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Picture it. The kuñja in the deepest hour, when the forest holds its breath. The leaves are still, the Yamunā lies dark and slow beyond the trees, and into this hush comes a sound so small you would miss it if your whole soul were not already leaning toward it: laughter. Soft, low, secret laughter passing back and forth between two who are made for each other and made of each other. One laughs, and the other laughs back. One teases, and the other answers the tease with a tease sweeter and sharper still. This is anyonya-hāsa: the laughter They give only to each other, and parihāsa, the joking that no other being in all the worlds will ever fully overhear.

O what is this play, this vilāsa-keli unfolding in the bower. He says something with a glance, and She turns Her face away, and the turning-away is itself a kind of giving. She answers His jest with a jest of Her own, and a corner of His mouth lifts, and the contest deepens. There is no end to the variety of it. The tradition calls it vaicitrya: variegatedness, and the word can barely hold what it points to, for every moment is a new color, every exchange a fresh invention, no two glances the same, no two smiles repeated. He is vidagdha, clever past all cleverness, and She is vidagdha too, His match in every flash of it, and when two such hearts meet in play the play itself becomes a living thing, jṛmbhita, expanding, stretching itself wider and wider like a flower opening past the point you thought a flower could open.

And from this laughter, from this teasing, from this thousand-petalled play, something rises. A flood. Mahā-rasa, the great flavor, the supreme love that is the inmost taste of the Absolute, comes pouring up out of Their sport like a fragrance released, like nectar shaken from a branch. This is the vaibhava: the splendor, the sheer overwhelming prowess of rasa, and it is not a thing They labor to produce. It simply happens wherever They are together in Vṛndāvana. They laugh, and worlds are sweetened. They tease, and the love that is the secret of all loves overflows its banks. The whole of the grove drinks it; the trees lean closer, the vines tremble, the very dust of Vṛndāvana becomes fragrant with what is happening above it. Some sing this swelling as the vaibhava of the great rāsa itself, the circle-dance of joy from which all sweetness spills; either way it is the same overflowing.

And now, O my heart, look what has become of you. You were watching. You thought you were only a witness, standing at the edge of the bower in the dark, daring to look. And while you watched, while you were lost in the wonder of Their laughter, something happened that you never chose and never could have chosen. Your heart was carried off. Hṛtam, apahṛtam, the heart is stolen away, and the thieves are no thieves at all but that clever radiant Couple Themselves. Kuto'pi, kenacid, from somewhere, by some means I cannot name, by no method I could ever reconstruct, my heart is simply gone. I cannot find the hour it left me. I cannot retrace the path it took. I only know that it is Theirs now, vanished into the grove with the two who play there. Aho, what wonder, that the heart should be taken so, and the taking be the sweetest thing that ever befell it.

This is the deepest tenderness of it, and the tradition guards this point with great care: the devotee does not summon this vision. He does not earn it by technique, does not arrive at it by force of will, does not open the bower with the key of his own effort. No. The clever Couple manifest of Their own sweet accord, appearing unbidden to the fortunate one whose patient bhajana has made him ready, and stealing his heart before he knows it is being taken. Śrīla Jīva Gosvāmī fixes the ground of this readiness in the Bhakti Sandarbha, that when real scriptural faith, śāstrīya śraddhā, has at last taken root in the heart of the sādhaka, a wonderful perseverance arises in his worship, steady whether perfection has come or not, like the gold-seeker who will not abandon his search, the svarṇa-siddhi-lipsā-nyāya. And from such a heart all arrogance falls away, dambha dies, all hunger for profit and praise and distinction quietly perishes, and the deliberate offenses against the great devotees become impossible, contradicted to the root by the faith that now reigns there. It is into such a swept and waiting heart, and only such a heart, that the vision comes. The grove opens not because you have pried it open but because you have at last become small enough, servantly enough, empty enough of yourself, to be allowed to look.

And the tradition tells the tender shape of how it comes, the milana-rasa, the rasa of meeting. The maidservant sees the Nāgara, dark and beautiful, overcome with the ache of separation from Śrī Rādhā, praying again and again to be forgiven, explaining why He had not come to Śrīmatī sooner. The sakhī consoles Him and arranges His meeting with virahavatī Rādhā, who waits in the kuñja worn thin by the long fire of waiting. And when He comes, Svāminī, vāmā by Her very nature, proud and lovely in Her wounded pride, turns from Him in anger; and the maidservant takes the Nāgara's side and finds the soft words, the coaxing words, the moon-words that make the ocean of love in Her heart rise and swell until it breaks over Them both. And the fortunate servant, Śrīpāda, standing unseen at the threshold of this reconciliation, watching pride dissolve into the sweetest meeting, is so flooded with astonishment that he can only cry out: this clever Couple of Vṛndāvana has stolen my heart. Once that happens, once the heart is truly gone, there is no other sight left in all the world, day or night, but that one sweet transcendental picture, the Yugala Kiśora at play. To see that meeting of Rādhā and Mādhava, to lose the heart into it forever, is itself the perfection of all longing. So the singers take up the cry: in sweet Vṛndāvana's secluded arbor Rāi and Kānu, kiśora and kiśorī, shower nectar with Their wonderful enchanting joking and laughter; rasamaya and rasamayī, the two equal in every splendor, sporting in the great rasa, this clever Pair has stolen my very prāṇa.