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Picture the night already spent. The Rāsa-līlā is over, that great circle of love turning under the moon, and now the divine Couple goes down to the Yamunā to bathe and to play in the cool dark water. They come up laughing and dripping, and they pass into a small temple of jewels set among the bowers, where a feast has been laid. This whole scene Śrīpāda does not invent; it rises to him as a self-manifest revelation, the līlā showing itself from within, and the same picnic Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu Himself once witnessed in trance, even as a fisherman's net drew Him up out of the Indian Ocean, as the Caitanya-caritāmṛta tells in its eighteenth chapter of the Antya-līlā.

O the labour of love that has filled this room. The sylvan goddesses of Vṛndāvana and the bower-maidservants have gathered fruit the whole day long, for in this land the vines and trees bear flower and fruit through all twelve months. They have washed each fruit in the best way, heaped them on broad plates, set the plates in long orderly rows upon a platform of gems, and made a sitting-place before it. Coconuts of many kinds and mangoes of many flavours, bananas and berries and jackfruit, dates and tangerines and oranges, blackberries and grapes and peanuts and buttermilk, cantaloupes and khiriṇīs and palmfruits, keśaras and waterfruits and lotusfruits, baelfruits and pilus and pomegranates, a thousand varieties always ripe in Vṛndāvana that no hand could ever finish writing down. And Śrī Rādhā Herself has made the sweets at home with Her own hands, for one mouth alone: Gangājala, Amṛta-keli the nectar-play, Pīyūṣa-granthi the knot of nectar, Karpura-keli the play of camphor, Sarapupī, Amṛta, Padmacini the lotus-sugar, and Khaṇḍa-kṣīra-sāra-vṛkṣa the sugar-candy trees, all of it carried in for the pleasure of Kṛṣṇa.

Seeing the loveliness of the spread, Mohana is flooded with happiness. He sits and enjoys His forest meal, and Rādhikā and Her sakhīs feed Him with a love that is almost a mother's, here in the very heart of the amorous mood. The rasa-knowers warn us that these flavours do not ordinarily mix; Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes it in the Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu, that "janayaty eva vairasyaṁ rasānāṁ vairiṇā yutiḥ": when incompatible mellows are joined a bad flavour is born, as sweet water is spoiled the moment alkali and bitter are dropped in. Yet Śrī Rādhikā is the storehouse where every rasa is kept together without quarrel, all of it bent toward one end, the delight of Kṛṣṇa; and Jīva Gosvāmī sings in the Gopāla-campū that the Rāsa dance itself holds all five chief rasas and all seven secondary ones folded into one. So the feeding is both motherly tenderness and sweetheart's adoration, and nothing is spoiled.

Now watch closely, for here the servant's whole heart is held. After Kṛṣṇa has eaten, Svāminī and Her girlfriends take up His remnants, the food His lips have touched, mohana-svāditena, and how enchanting these scraps are the maidservants need never be told; they read it plainly on Svāminī's face, in Her mouth, in Her eyes, the wonder of one who tastes what Mohana has tasted. Then Rādhā with Her friends also eats, and full and content the divine Couple withdraws and lies down together in the bedchamber.

This is the hour the verse aches toward. They lie facing each other, lost in a slow intimate sweetness of murmured words, and the maidservants gather close to serve in every way: keho kore vījana, keho pada samvāhana, keho korāya tāmbūla bhakṣaṇa, one waves a fan, one presses the lotus feet, one sets betel upon Their lips. And in his kinkarī-form Śrīpāda is granted the dearest place of all, to draw Śrī Rādhā's lotus feet into his lap, while another sakhī tends the feet of Śyāmasundara. He will not call it massaging. He calls it lālanā, a cuddling, an affectionate cradling, the way one holds something unbearably precious. The lucky girl is undone by the sweetness of those feet and the enchanting marks written on their soles; tears of love run down her face as she lifts them to her chest, breathes their fragrance, kisses them. And so, soothed by these loving hands, Śrī Rādhā drifts down into sleep.

O how They look as sleep takes Them. The talking slows, the eyes grow heavy with the sweet fatigue of love, and the dark pupils slide away beneath the lids the way bees vanish under the petals of a lotus folding shut at dusk. The Couple sleeps. The maidservants kneel and simply fill their hearts with the savour of that beauty, asking nothing.

And then, carefully, so as not to wake Her, the servant slips those lotus feet from her lap and rises, for one last grace remains. There are still the remnants of Śrī Rādhā's own meal, the ambrosial leavings of Svāminī's plate, madhura-madhura-ucchiṣṭa-pīyūṣa-sāram: the very essence of nectar, sweeter than any sweetness in the three worlds. For first Mohana tasted this food, and after Mohana, Mohinī Rādhikā tasted it, the enchanter and then She who enchants the enchanter, so that two infinities of sweetness have passed over it before it ever reaches the servant's tongue. The kinkarī sits and eats, and eats, and eats again, bhojaṁ bhojaṁ, on and on, and at each mouthful the flavour is not the old flavour but a wholly new one, nava-nava-rasa, fresh-minted joy with no bottom and no repetition, and she goes under into that ocean and is drowned. This is the whole of the longing: not one taste but the endless feasting, not nearness only but the lowest dearest service, and the cry stretched to breaking on a single word, kadā syām, when, when shall I be this, when shall I be granted this and drown.

And the tradition is tender with us here, for it will not leave us standing outside the door. Jīva Gosvāmī teaches in the Prīti-sandarbha that the Lord's eternal companions relish the very essence of this rasa because they are insiders, antaraṅga, while we who only aspire stand for now at the edge, bahiraṅga. Yet by the holy borrowing called bhāva-sādhāraṇya or sādhāraṇī-karaṇa, a kind of recognized sādhana, the rasa relished by the eternal associates begins to manifest within the cleansed heart of the one who longs, until an equality of feeling is reached and the parikara's relish is infused into the sādhaka. By hearing this, by chanting it, by turning it over and over in remembrance, the aspirant grows tanmaya, wholly absorbed, until he no longer feels he is merely remembering a pastime but feels he is truly there, holding those feet, feeling their softness, tasting that nectar; and this process, the Gosvāmīs say, is far greater than any independent striving. Rūpa Gosvāmī writes in the same Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu, "alaukikyā prakṛtyeyaṁ sudurūhā rasa-sthitiḥ": this rasa-state is by its very nature beyond the world, precious and most hard to reach, and yet through vibhāva and through rati it grows vividly visible to elder and younger devotee alike. If there is so much bliss in relishing this within the mind, then what must the direct experience be?