52

Dusk gathers over the bower, and the kuñja falls shadowed and still, and within it Śrī Rādhā sits alone, Her face turned away, Her heart gone wandering after Her dark Beloved who has not yet come. Kunje virahini rāi: She is the woman of separation, suffering in the grove for love of Her lover, and even the leaves seem to hold their breath around Her grief. And out from that grove, light-footed, a small maidservant slips away into the gathering night, searching the groves and the riverbank for Śyāma, because Her Īśvarī's very life hangs upon His coming. This is the scene the heart is reaching toward. Not a throne, not a court of splendour. A girl running through Vṛndāvana for love of Her mistress, to save Her Īśvarī's life.

And see what happens when she returns having served well. Rādhā, most satisfied, soothed, drawn back from the edge of Her longing, reaches for Her little one. She pulls the maidservant close against Her breast. She kisses the bent head. And then, praṇayataḥ, with love, with Her own two hands, from Her own form, She loosens the silken dukūla and the kañcuka-paṭa, the bodice that has lain at Her breast, and She gives them away to this child of Her service, along with Her leftover garland and ornaments. How many streams of mercy pour from Rādhā's beautiful eyes upon the maiden as She does it. Think of it: the cloth still warm from Her, still carrying Her gandha, that sweet bodily fragrance which is itself the highest prasāda. The kinkarī presses it to herself and breathes Her in and feels blessed beyond all the kingdoms of the world. Such rasika rewards, the tradition cries, cannot even be imagined in the aiśvarya-dhāma, the abode of divine prowess.

O Rādhe, this is the body the seeker begs for. Not the body that hungers and tires and forgets, but a transcendental girl-form, eternally young, kiśorī, eternally tender, sukumārī, fashioned of nothing but service to You. The tradition teaches that the practising devotee gazes upon the eternally perfect mañjarīs, the nitya-siddha mañjarī-gaṇa who never fell from Your side, and takes their forms and their qualities and their thousand small services as the very pattern of his inmost self. From them he weaves the contemplation: "I am an adolescent maidservant with such-and-such qualities, such service, such a form. I am not this body, I am not this mind, I am not these restless senses, but a transcendental female individual, eternally endowed with adolescent beauty." This is how the aspirant shrugs off body-consciousness and mind-consciousness at last. The Upaniṣad itself whispers it: "naiva strī na pumān eṣa na caivāyaṁ napuṁsakaḥ, yad yac charīram ādatte tena tena sa vakṣyate": the soul is neither female nor male nor neuter, and it takes the body its absorption shapes for it. So the absorbed heart, drowning itself in this single sweet thought day after day, slowly sheds the heavy garment of bodily identity and stands forth in its true and tender shape.

How sweet it is even to say the words: I am Rādhā's maidservant. How tender and delicious is the remembrance of one's siddha-svarūpa. Śrī Jīva Gosvāmī fixes it in the Bhakti Sandarbha, that astu tāvad bhajana-prayāsaḥ: let the labour of formal worship even be set aside, for kevala-tādṛśatvābhimānenāpi siddhir bhavati, by this conviction alone, this loving certainty of belonging wholly to God, perfection arrives. Hold fast to "I am Hers," and the goal is already won.

And there is a deeper sweetness still in the prasāda of that warm-given sari. Śrīla Raghunātha Dāsa Gosvāmī teaches that all of Śrīmatī Rādhārāṇī's clothes and ornaments are woven of transcendental emotion itself. So Her castoff bodice is not mere silk; it is feeling made wearable, love you can drape across your shoulders. Even a heart gone dry as summer dust, the elders promise, will flood again with rasa the moment it remembers Śrīmatī's leftover blouses and dresses. Uddhava Mahāśaya sang long ago in the Śrīmad Bhāgavata, "tvayopabhukta-srag-gandha-vāso'laṅkāra-carcitāḥ, ucchiṣṭa-bhojino dāsās tava māyāṁ jayema hi": that the servants who accept the garlands and perfumes and clothes the Lord has worn, and who eat the remnants of His food, conquer even māyā. But hear the difference the tradition is careful to mark. That is aiśvarya-bhāva, the reverential mood, and so the benediction held out there is conquest, mastery, the defeat of illusion. In mādhurya-rājya, the kingdom of sweetness, the benediction is not victory at all. The benediction is rasa. The reward is simply more of Her. The maidservant does not want to win anything; she wants to wear what Rādhā wore and breathe what Rādhā breathed and stand where Rādhā stands. And so Prabodhānanda sings in the Vṛndāvana-Mahimāmṛta, "preṣṭha-dvandva-prasāda-srag-vastra-bhūṣādi-mohinīm": that Rādhikā's maidservants enchant the whole world simply by wearing the leftover garlands and dresses and ornaments of the dearmost Couple.

For these handmaids are no awkward servants stumbling at their tasks. Vividha-paricaryaika-caturām: they are expert, deft, schooled in every art and every small attendance. Again the Vṛndāvana-Mahimāmṛta sings it, "śrīśvarī-śikṣitāśeṣa-kalā-kauśala-śālinīm, śrīśvarī-dṛṣṭi-vāg-ādi-sarveṅgita-vicakṣaṇām": Śrīśvarī Rādhā Herself personally taught them all these artful skills, every grace and craft and clever touch, so that by Her grace they read the least hint She gives, the flick of Her eyes, a half-word, the smallest gesture, and they move at once to do exactly what She wishes before She has finished wishing it. And to them, and to them alone, the divine Couple will at last draw back the curtain from Their minds and reveal everything, holding nothing hidden anymore. This is the unimaginable intimacy the seeker aches for: not to gaze at the love of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa from afar, but to be the trusted girl in the room, the one whose hands arrange Their pleasure, the one They confide in, the one wearing the sari still warm from Her body. Nobody in all of creation knows how to serve as Rādhā's maidservants serve.