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Picture it. A morning in Vraja so new that the dew has not yet decided whether to fall or to stay, and the kuñja stands hidden among the canes, breathing. Inside that hidden house of leaves, something has been prepared. Not a throne, not a couch of gold, but a bed of soft fresh sprouts, tender pallavas heaped and smoothed and pressed flat. Picture whose hands smoothed them. Śyāmasundara Himself has knelt here. The sakhīs had already brought Him to the trysting-bower, and with His own trembling hands the dark Lover gathered the youngest leaves and built a bed and a pillow in the cottage of that kuñja, and as He worked He wept, and His tears of love fell into the leaves like a second dew. This is the marriage of the bower: a bed made by the Beloved's own hands, salted with His longing. The Rādhāvallabha singers call it the rasikendra-śayyā, the couch of the king of connoisseurs, set deep in the rahasya-nikuñja-gṛha, the secret chamber of the grove.

He is waiting. The viṭendra, the king of paramours, waits at the gate of the kuñja, and the whole grove waits with Him, the bees holding their hum, the canes leaning in. He has not come as a master who summons. He has come as the one who builds the bed and then stands aside, hardly daring to breathe, watching the path for the first glimpse of Her.

And She is being brought. O Vṛṣabhānu-nandinī, today You are the nitya-kiśorī-maṇi, the eternal jewel of all girls just stepping into Their flowering, and today You are mugdhā, innocent, all sweetness and no schooling in this love. Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes Your portrait in the Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi, in the count of heroines, that the mugdhā is very young and has barely any desire, that She is unwilling to make love and wholly under the sway of Her girlfriends, that She is the very picture of shyness in love, and yet, secretly, sweetly, She is already striving to be skilled in it: cāru-gūḍha-prayatna-bhāk. So the desire is in You the way fragrance is already inside the bud, fully present and not yet opened. The tradition is tender about this. It says You eternally-perfect young gopīs gave Yourselves to Kṛṣṇa from jñānodaya, from the very dawn of a child's first awareness; in those early days no amorous feeling stirred, though its whole potency lay folded and waiting inside You. This growth, this real ripening, is the special sweetness of the prakaṭa-līlā, the pastimes manifest upon the earth, where Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa and all Their young companions are seen to unfold. Viśvanātha Cakravartī gathers this very scene in his Ānanda-candrikā, his commentary on the Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi, where, glossing the verse of tiryak-kṣipta on the quality called Suvilāsa, he shows the sidelong-glancing sweetness of just such a first meeting.

The sakhīs are clever and patient. They did not say, Come, He is waiting. They said, Come, let us gather flowers for the worship of the sun, for Sūrya-pūjā. And so You walked out under a pretext, basket in hand, and they led You farther than the flowers required, farther into the canes, and a small suspicion stirred in You: there must be some secret reason My friends take Me so far today. Then the leaves part, and there at the mouth of the kuñja stands Śyāmasundara, and the basket nearly falls from Your hand.

O Rādhe, how You turn. You turn back the way You came, You want only to run home, the whole of You drawing away like a vine pulled from a wall. And it is precisely this turning away that undoes Him. Nāgara stands enchanted, drinking the sight of His Prāṇeśvarī frightened and lovely, the trembling of Her, the half-step back, the lowered eyes. He could conquer worlds and feel nothing; this small flinch of a young girl at His gate brings Him to His knees inside.

Now the maidservant comes close, and this is where the longing of the whole verse speaks, for it is in her dāsī-form that this prayer is breathed. She takes Your fearful lotus hand into her own and pleads, softly, near Your ear. O Svāminī, do not be afraid. Come inside the kuñja. Look, only look, just once, at this Vraja-rāja-kumāra so rarely won, the very One for whom You have ached through all the hours of separation. Speak a few words to Him. Do not waste this hour. Why do You tremble? I am here beside You. Nāgara will not touch Your body. Come.

And You answer, and Your answer is the honey of the whole scene. O sakhi, I am such a young girl. When I so much as see this boy I shake with fear. He is like a black bumblebee wanting to land on a lotus-bud that is not yet ripe enough to be enjoyed. Hear the perfection of it: He who is the supreme Brahman, the Lord of all that is, is here a bumblebee hovering at an unripe flower, and the unripe flower is the supreme Love Herself, and neither diminishes the other, for this is Vraja, where the highest reality and the highest sweetness lie down together in a hut of leaves.

So with ati-āgraha, with great eagerness that is all insistence and no force, the maidservant draws the trembling Svāminī step by step toward the bed of blossoms. She lays Rādhā's lotus hand into Śyāma's lotus hand. The two hands meet, and the grove forgets to breathe. The maidservant has brought the amorous Pair to the lovebed, and how much effort it took, how many pretexts and patient steps, to arrange this first meeting of the supreme Brahman and the supreme Love.

Mādhava gazes hungrily at Rāi's face and gathers Her onto His lap. She sits careful, glancing at Him sidelong, shy past all telling. When first He touches Her, She startles like a fawn. When He bends to kiss Her, She turns Her face away. And then He folds Her close, holds Her fast, and drinks the nectar of Her lips. The first union. How sweetly the divine Couple tastes it. Only the loving devotees can ever understand this.

The tradition is careful, too, with one word: viṭendra, king of paramours. It does not blush at calling Śyāma a rogue, a cheat, a thief of hearts. It crowns Him the indra of them all, and the crown means this: no one else may ever rightly wear this name. Only Kṛṣṇa can be the true paramour, because only with Him does this love yield the very highest loving pleasure. As the Caitanya-caritāmṛta sings it, vraja vinā ihāra anyatra nāhi vāsa: this relationship with God dwells nowhere in all the worlds but here, in the canes of Vraja, in a bower of leaves.

And so the question at the heart of all this is not whether such a meeting happens. It happens eternally. The question is the maidservant's own aching longing, her abhilāṣā: will I ever, will the day ever come, when it is given to me to take that frightened lotus hand and lead Her in. Not to watch from far off, but to be the very hand that brings Her, to serve the first tryst, to lay one hand into the other and then disappear into the joy of having served.