Prārthanā Lalasāmayī — Prayers Filled With Longing

At twelve songs, Prarthana-Lalasamayi, prayers filled with lalasa, longing, is the largest section within Ucchvasa and the second largest in the whole of Kalyana-Kalpataru after Updesa. Nearly every song is built around the same recurring question, kabe, when — imagining a future moment of devotional fulfillment rather than describing a present state, a poetic device Bhaktivinoda Thakura would return to again more than a decade later in Saranagati's own section of devotional longing, making this one of the earliest sustained uses of that pattern in his songwriting. The section moves from questions about the mercy of guru and the wider Vaishnava community, through longing for the ability to properly recognize genuine devotees, to an extended, twenty-verse meditation on the mind's own distraction, before shifting register in its final three songs from patient questioning to direct, anguished cries addressed to Gaura and Nitai. The section, and with it Kalyana-Kalpataru's account of longing, closes still unresolved — waiting rather than answered — before the book turns to its shorter closing sections of direct glorification.