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Picture the kuñja at dusk, and one watchful maidservant standing at its edge with her hands on her hips, narrating what she sees as though she had caught a thief in the act, because she has. There is Śyāma in the midst of the sakhīs, and her tongue runs ahead of her heart: "I know this one. Oh, I know him. The mahā-lampaṭa, the great debauchee, the king of flirts." And then she counts His crimes on her fingers, five of them, one gopī after another.

Of one He is the rati-caura, the love-thief, ekasyā rati-caura: He has simply stolen her heart and walked off with it. To another He does worse; startled, cakitā, the girl stiffens as His hand strays to the tip of her breast, stanānte karam. A third stands with jasmine braided into her hair, dhammilla-mallī-srajam, and He will not even use His hand for the theft; He brings the flute to her braid and tugs the garland loose with it, so that the very instrument that maddens the world becomes His accomplice. A fourth He has by the arm, bhuja-vallim, that vine of an arm, and He holds it until it goes utpulakitām, until every hair upon it lifts and shivers with delight. And a fifth He does not even touch; a glance, a tilt of the head, saṅketa, the signal to come away to a bower, and the Rādhāvallabha singers tell us plainly what the signal means: kuñjāntara-praveśa, slip into the inner bower and wait for me there. Five gopīs, five thefts, and the maidservant has seen every one.

So far it sounds like a complaint, and a scandalized one. But hear how her sentence ends, for the whole verse has been leaning toward its last breath: rādhāyāḥ padayoḥ luṭhati, "and then he rolls at Rādhā's feet." After all the roaming, after every clever theft, He comes back and throws Himself down at the feet of one Beloved alone and rolls there like a man undone. The Gauḍīya teachers in the line of Ananta Dāsa Bābājī give this its proper name at once: this is no neutral telling. The metre itself, the long lion's-stride of Śārdūla-vikrīḍita, the Rādhāvallabha tradition notes, carries the swagger of His wandering only to lay it flat at Her feet in the final line.

Now the deeper turn the plain words withhold. The tradition, under the heading "The Pastimes of a Great Debauchee," says the unexpected thing: Śrīmatī Rādhā Herself is glad of all this. When She sees Nāgararāja, the king-lover, sport with Her friends and then fall at Her feet, She feels a happiness that cannot be told. For the greatest desire of the sakhīs is exactly this, to unite Rādhā with Kṛṣṇa, and Rādhā loves them back by arranging their own meetings with Śyāma. She even thinks, in Her own generosity: "Can I alone fulfill all of His desires? Lalitā and the others are just as worthy; they will please Him even more than I." It is the opposite of jealousy. It is love so wide it wants the Beloved shared among those She loves.

And the truth beneath even that, the tradition is careful to add, is this: Śyāma is in fact fully satisfied with Rādhikā alone. He needs no other. He meets the friends only to please Her, only because He knows how dearly She holds them. So the whole game is a circle of love feeding itself. Even the sharpest-seeming moves belong to it: when Kṛṣṇa "cheats" Rādhā by stealing off to Her rival Candrāvalī, and Rādhā's pride flares up in hard, beautiful māna, even that, the teachers say, is arranged by the two of Them to make each other happy. Rūpa's tradition fixes the principle in the Caitanya-caritāmṛta: anyonya viśuddha prema kore rasa puṣṭi, "their mutual, perfectly pure love nourishes the rasa." His play with the sakhīs does not thin His love for Her; it thickens it. Every theft drives Him deeper under Her control, makes Him long for Her more, until there is nowhere for all that longing to spend itself but at Her feet, rolling.

Then the maidservant's last word, alam, the word that could mean simply "enough" or could mean "useless, in vain." The Gauḍīya reading hears it as the mock-scold of one who adores Her mistress: "Useless fellow, look at him groveling at Her lotus-feet after all that mischief, as if it could be undone. We know exactly what He is." And the Rādhāvallabha singers hear the same defeat from the other side: at Her feet, इसकी एक नहीं चलती, not one of His tricks works there; every bit of His roguish cleverness, so dazzling among the others, fails the instant he reaches Her, and the great thief is simply, helplessly conquered. The Rādhāvallabha tradition gathers the whole verse under one word for what that surrender is: samarpaṇa-bhāva, the mood of total self-offering. The very same syllables, harsh on the surface, are the tenderest praise underneath. The old teachers hold both at once and will not choose, because the scolding is the love. This, they tell us, is the maidservants' rādhā-snehādhikā: a love for Svāminī so fierce, so possessive of Her glory, that it can only speak its devotion as a complaint.