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Picture it: a single light, soft and dark and shining, resting upon the breast of Śrī Rādhā as though it were the one jewel She wears. The maidservant who keeps the bower looks at it and cannot find the bottom of her own wonder. She does not begin by naming it. She begins by tasting it. Susvādu, she breathes, so delicious; surasa, so brimming with juice, so wet with rasa. And then a third word that seems almost too homely for such a vision: tundila, thick, well-fed, the word you would use for a man with a full round belly after a feast. She lets all three stand. This light is delicious, it is juicy with love, and it is fed full to heaviness.

And who is the light? The maidservant knows, though she names Him only by what Her love has done to Him. It is Nāgaramaṇi, the jewel of all gallants; it is Śyāma, Govinda, the transcendental youthful Cupid of Vṛndāvana. The touch of Śrīmatī's beauty, the touch of Her sweetness, the touch of Her love, has worked upon Him until He is this: so beautiful, so juicy, so sweet that the only thing the eye can do is feast and the only thing the heart can do is melt. He who is called ānandamaya, made wholly of bliss, the very fountain of joy for all the worlds, here floats in streams of a delight greater than His own, and the cause of it is Her.

She would tell you more, but she cannot, and she says so. Kim api, she says: indescribable, beyond all words. There are no words in Bhāratī's storehouse, none even in the treasury of Sarasvatī herself, that can carry what Rādhā's mādana-mahābhāva, the maddening summit of all love, does to Kṛṣṇa. So she stops reaching for a name and simply calls it "some light, I cannot say what." When Govinda enjoys Śrī Rādhā's sweet love in a sweet arbour in sweet Vṛndāvana, He looks endlessly sweet before the maidservant's eyes, and there is no end to the looking and no word for the sweetness.

Then comes the tenderest turn of all. We are used to seeing Kṛṣṇa as the one who wears the jewels, the peacock feather, the forest garland, the sapphire at His own dark throat. But the maidservant's eyes have been reversed by love. She sees Śyāma as a blue lotus flower laid upon Rādhikā's shining breast. He is not the wearer now; He has become the worn. He is Her ornament. The tradition remembers here the great poet Karṇapūra, who as a small boy sucked the nectar of love from the toe of Mahāprabhu and grew up unable to see Hari any other way. In his Āryā-śataka he sang, "śravasoḥ kuvalayam akṣṇor añjanam uraso mahendra-maṇi-dāma": all glories to Hari, who is the complete ornament of the girls of Vṛndāvana, the blue Kuvalaya-lotus that decorates their ears, the eyeliner that beautifies their eyes, the sapphire necklace that rests upon their breasts. Through such eyes Kṛṣṇa is no longer the Lord being adorned; He is the adornment, the dark blue flower upon Her bright heart.

And now that small homely word, tundila, comes back to do its sweetest work. Just as a man who has eaten a vast meal grows heavy and cannot rise on his own, so Kṛṣṇa has eaten and drunk so deeply of Rādhikā's surasa, the sweet juice of Her amorous love, that He simply cannot get up anymore. He stays. He rests, content and unmoving, a big well-fed blue lotus laid upon Her shining breast. The God who upholds the universe has been fed by one girl's love until He has no wish to lift Himself away from Her heart. This is what Vṛndāvana means when the light "revels," nandati. It is not the revelry of motion; it is the revelry of perfect rest. And the maidservant who watches, and all the devotees who keep the love by hearing and chanting it, are not left outside: He makes them float along with Him in the same indescribable delight.