Priya was not the kind of girl who cried.

She had fallen out of a mango tree in Class 3 and broken her wrist, and the auto driver who took her to the hospital said she had not made a sound the entire ride, just sat there with her arm cradled in her lap, her face very still. When her dog Golu died, she dug the grave herself in the backyard, lowered him in wrapped in his favourite towel, and patted the earth flat. Her eyes burned, but she did not cry. She was proud of that. She thought it meant she was strong.

Then came the day of the transfer.

Her father worked for the railways, and every three years the family moved to a new city. This time it was Bhopal to Jaipur. Priya had known it was coming. She had packed her room into brown cardboard boxes — books, clothes, the small brass Ganesha her grandmother had given her, Golu's collar with the little bell that still jingled. She was ready.

The morning they left, half the colony came to say goodbye. Priya stood at the gate, her school backpack on her shoulders, and shook hands and accepted sweets and said "thank you" to every aunty and uncle in a voice as steady as a metronome.

Then she saw them all together.

Not one by one, the way people usually appear — entering a room, walking down a corridor, showing up at a door. But all at once. Mrs. D'Souza from next door, who had fed Priya biscuits and Horlicks every afternoon while her parents were at work. Salman bhai from the corner shop, who always saved the last packet of cheese chips for her. Isha and Tanvi, her best friends, standing side by side with their arms linked, wearing the matching bracelets the three of them had made at Isha's birthday party. Behind them, her school bus driver Raju, who always waited an extra thirty seconds if he saw her running down the lane.

Priya saw all of them at the same moment, and something inside her broke open like a dam.

The tears came so suddenly that she could not breathe. Her chest heaved. Her vision blurred. She sat down on the gate step and sobbed into her hands while her father loaded the last box into the car and her mother rubbed her back without saying anything, because there was nothing to say.

She was not crying because she was weak. She was crying because she finally saw — all at once, in a single overwhelming flood — how deeply she was connected to every person in that crowd.

That is what the verse means by "kṛpayā parayā āviṣṭaḥ" — overcome by deep compassion. It is not pity. It is not sadness. It is the sudden recognition that you are bound to other people in ways you never fully realized until the moment you had to leave them. And that recognition can knock the strongest person off their feet.

But the tears were not weakness — they were proof that Priya had loved deeply, and that love did not evaporate when the car pulled away from the colony gate. The bonds that made her cry were the same bonds that would carry her forward: Mrs. D'Souza would call every Sunday, Isha and Tanvi would text until their fingers hurt, and in Jaipur there would be new gates, new lanes, new people waiting to become the next chapter. The address changed, but the girl — and everything she carried inside her — did not.