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Picture it. The morning is soft in the bowers of Vraja, and Śyāmasundara, who is bliss itself wearing a body, lifts His own hand to the part of Rādhā's hair. He is setting the sindūra there, the fresh red vermilion, and He does it slowly, passionately, the way a thing is done when the doing of it is the whole sweetness. In this land a married woman is called sīmantinī, for she is known by that single line of red laid down the parting of her hair; it is the open, public sign that she belongs, in love, to one beloved. And here it is the Lord's own fingers that lay it down. O Rādhe, who in all the worlds can measure the joy You give Him in that moment, You who are the greatest of all His worshipers, simply by letting Him do this small thing, simply by bowing Your head so that He may part Your hair and crown it red.

Now stand where the maidservant stands, a little to the side, watching. She cannot hold still inside her own chest. The red against the black undoes her. That stripe of vermilion shines like the rising sun breaking over the dark night of Śrīmatī's hair, the one small fire of dawn upon a sky of black silk, and she thinks: how could a maidservant of Rādhā even stay alive unless she could see Hari place that vermilion with His own hands? She is enchanted past speaking plainly, and so she does not speak plainly. She teases. This is allowed to her, for her mood is the servant's mood folded together with the closeness of a friend, the sakhī-bhāva that knows when to kneel and when to laugh; she is expert at exactly this kind of loving joke. She looks at the line and says, half in wonder and half in mischief: "O tender Rādhe, is this bright stripe here only to announce to us how a stream of anurāga-rasa, the very nectar of constant passion, is the one thing fit to part Your crooked, beautiful black hair in two?"

And the older teachers heard far more than paint in that line. Viśvanātha Cakravartī fixes it in the Kṛṣṇa Bhāvanāmṛta, that fourth canto, asking whether this stripe of vermilion is not the sweetness of all sweetness, suranadī, the heavenly Gaṅgā herself taking visible shape upon the part of Her hair, a Gaṅgā whose mere remembrance burns away every sinful reaction. He asks whether it has not become a flowing stream where the elephant of Kṛṣṇa's own heart wades and plays at its ease, the way the Gaṅgā runs in her three currents as tripatha-gāminī; and he sees the boat-like eyes of all the gopīs set adrift upon its waves and carried in every direction on the rocking sweetness of it. So the one red line widens, in the seeing of the lovers of Rādhā, into a river of nectar with no far bank.

But the friend's joke turns on a hinge hidden in the very words, and here is the heart of it. The phrase for Rādhā's hair, kuṭila ruci śyāma, crooked and lovely and dark, can be heard a second way, for śyāma is also a name, and "crooked, beautiful Śyāma" is Kṛṣṇa Himself, the dark and winding-hearted One. So the sakhī's tease folds over upon itself. On the surface: that smooth stream of love is what rightly divides Your hair in two. Underneath, and this is what truly makes her laugh: a girl as drenched in passion as You, an anurāgavatī, also divides the crooked, beautiful Śyāma in two, not with vermilion but with Your own embrace, gathering Him so close against Your chest that He seems split between the holding. And, says she, the bright stripe in Your part is standing up to announce that to us, to publish abroad what You have done to Him. What looked like one line of red dye becomes the open proclamation of the whole bond: she who is parted by love is the very one who parts the Beloved.

So the verse is victorious, vijayate, triumphant, as the closing word says of it. The line of sindūra triumphs not as ornament but as herald. It announces to the watching servants that here, in the part of one girl's hair, the smooth and unbroken flow of love's nectar has done its proper work twice over: it has parted the dark curling hair, and it has parted dark curling Śyāma, dividing Him in the sweet helplessness of being so wholly Hers.