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Picture a small bower in the late forenoon of Vraja. The light has thickened and stopped, as if the sun itself has grown heavy with grief and refuses to cross the sky. Into that stillness a voice comes, low and trembling and impossibly sweet, and it is Hers. Śrī Rādhā sits with a lute laid across Her lap, Her lotus fingers resting upon the strings, and from somewhere beyond the breaking in Her throat the song begins.

The lute has a name, O heart. She is called Madhumatī: a girl who intoxicates the heart with honey, the honeyed one, sweet of voice. It is no accident that this instrument bears a girl's name and almost a girl's tenderness. When Rādhā touches her, honey runs from the wood; the strings do not merely sound, they pour. And what pours from them is not melody for its own sake. It is Him. Every note She draws is shaped around a single absent face, and the Gauḍīya teachers note that Śrīmatī is wholly absorbed in singing of Rasarāja's emotional pastimes with an ever-so-sweet voice, thinking of nothing else at all.

Listen to what She sings, and you will understand why the lute weeps in Her hands. She sings the bhāva-līlā of Her Beloved, the emotional love-play of the one the tradition crowns nāgara-śiromaṇi, the crown-jewel of all gallants, whom the Rādhāvallabha stream names with tenderness as Śrī Lālajī. And consider what that title carries. He is the one who knows precisely how to extinguish the burning fire of His beloved's separation by appearing sweetly before Her at the very edge of Her endurance; and He is the very one who lights that fire, who arranges the anxious distances on purpose, because out of the anguish of separation are born a thousand astonishing flavours of mutual love that union alone could never give. He is gallant in His coming and gallant in His staying away. Rādhā knows both of His hands, and She sings of both, and that is why Her singing is also Her weeping. The word bhāva itself means to be absorbed, to be drowned; and so the bhāva-līlā is at once His pastimes brimming with feeling and Her own self poured out, lost, in the singing of them.

For the day has become endless: dinam apāram, the day without a far shore. To one who waits in love, time does not pass; it pools and stands and presses. The morning that He does not come is longer than any night, and the girls of Vraja have found the single thread by which a heart can be carried across such a day without simply ceasing to live. She must speak of Him. She must sing of Him. The Gauḍīya teachers say it without softening: this is the only way the beautiful daughters of Vraja can pass the seemingly endless day without dying. To fall silent would be to be burned to ash in an instant by the fire of His absence. So Rādhā sings not to entertain and not even, quite, to console, but to survive. The song is Her breath.

The tradition remembers Her own words to the bumblebee in the Bhramara-gīta of the Śrīmad Bhāgavata, where the bee comes as Kṛṣṇa's messenger and Rādhā answers it. There She will not even pronounce His dark and lovely name; She calls Him only asita, the one who is not fair, holding Him at arm's length. Tad alam asita-sakhyaiḥ, She says: it is useless to make friends with a dark-complexioned boy. And then the truth breaks through Her own refusal, dustyajas tat-kathārthaḥ: yet it is impossible to give up speaking of Him. I can renounce everything, She tells the bee, even your friend Himself, but I cannot renounce the treasure of His talk; it is only by speaking of Him that we gopīs somehow survive, and were we to stop, we should be burned to ashes that very moment. Here is the whole heart of this verse. The mouth that says it cannot bear Him is the same mouth that cannot fall silent about Him. The song is the proof of a love too large to be set down even by the one who carries it.

And now the tears. Aśru-varṣaiḥ, with showers of tears, the way the rainy season empties the whole sky over Vraja. She passes the day duḥkhāt, out of pure misery, prema-vihvalā, undone and overwhelmed by love. Yet the misery is itself a kind of riches, for it is woven entirely of Him. No worldly grief resembles this. When a thing of this world is lost, the heart slowly closes the wound; here the wound is the very life. The more She weeps, the more She loves; the deeper the separation cuts, the sweeter and more astonishing grows the flood of feeling. She cries to Her maidservant, Where is Kṛṣṇa now, that ocean of all qualities? Without Him My whole world is empty, and the day has no end. And the teachers add, plainly, that what is in one heart another cannot know; even Her own Prāṇa-sakhīs, the friends nearer to Her than Her own breath, confess they do not know how to comfort Her, and if they cannot, who can? Her grief has gone somewhere only He could follow.

The Gauḍīyas lay beside this verse a memory of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu in His last years at Purī, living wholly inside Rādhā's own mood. The Caitanya-caritāmṛta sings it in the Antya-līlā: by day the press of people gave Him some distraction, but at night the pain of separation rose up and would have taken His very life, and one medicine alone answered. Rāmānanda Rāya would speak to Him of Kṛṣṇa, and Svarūpa Dāmodara would sing the emotional pastimes, and by that singing alone the Lord was kept alive until morning. See how the same truth returns. The song of His līlā is the one cord by which a heart drowning in His absence is held above the water. What Rādhā does in Her bower with the lute Madhumatī, the great Lord did at Purī through the night with His companions. It is the one thing that love in separation can do, and it is barely, exactly, enough to live by.

And there is one more wonder the Gauḍīya teachers unfold here, the wonder the seeker may pray to enter. The maidservant in her mañjarī-form watches all of this. She sees Svāminī singing and weeping, and she cannot bear it, and a single thought rises in her: I must go and find Śyāmasundara. But what if He is in some rival's bower, in Candrāvali's kuñja, and I cannot make Him understand how my Svāminī suffers; then what shall I do? And then the mañjarī discovers the secret of her own service. She need not argue or explain. Because the sakhīs and mañjarīs reflect Śrīmatī Rādhikā's every feeling exactly, Kṛṣṇa has only to glance at the maidservant's face and He will read there, line for line, the whole of Rādhā's anguish, and reading it He will run to Her at once. What a wonderful service these mañjarīs perform: to carry the very picture of Śrīmatī's bhāva on their own faces to Śyāmasundara, so that the sight of them becomes the messenger that brings the Beloved home. The tears that fall in Her bower are answered, in the end, by a face that loved Her enough to wear Her grief.

So when this verse prays, hṛdi me 'stu rādhā, let Rādhā be in my heart, it is asking for the whole scene to take up residence within. Let the honeyed lute Madhumatī play in me. Let the endless day be borne in me by singing of Him. Let even my weeping be only of Him. And if the heart is graced beyond its deserving, let it become one of those faces that carries Her sorrow so faithfully that the Beloved cannot look upon it and stay away.