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Dusk has come to Vṛndāvana, and the whole grove holds its breath. Śyāmasundara has come early to the trysting place and He cannot keep still; He paces, He listens, He turns His face to every rustle in the leaves, watching the path for one thing only. And then She comes. O Rādhe, You come running through the kuñjas with Your sakhīs around You, and where You pass the grove kindles into light, for the splendour of Your moon-face is moonrise itself, silvering the vines, washing the dark boughs, so that Vṛndāvana needs no other lamp tonight.

But see what happens the instant You catch sight of Him. All that running boldness folds inward. You draw the veil across Your face and turn, half-vexed, to Your friends: "Why have you brought me here?" O the sweetness of that pretending. Nāgara, who knows every mood there is, goes unsteady at the sight, because nothing intoxicates Him like the shyness that rises in You when love is closest. The sakhīs will have none of Your flight; laughing, they draw You inside the bower and seat You on Kṛṣṇa's left upon a dais strewn with blossoms, and then they themselves sink down beneath the divine Couple, hungry to drink the conversation about to begin, hungry to gaze at these two sweet forms.

And the talk begins as teasing, as it always does between lovers shy to say the plain thing. Kṛṣṇa glances at the sakhīs and asks them, sweetly conspiring, to coax away the cloud of Rādhā's mock-displeasure. He spins a story: "O girls with Cakora eyes, what shall I say of My luck today? While I meditated on My Gaurī-mantra the omens were all auspicious, that I would behold chaste maidens whose beauty lights up the very directions." And when Vilāsinī-maṇi, the jewel of all playful girls, hears this, the pupils of Her long eyes, eyes that reach almost to Her ears, go restless to their very corners, and the crookedness of that sidelong glance stops Śyāma's breath. "No," She says, "we are the unchaste ones, and You are the great sādhu, here in this bower worshipping Your most beloved Gaurī," and everyone hears the barb in it, that Gaurī who is Her rival Candrāvalī. He answers with another tale, of an astrologer's promise that a golden necklace would grace His chest this day. She makes Her vine-like brows dance, and He is struck dumb. "I do not follow Your meaning," She says, "but I will stay only as long as my friends stay, and I will leave this bower before them." The sakhīs turn the screw: "O Śyāmasundara, a king's son lacks for no golden creeper, yet today fortune has given You a whole wish-yielding Surataru-tree." And He, playing to the very edge of the word: "True, true. I would count Myself satisfied to win even three syllables of that word today." The hidden meaning glints under the surface like a fish, for the first three syllables of surataru form surata, and everyone in the bower knows it.

And then it comes, the thing the whole verse is built to remember. Hearing His play, O Rādhe, You smile. You cannot help it. The smile breaks across Your face and the teeth within it shine like kunda blossoms, like rays of the moon itself, and though You try to fold that smile away, to hide it back behind the veil, it will not be hidden. It rises faintly, helplessly, because it is no ordinary smile: it is the visible symptom of rati, of love itself surfacing in the body, and love cannot be kept under.

This is the moon the tradition asks us to remember, not a face only but a face that smiles, and in that smile an elixir. For Kṛṣṇa's eyes are the Cakora-bird that lives, the legends say, on moonbeams alone, and here at last is the moon that bird was born thirsting for. He cranes His neck to drink. And You, stubborn and sweet, turn Your face away to the left, so that the light catches only Your right cheek, glancing off the earring swinging there, a single bright flash thrown to Him like a coin, and He is undone, out of His mind with ecstasy. From Your moon-face the soft beams of a hundred passing moods, the sañcārī-bhāvas, pour and cross and clash: pride and joy, bashfulness and eagerness, restlessness and a sudden inertia, all shining out at once. And when this thirsty hero drinks even a little, the seed of His desire for the play of love sprouts and pushes up green, and the hairs of His body stand erect with ecstasy, while all around the sakhīs and manjarīs are themselves drowned in the bliss of it, marvelling how sweet, how brilliant, these pastimes are.

Here is the wonder the verse keeps repeating, premollasad-rasa-vilāsa-vikāsa-kāṇḍam: Her face is the very seed from which the whole gladdened play of love unfolds and blossoms. From this single moon the vast garden of līlā grows; the smile is the seed, the bower-pastime is the flowering, and Her smile is the fertiliser for the seed of His every rasika pastime. And it is the strangest drink in all creation, because it does not satisfy. Govinda-locana-vitṛpta-cakora-peyam: the drink for Govinda's unsated eyes. The Cakora drinks and drinks and is never filled; the more nectar it draws from this moon, the more its thirst increases. For the nectar of this particular moon is mādana-rasa, the topmost love of God, the rasa that intoxicates even Kṛṣṇa who is Himself the transcendental Cupid. He who fills all worlds is here the thirsty one; He who is the source of every satisfaction is here unsatisfied, leaning toward a girl's hidden smile.

And siñcantam adbhuta-rasāmṛta-candrikaughaiḥ: see how the moonlight does not stay within the bower. It pours out in floods, drenching everything. As the material moon scatters the night's darkness, this moon scatters the darkness of ignorance in the hearts of all who remember it; where its light falls, the wish-yielding creeper of devotion takes root and climbs, putting out the flower of bhāva and ripening into the fruit of prema. And the burning of the three miseries of this world, the very fevers we came seeking relief from, those too are extinguished, but only as an afterthought, a concomitant side-gift of this cooling light, never its purpose. In this dark age of Kali, the tradition says, these very rays of Rādhā's moon-face are poured out mercifully upon the world in a wonderful new way through Śrī Gauracandra, the golden moon who is that smile turned outward to us all.

The teasing, meanwhile, ripens to its sweet crisis. Govinda's every sense is drowned now in Rādhā's sweetness, and seeing it, She draws the veil again and answers in a faltering, broken voice, words so unclear they work on Him like enchanting mantras out of the Kāma-śāstras. "O forest-elephant," She says, "the she-elephants of the wood will satisfy Your three-letter desires. I am only a wish-yielding vine; such vines fulfil others' wishes, never their own. Take these friends of mine; let them satisfy You." At which the playful sakhīs cry out, "If You mean to give us Your own beloved, then we forest-elephant-girls will run away into the forest," and out of the kuñja they rush, and Rādhā moves to flee with them, until Kṛṣṇa catches Her by the neck and draws Her, firmly and gently, back into the bower.

And then, as all such visions must, this one dissolves. The maidservant who has been watching, blessed beyond words, finds the bower empty in the heart's eye, and a great humility comes over her, for such service is hard to attain and such nearness is never seized. So she folds her hands and prays the only prayer that is left: "If I cannot be so fortunate as to behold Vilāsinī-maṇi Rādhā's moon-face directly, then at least, at the very least, let me always, always remember it." Ahaṁ smarāmi. I remember. That is the whole of the verse, titled in the Rādhāvallabha line simply as the remembrance of the moon-face, and it is the whole of the path: to remember this moon until remembrance itself becomes a kind of seeing.