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Picture it. The loveplay is over, and the grove has gone quiet around them. On a low bed strewn with fresh flowers, the petals warm and crushed beneath them, Rādhā and Mādhava sit close, drowned in each other. They are not speaking of anything and they are speaking of everything: the nectar of a conversation that has no subject but themselves, each gazing at the other's form, each tasting the other's qualities, each turning over pastimes that happened only moments ago as though they were old and dear treasures. The waves of that talk rise and fall, and the two of them float upon it the way a lotus floats, rooted in sweetness, lifted by it.

And there, just behind them, the kiṅkarī. The maidservant of the tradition stands in her eternal form, the cāmara moving slowly in her hand, fanning the divine Couple with a love so total that her whole being has become the rhythm of that fan. She wants nothing for herself. She wants only that They be comfortable, that the breeze reach Them, that nothing disturb the honeyed ease of Their rest. Watch her, O heart, and learn the posture of this whole verse: she is near the most intimate thing in all the worlds, and her one prayer is to serve it, never to seize it.

See how the happiness moves in a circle here. Rādhā is glad only when Kṛṣṇa is glad; Kṛṣṇa is glad only when Rādhā is glad; and the maidservants are gladdest of all when Rādhikā is revealed as the greatest, when She crests above everyone, the supreme one. There is no rivalry in this love, only a current of joy that keeps returning, swelling each time it comes round, the way the navel of this verse is a whirlpool of ever-new rasa: nava-nava, fresh and fresh again, never twice the same, never spent.

Now look at Her face, O devotee, as the maidservant looks. How beautiful is Her smile. When Her lips part even a little, Her teeth shine, a row of pearls freshly strung, and the tradition sings it: "īṣat hāsiya taraṅga hillole madana muracha pāy": even Cupid himself faints in the rolling waves of Her slight smile, swooning on the swell of so much sweetness. And this is no idle ornament. When She is angry with Śyāma, when She turns Her face in pretty wrath and a shadow of despair falls over His heart, it is the moonlight of these very teeth, the faint cool light of Her smile when at last She relents, that lifts the darkness from Him. The Gīta Govinda fixes it: "vadasi yadi kiñcid api dantaruci kaumudi dara timiram ati ghoram": if You will only speak some small word, the moonbeam of Your teeth scatters the terrible darkness. O Rādhe, even Your littlest mercy is the dawn that saves Him.

And Her lips. Red and full as the ripe bimba-fruit, they hold a sweetness that Śyāmasundara desires above all sweetness in creation. He cannot have enough of them. The nectar that wells at the edge of those lips, on that moon of a face, pleases His eyes the way moon-nectar feeds the cakora bird, that bird of the old songs who lives on nothing else, who drinks only the light that drips from the moon and would starve before tasting anything coarser. So Kṛṣṇa confesses it Himself in the Gīta Govinda: "sphurad adhara sīdhave tava vadana candramā rocayati locana cakoram": the nectar oozing from the lips of Your moon-face pleases My eyes, that are like cakora birds. Two cakoras, His eyes, turned forever toward the moon of Her mouth. And His thirst has no floor. The tradition lets Him cry it out: "koto caturānana, mori mori jāoto, na tuwā ādi avasāna": how many four-faced Brahmās have lived out their measureless lives and died, and I am not yet finished relishing Your sweetness. Count the Brahmās if you can, each living billions of years; lay their lifetimes end to end; and still the savour of Rādhā has not begun to be exhausted. These pastimes do not run down. The Rāsa could turn through a whole night of Brahmā, age upon age, millions of years, and remain as fresh at its close as in its first moment, because the rasa here is nava-nava, the whirlpool that never empties.

Then, into this stillness, a sound. The girlfriends are coming. The sakhīs slip into the arbour with their veils drawn over their mouths, hiding their smiles, their shoulders shaking with held-in laughter at what they have caught a glimpse of. And Rādhikā, all at once shy, Her garments loosened and Her ornaments out of place, draws back from Śyāmasundara and pulls Her veil about Herself and rises a little from the bed to put a sweet modest distance between Them. O Rādhe, even Your shyness is an adornment; even the way You withdraw is a kind of beauty offered to the world.

And it is exactly in that movement, as She rises, that the maidservant beholds Her whole. She sees how full and lovely are those hips, how slender the waist above them, the fullness and the slimness answering each other like two notes of one chord. She sees the deep navel, that grave little whirlpool around which the freshest rasa is forever turning. And she sees the thing this verse most wants us to feel: that youth has dawned in Rādhā, taruṇima just now unfolding, samunmeṣa, opening fully like a flower at first light, and with it Her loveliness has become an ocean. Not a still pool but a sea at its rising tide, swelling, blooming, with wave upon wave of joking and laughter breaking across its surface as the sakhīs gather round Her. Lāvaṇya-sindhu: an ocean of grace and elegance, and we who only hear of it stand on the shore and are wetted by its spray.

This is why the maidservants rejoice without a trace of envy. For Rādhā is the very heart, the indescribable secret heart, kim api hṛdayaṁ, of all the clever and artful loving girls of Gokula. She is their life. Whatever sweetness any of them carries is Hers first and theirs by Her grace; whatever cleverness in love they show is the play of Her own nature shining through them. So when She is revealed as supreme, when the ocean of Her youthful beauty crests highest in the grove, they do not shrink. They bloom too. Her glory is their festival. And on the strength of all this loveliness, all this sweetness that has no bottom and no end, the prayer of the verse goes up like the maidservant's fan, steady and tender: pātu rādhā, may this Rādhā, jewel and life of all ladyloves, protect us. Guard us, O Pleasing One; keep us; let us only stand where the kiṅkarī stands, fan in hand, near the sweetness, asking nothing but to serve it.