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Begin with the river. The water curving past these groves is no anonymous stream; she is Kālindī, the daughter of Mount Kalinda, dark and slow and devoted, moving past Vraja as though she too has come only to keep watch. Walk along her shore in the imagination and you find, set back among the trees on the pulina, the soft sandbank, a bower of mālatī creepers grown so thick and so sweet that the tradition will not call it a thicket but a temple, a mandira. It is no temple of stone. Loving maidservants raised it, the sakhīs who know the exact mood of the Divine Couple before that mood has even finished forming in Their hearts, and they wove it not for worship but for a meeting. Every petal of it was set there by hands that wanted nothing for themselves except that the Two be hidden, be cool, be alone.

Now watch Him come. Vanamālī enters, the wearer of the forest garland, and pause on that name, O heart, for a whole tenderness is folded inside it. The garland about His neck is not a thing the world made for Him. Śrīmatī Herself wandered the grove and picked its flowers; She strung them with Her own fingers; She lifted the strand and hung it upon Him before any play began, and She decorated Him besides with leaf and blossom and the small adornments of love, and He let Her. As She bent to that adorning and He to His own adorning of Her, each absorbed in the other with deep concentration, something quietly dissolved. The very feeling of difference between Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa thinned and then gave way. This is the first secret the bower keeps: that the deepest love does not stand apart to admire; it loses track of where the lover ends and the Beloved begins.

He enters, then, and the moment He does the play stirs, and She is set astir within it. The word the tradition lifts up here is lalita, loveliness, but loveliness with motion in it. Rūpa Gosvāmī fixes its meaning in the Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu, that lalita is "śṛṅgāra-pracura-ceṣṭā yatra": the condition in which amorous gestures are abundant; and the Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi unfolds it further, the enchanting knitting of the brows, the playful turning gestures, a tenderness almost too delicate to bear. It is this lalita-keli that the maidservant is permitted to behold, and barely. For the instant the loving Couple step inside and Their hearts turn toward one another, she who built the bower does not remain; with perfect discretion she withdraws to the edge of the leaves and from that loving distance she witnesses the pastimes, holding them the way one holds a brightness too keen to look at directly. And understand, O seeker, what it is she beholds. This is no ordinary, mundane meeting as the world below knows meeting. It is the very limit of transcendental love, a height no one still wrapped in body-consciousness can reach or rightly imagine.

The Bhāgavata sings of the night by the Yamunā when, after a short rest in the bushes along her bank, the Lord expanded Himself into as many forms as there were cowherd women and was with each of them: "reme sa bhagavāṁs tābhir ātmarāmo'pi līlayā," He enjoyed with them, He who is already self-satisfied, ātmarāma, needing nothing, and yet sporting, līlayā, purely out of play and love. Sanātana Gosvāmī in the Vaiṣṇava-toṣaṇī lingers on those words: reme and līlayā tell us that Kṛṣṇa enjoyed amorous, śṛṅgāra-rasa sports with the gopīs; and the single word bhagavān, he says, means that here Kṛṣṇa revealed the very quintessence of Godhead, the whole treasure of sweetness, not in thunder but in tenderness; and that He took as many forms as there were gopīs, with each in her own separate arbour. Yet of all that sweetness their thirst is never slaked. Jīva Gosvāmī writes it in the Gopāla-campū, that even when the gopīs meet Hari Himself their longing cannot be pacified even a little, like a parched man who drinks and drinks water in a dream and wakes thirstier still. Even the meeting does not still the wanting; the wanting is itself the love. And then he adds the line that bends the whole teaching toward Her: "śrī rādhāyāṁ tu sutarām anirvacanīyam eva sarvam," in Śrī Rādhā every one of these inexpressible heights is present beyond all telling, gathered into Her alone.

So the bower fills with wonder, and here is the marvel the verse will not let us forget: pratikṣaṇa, at every moment. Not once, not at the peak of meeting only, but at each successive instant the play astonishes again, camatkṛta, struck through with amazement, adbhuta, wonderful past every expectation. For Kṛṣṇa is anusavābhinavam, the Bhāgavata says, ever-new, never twice the same in the eyes of one who truly loves Him; and beneath it all rings the Upaniṣad's word, "raso vai saḥ": He Himself is rasa, the very flavour and sweetness of being. Read rasaika-līlā-nidhe by that light and the line turns to address Her: O You who play the ever-amazing love-play with Kṛṣṇa who is rasa itself. And if He is rasa, then the one and only ocean in which His pastimes break and surge and return is Śrī Rādhā. She is the rasaika-līlā-nidhi, the sole sea, the treasury, the very depth in which all His sweetness is held and from which all of it pours.

There is a height beyond even this that the tradition speaks of only in a hush, and so we too will speak of it softly. As the loving desires of the Two go on increasing past all measure, the play can turn until the roles themselves overturn, and She who is the beloved takes up the very part of the lover. The verse hints at it in one word, lolīkṛta, stirred and set in motion, and the wise name this reversal prema-vilāsa-vivarta, the whirling-over of love's own delight, the ultimate fruit of Their ever-growing desire and the furthest reach of loving ecstasy. We name it the way one names a thing glimpsed at the very edge of sight, without grasping, only adoring. It belongs to Her. We are not its witnesses; at most we are the maidservant's distant, downcast, grateful gaze from the tree-line.

And so the prayer rises, and after all this wonder it could be no other prayer. O Rādhike, ocean of these astonishing pastimes, treasury of every rasa, the one in whom even the gopīs' unslakable thirst is gathered and surpassed, do this one thing. Aim at me. Take the surge that is forever cresting in You, that endless glittering wave of Your own mercy, and turn it, just the bright spray of it, this way. Nidhehi mayi: place it, set it upon me. I do not ask to enter the bower. I do not ask to see what only the trusted maidservant may see. I ask only that one curl of Your grace, breaking like surf and catching the light, fall where I am standing. Let the cchaṭā, the flung splendour, the glowing brightness of Your kindness, reach even me.