45

The late hush of the morning lies over the kuñja. The flowers have been gathered, the errand that gave them their excuse for coming to the grove has been used up, and now the two who were supposed to keep apart have not kept apart. Through a gap in the woven foliage, where the leaves have thinned and the daylight comes through in small green coins, a maidservant is watching. She is not in the scene. She is at the edge of it, out in the courtyard of the bower, in the alinda, the yard before the inner room, and she has come for one thing only: to hear. This is Śrīpāda Prabodhānanda himself, who never beholds this līlā as a man looking on but always in his mañjarī svarūpa, his kiṅkarī form, the maidservant's heart through which alone these secrets open.

Begin with what she sees. The gallant of Vraja, the vraja-nāgara, the prince of Gokula who steals every heart in all the worlds, is standing before Śrī Rādhā, and His body will not hold still. Waves are rising in Him, anaṅga's waves, Cupid's waves, wave upon wave, a whole garland of them, taraṅga-mālā, each one cresting and breaking and lifting the next, ucchalad, swelling, saṅkṣobhita, agitating His whole frame until He sways the way a slender tree sways when the river-wind comes off the water in long pulses. And the maidservant cannot get over the wonder of it. He is the thief of every heart. Who, then, could shake the heart of the Thief? Here is the answer, standing before Him in fresh youth: the moon-faced girl of Barsana, whose sweet kaiśora beauty has reached in and stolen even His heart. The robber is robbed. So the maidservant, in the boldness that is the secret glory of Rādhā's own servants, leans toward her Svāminī and whispers encouragement, urging Her on to meet Him, to enjoy with Him, even though Rādhā is mahā-bhāva itself, the most anxious ecstatic love personified. This is what is so special about Rādhā's maidservants: they have no jealousy, only the will to see their Queen united with Her beloved. And Śrīpāda fixes the very words of that encouragement in his own Saṅgīta-Mādhava, "śrī vṛndāvana candra durmada manaś caurīṁ kiśorīṁ smara": the mind of Śyāma, the moon of Vṛndāvana, is hard, so hard to control; He plunders the hearts of everyone in the world, but who is there who can plunder His? Remember Her, the maidservant says, remember Kiśorī-maṇi Rādhā, the one being capable of it. The beauty of this divine Couple is victorious even over the blue and golden lotus-flowers; oceans of sweet nectar pour from Rādhā's face and from Her eyes, and they enchant the prince of the cowherds. Through the holes in the foliage the mañjarī can see Their sweet forms and hear Their sweet words, and into just such nectarean meditation the aspiring devotee is invited to sink.

Now listen with the maidservant, because the verse does not finally turn on the seeing. It turns on the hearing. Śaśīmukhī, moon-faced Rādhā, speaks with the king of lovers, and Her voice falters, broken at its edges with the ecstasy in Her, the words coming unevenly because love has loosened them, and every syllable as it leaves Her is sprinkled with the taste of mādana, the most intoxicating sweetness of love. And here is the marvel the heart should hold long. Not from the sentence, not from the speech taken whole, but pratyakṣaraṁ, from each single akṣara as it falls, an ocean overflows. An apāra-rasāmṛta-abdhi, a limitless ocean of the nectar of rasa, breaks open and spills, kṣarad, streaming, hundreds of streams in a hundred directions. To make the wonder land, the tradition sets one measure against another: when the devas and asuras churned the great celestial ocean of milk with a mountain for a churning-rod, after all that labor only a single pitcher of amṛta rose to the surface. One pot, from the churning of a whole sea. But here, with no churning at all, from one small syllable of Rādhā's faltering speech, oceans pour and pour. This is the abundance the maidservant has come to drown in. And when Kṛṣṇa hears these rasika words, the waves in Him rise higher; His body is swayed the more by the swelling tides of amorous desire, until He can scarcely contain Himself.

So the converse between Them is no idle talk that merely fills a silence. It is talk that makes the very bodies of the Divine Couple tremble. And it is, precisely, saṁlāpa, for Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes the word in the Ujjvala-Nīlamaṇi, "ukti pratyuktimad vākyam saṁlāpa iti kīrtate": speech made of statement and answering counter-statement, this back-and-forth of word and the loving word that runs to meet it, this is what is called saṁlāpa. And it is exactly this exchange the maidservant has crept close to overhear.

Hear a little of it, the way she does. Kṛṣṇa pleads, half-laughing, half-aching: "O dearest One, even the greatest misers will sometimes open their hands when they see a beggar truly suffering; this much can be seen in the world. You, who grow sad at anyone's sorrow, will not give Me even the nectar of Your lips, though I stand here praying for it. How amazing this is." And Śrī Rādhā answers with a sharpness that is itself a kind of caress: "O most shameless boy, it was My own girlfriends who turned enemy today and delivered Me into Your hands; the fault is not Yours at all. A hunter wanders forest after forest after the deer, and when by some accident a golden deer falls to him, what a glorious moment for the man. So now the prince of Gokula has sunk so low as to beg the housewives of Vraja for the nectar of their lips." And Kṛṣṇa, undismayed, turns it into beauty: "O Gaurāṅgī, when a fresh rain-dark cloud holds the lightning to its breast it grows most beautiful and rightly proud; and should not the lightning count herself most fortunate, that she may adorn the dark cloud with her golden luster? Now that the two are no longer separate, should they not hold one another tightly close?" And She, keeping a ground that is no ground at all, the resistance that is the deepest form of yielding: "O Gokulānanda, we are chaste housewives of Vraja; how shall we abandon our adherence to the ways of our households? We came so far only because duty obliged us, to pick flowers for the worship of the sun. Will the prince of Gokula now trouble helpless housewives?" And so the sweet conversation goes on, this honeyed quarrel that is no quarrel, this dispute whose every turn pours sweetness, the most intimate of all exchanges between the one who begs and the one whose refusal is the dearest form of love.

The maidservant stands close by, in the alinda of the nikuñja, and she does not enter. She floats. The lake of nectar that this single saṁlāpa has made rises around her, and she swims in it, the river of prema lifting her, honey-words drifting past her on the current. This is the whole of her wealth: to be near, only near, adūrāt, near enough that the sound of it reaches her. She wants nothing of the inner bower for herself. She wants the overflow. She wants the syllables that escape.

And then the vision suddenly stops. The leaves grow opaque again, the small green windows shut, the grove draws back into itself, and the maidservant is left outside with the ache of one who has been allowed to hear and then has heard the sound withdraw. So she folds her joined palms upon her head and bows at the feet she loves and prays the prayer that is the whole verse: He Rādhe, my goddess, my īśvarī, this kiṅkarī lays her añjali upon her brow and offers obeisance at Your lotus feet. Let me go to the yard of the nikuñja and stand and listen to that honey-sweet talk, floating on the river of prema. You are Kuñjeśvarī, Queen of the groves; all the worlds glorify You as apāra-karuṇā-mayī, the limitlessly merciful one. O moon of Vṛṣabhānu's dynasty, Bhānu-kula-canda, You have thrown me so far away; take me closer to You; fulfill, O fulfill, this one desire of my heart.