In a house at the edge of the forest, a small clay lamp burned in the corner of a room. Its flame was steady and bright, and it asked for nothing. It did not judge the people who passed by. It did not keep score of their kind acts or their unkind ones. It only shone.

One evening a child named Ketu came in from playing and, without thinking, set an upturned basket down right over the lamp.

At once the room went dark. Ketu stumbled. He bumped the table, knocked over a cup, stubbed his toe on the doorframe, and grew frightened. "The lamp has gone out!" he cried. "The light has abandoned us! Now I cannot find my way!"

His grandmother, sitting calmly in the dark, did not move. "The lamp has not gone out, little one," she said. "Listen. Is the room warm in that corner?"

Ketu reached out a careful hand toward the basket. It was warm. Faint threads of light leaked from the basket's woven gaps.

"The flame is exactly where it always was," said his grandmother, "burning just as bright, taking on none of your stumbling, blaming you for nothing. It did not leave you in the dark. Something was simply placed over it. The darkness is not the lamp's doing — it is only a basket."

Ketu felt his way forward, found the basket's edge, and lifted it off. The room flooded with steady golden light. There was the lamp, unchanged, shining as it always had. He could see the table, the spilled cup, the doorway — and he wondered how he had ever felt so lost when the light had been there the whole time.

"Inside each of us," his grandmother said, "there is a lamp like this. A bright knowing. It never goes out, and it never takes the blame for our mistakes. But sometimes a basket of not-knowing gets set over it, and then we stumble in the dark and cry that we are lost. We are not lost, Ketu. We are only covered. Lift the basket, and the light was never gone."

Ketu sat down beside the lamp and watched it burn, and the warmth of it settled into him like an old, remembered thing.