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Begin with a bower on the bank of the Yamunā, and a small command given in love. Today Svāminī is in Her self-possessed mood, the svādhīna-bhartṛkā mood in which She holds the reins, and She has sent Śyāma out to gather flowers so that He may dress and decorate Her with His own hands. He goes gladly, this dark wanderer of the groves, stooping for fresh kuvalaya blossoms, returning with His fingers full of blue. And He comes back to find the door of Her face closed. She has turned. Her shoulder is toward Him, the slope of Her back is a wall, and not a word will She give Him. He has done nothing. There is no quarrel He can name, no fault to confess, no apology that has an address. She is simply, beautifully, inexplicably displeased.

The tradition has a tender word for this. Causeless pique is not the cooling of love but its most exuberant flowering, the very showing-off of love's riches. Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes it in the Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi, that "asya praṇaya eva syān mānasya padam uttamam": praṇaya is the highest stage of māna. And the learned draw the fine line: offended sulking that has a reason is the ripening, the culmination of praṇaya, while offended sulking with no reason at all is praṇaya parading its sovereign power, its vilāsa-vaibhava, dancing simply because it can. There is a crucial difference between the two. A quarrel with a cause can be coaxed away by the seven gentle means: by conciliation, by feigned antagonism, by exertion, by bowing down, by the giving of gifts, by studied indifference, by taking shelter in another mood until the storm passes. But a quarrel with no cause has no handle to grasp. It cannot be reasoned away. It must dissolve of its own sweet accord, the way a snake's track loses itself in the grass. For the same Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi sings, "aher iva gatiḥ premnaḥ svabhāva kuṭilā bhavet": the gait of love is crooked as a serpent's gait, and so love's offence may rise with a cause or with none at all.

Watch how it has gone before, in the bowerhouse by the river, the līlā Kṛṣṇa once confided to Viśākhā in the Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi. The two of Them sat there, backs turned, each having vowed not to speak first, each suffering from a quarrel made of nothing, both worn thin by the useless silence. And He, unable to bear it, let His glance fall upon a round pomegranate fruit lying near. The smallest smile began to bud on Her face. Then He reached out and took up the fruit in His hand, and Her smile opened all the way. At once He laughed, "Priye, You smiled first, You broke Your vow first, You are defeated." And She answered, "No, You moved first, You reached for the fruit, You are defeated." This is the whole comedy of Their love: each one longing to lose, each one accusing the other of having surrendered first, because to be defeated by the Beloved is the only victory worth winning.

So today the maidservant comes near, this kiṅkarī who lives only to serve the union of the two, and Śyāmasundara begs her with His eyes: break this pique, bring Her back to Me. And the handmaiden, Śrīpāda in his kiṅkarī-form, who knows Svāminī's heart better than Svāminī will admit, kneels close and speaks the gentle, teasing argument of this verse. O Rādhe, she says, look at what You love. You who have turned Your face from Him, consider how the whole blue world is dear to You, and every blue thing is only His shadow cast across creation, His by name, by colour, by form, or by quality.

For there is the dark fortnight itself, kṛṣṇa-pakṣa, the waning half of the moon that carries His very name. The world prefers the bright fortnight, the swelling silver nights. But You love the dark one more. And how could You not? You are Rādhikā, His topmost worshipper, and it is in the moonless dark that You must slip out to meet Him, the black night drawing its veil around Your going. The dark fortnight is not only His namesake; it is Your accomplice, the easiest of all times to steal away to the tryst, the friend that hides Your feet on the path.

And there is the fresh kuvalaya, the blue night-lotus, soft and sweet and fragrant with exactly His softness, His loveliness, His sweetness, His fragrance, His hue. You tuck them at Your ears; You will not be without them; they are little blue images of Him resting against Your cheek. And there is the kṛṣṇasāra, the black antelope that shares His name and His dark coat, the deer whose very name can be heard to mean those who take Kṛṣṇa to be the quintessence of all things. How blessed they are, You think, these deer of the forest, who let everything fall the instant His flute begins, and run to Him with the hair standing up along their bodies in the thrill of love, free to draw near and gaze on His enchanting form. Even when the doe pours out her loving tears before Him like an oblation, her mate feels no jealousy at all; he is only glad that her tears have made Kṛṣṇa happy. What a love that envies nothing, that wants only His joy.

And there is the tamāla, the dark-trunked tree whose luster is the colour of His limbs. You have said it Yourself, O Rādhe, in the words the Caitanya-caritāmṛta keeps, "Kṛṣṇa āliṅgaṇa pāinu janama saphale; sei sukhe magna rahe vṛkṣa kori kole": I count My birth fulfilled when His arms close around Me, and when I wrap My own arms around a tamāla trunk I drown in that same bliss. And there is the rain-cloud, the nava-ambhodhara, fat and dark above the groves, the very tint of His body, so that when one drifts across the sky You ache, as the Vidagdha-Mādhava remembers, for a pair of wings to fly up and fold the storm to Your heart. And there is the Yamunā herself, whose other name is Kṛṣṇā, the two syllables kṛṣ-ṇa that You love to hear, her water dark-blue and deep, His double in name and in colour, so that You stand and stare at the blackish splendour of her flowing. Your sakhīs know all of this. They dress You in blue silk, they ring Your wrists with blue bangles, they line Your eyes dark, they touch You with musk, knowing You love to wear His colour against Your skin.

But ah, the strange crookedness of love. When the offence sits heavy upon Her with a real cause, then every blue thing becomes a wound, and the tradition remembers Her in that grief. How the single syllable "kā" strikes Her ear like a thunderbolt and She claps both palms over Her ears, crying out "Jaimini, Jaimini," the name of the sage who guards against the lightning-bolt. How She will not hear His attributes or His name though they are spoken, knowing His very form to be Her enemy, and will not even speak with His friends, so that the messenger despairs of how to bring Her near. How She pulls off the blue silk and the blue bangles and the sapphire at Her throat and changes into ivory and pearl and a red sārī. How She wipes away the musk-pictures drawn upon Her breasts, the musk-tilaka on Her brow, the blue eyeliner, and covers all with white sandal-paste; and the single drop of musk on Her lovely chin, which lies there like a sleeping blackbee, She paints over with the tip of a straw. How She raises an umbrella the moment She sees a cloud, and will not go to Her own sakhī Śyāmalā whose name remembers Him, and whitewashes the very tamāla trunks, and shrinks far from the peacocks whose feathers wear His crest. How, seeing a blackbee at the foot of a campaka tree, this fortunate girl trembles and Her eyes fill; how, catching the dark fleck of musk on Her own chin in a mirror, She takes Him for an enemy and smashes the glass to a hundred pieces. That is the anguish of a quarrel with a cause, when love and all its reminders are too much to bear.

But today there is no cause. Today is the lighter, brighter sulk, the play-sulk, the sovereign whim, and She sits averse to Kṛṣṇa alone while all His blue shadows are still dear. And so the handmaiden does not need to mourn; she needs only to tease. O Rādhe, she says, why so cold to Mohana alone, when all His reflections are so dear to You? And she chooses that name on purpose, Mohana, the Enchanter, to remind Svāminī of how helplessly enchanted She has always been by His sweetness and His beauty. Svāmini, how long can You hold out against the one who has already stolen Your whole heart? For these little quarrels are not damage. They are the freshening of love, the renovation of sweetness, the way rasamaya Govinda's tenderness for Her and Hers for Him are made new and deepened by the brief withholding. Rūpa Gosvāmī teaches it in the Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi, "snehas tūtkṛṣṭatāvāptyā mādhuryaṁ mānayan navam, yo dhārayaty adākṣiṇyaṁ sa māna iti kīrtyate": when sneha grows so rich it begins to show ever-fresh sweetness and a lovely crookedness, that crookedness is called māna. And far from being a flaw, it is the most desirable thing, a serpent moulded out of sugar-candy that carries no poison and tastes only sweet.

And it works. Hearing her handmaiden's coaxing, the smallest bud of a smile breaks on Śrī Rādhā's lips. The pique loosens. The wall of Her turned shoulder softens. And the maidservant, who asked for nothing but this, now stands at the threshold of the sweetest of all sights, free at last to relish the meeting of the divine Couple: the dark Beloved and His golden Love turning back toward each other, the silence ending, the laughter rising in the bower. O wind of Vṛndāvana, carry it. O Rādhe, smile, Your māna gone, and let us see it.