the humblest of beggars: "Let Me enjoy this vision a moment longer. Do not give Me away." Seeing Him so, seeing the Lord of all begging at the foot of love, the servant herself dissolves, drowned in rasa, her hands gone still, her whole being melted into the sweetness of what she has been allowed to behold. And it is from inside that dissolving that the cry rises: O Rādhike, when, when will this be mine?