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Picture it. The afternoon has thinned to gold over Vṛndāvana, and along the dark water of the Yamunā something is stirring that the trees know before the heart does. A flute lifts. Not the ordinary call that turns the cows homeward, not the playful tune that scatters the milkmaids' resolve, but a new music, a flute pitched to the fifth note, the supañcama, the note of longing and of spring, so that the hollow bamboo no longer sounds like bamboo at all. It sounds like a vipañcita-vīṇā. It sounds like strings. Śyāmasundara has learned a fresh art today, and the art is this: to make His flute speak in the voice of Her instrument, so that when She hears it across the water She will know He is not merely calling the world. He is calling Her.

O flute, what are you saying? You are saying the one thing He cannot say in words and will not entrust to any messenger. You are saying: come. For this is the call of the Rāsa, the round dance that is the crown-jewel of all His pastimes, the dance whose blazing mellows enchant even the Lord Himself. The tradition keeps for us His own astonished confession, na hi jāne smṛte rāse mano me kīdṛśaṁ bhavet: "I cannot tell what becomes of My heart when the memory of the Rāsa rises in Me." And Rūpa Gosvāmī sets it down in the Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu, in Uddhava's wondering words, that the mellow of that dance astonishes even the astonishment of Śrī Hari, vibharti hṛdi vismayam kam api rāsalīlā rasaḥ. He who delights all creation is here the one undone. And the undoing has a name. The Caitanya-caritāmṛta tells us plainly that Kṛṣṇa's desire in the Rāsa is complete, and that Śrī Rādhikā is the very binding link, the śṛṅkhalā, of that desire; without Her He does not even like the Rāsa, tāhā vinu rāsalīlā nāhi bhāy cite. Take Her away and the dance falls slack and meaningless in His hands. So He does not summon the Rāsa. He, the Rāsa-rasika, summons Rāseśvarī, the Queen of it, and the flute bends itself into the shape of a lute to coax Her near.

And She hears. O Rādhe, You hear, and something in You answers before You have decided to answer. For You are the vidyānidhi, the ocean and reservoir of every sweet art, and there is no other abode than Vṛndāvana where such a treasury could appear, and where the Rāsa itself unfolds. When the flute crosses the water sounding like strings, You will not let it sing alone. You reach for Your own vīṇā. As the tradition shows us, that lute is the reservoir of all sweet songs, and it plays its duet with the sweetness of Śyāmasundara's flute, two oceans pouring into each other on one shore. All the singing and dancing of the Rāsa is born of the gopīs' mahā-bhāva, and here it crests in You: hearing the flute imitate Your strings, You grow eager to match note for note, and very eagerly You go to meet the flute-player who is dearer to You than millions of lives.

Now watch how She comes. The tradition gives us the image, and it is bold and tender at once: She comes as a maddened she-elephant comes to the king of the elephants in the deep forest. Do not flinch from the picture; receive it. There is a grandeur in the great elephants of the wood, an unhurried royalty in their gait, and when the she-elephant in her season sways toward the noble tusker there is nothing small or shy in it. So Her approach is stately, swaying, sovereign, intoxicated, the mada of love thick upon Her, Her course udāra, generous and large. She does not creep to Him like a thief. She places Her feet with the mada-gaja gait of a queen who knows she is awaited.

And when at last They meet upon the bank, what is given to the eyes blessed to see it? Their faces turn to each other and each face is a moon, and each gaze drinks the other the way the cātaka bird drinks only the rainwater it has waited the whole dry season for, the way the cakora bird lives on moonlight alone. Śyāma shines dark and luminous as the atasī blossom; Rādhikā glows like the golden campaka. When the dark and the gold draw together They are the moon hidden in a fresh raincloud, gold veiled in blue, blue lit from within by gold. And in the nearness Their garments loosen of their own accord; His hair tumbles loose from beneath the peacock-feather crest, and the soft bluish veil drifts from Her head. The whole scene is tender past describing.

And the tradition presses the wonder of it home with a homely truth: a loving mother would rather gaze on the face of her own child, even a child who cannot speak, than upon the moon, because it is love, not beauty, that draws her, and love makes even the plain face dearer than the moon. If love can do that to a mother's eyes, who then could ever measure the ecstasy when the greatest and most beautiful Lovers in all of being meet upon the shore?

O Yamunā, you cannot keep still. You are bhānujā, daughter of the sun, and you swell up in your own ecstasy when you see Vṛṣabhānujā, the daughter of King Vṛṣabhānu, meeting your dark Lord upon your banks and playing freely with Him like an intoxicated she-elephant with the king of elephants. Your waters rise to touch Their feet. And it is not you alone. Every moving and unmoving creature of Vṛndāvana is shivering with ecstasy, the leaves trembling, the vines leaning in, the very stones quickened, while Rādhikā, the ocean of artfulness, lifts Her vīṇā and out-sounds the flute, and the bamboo answers the strings, and the strings answer the bamboo, and the river answers them both.

Then the heart that has been watching all of this turns, at the end, into one ache shaped like a single word: kadā nu, when, oh when? When will this be given to me? The whole verse is that one yearning question, not a memory recited but a longing leaned forward into the future: when, on the banks of the Yamunā, will I be standing near enough to serve this meeting? For the longing is not to possess the scene; it is to be present at it as a servant, to fan Them, to string the vīṇā, to carry the cool water, to be the kiṅkarī whose only wealth is the sweet vision earned by service. For the tradition tells us it is precisely by serving the divine Couple that the kiṅkarī is blessed with the sweet vision of Their pastimes. That is the prayer. When, O when, will my eyes be made fit and my hands be made useful on the shore where the flute turns into a lute and Rādhā answers it?