It was dusk in the Mithila village, and Nani was finishing a painting she had been working on for many days — a great Madhubani image of the divine, every inch of it filled with fish and birds and twining vines, all in the deep reds and indigos and blacks of the old folk style.

Ravi sat beside her, watching the very last line being drawn. Moti was asleep against his knee.

He had been thinking, all through the chapter Nani had been telling him — about the restless mind, and the breathing, and the lamp that doesn't flicker, and the long climb up the mountain across many lives. It was a lot.

"Nani," he said, "out of all of it — sitting still, and breathing, and not eating too much, and seeing the same Self in everyone — what's the most important part? If you could only keep one?"

Nani did not answer right away. She dipped her thinnest brush, steadied her wrist, and drew the final line of the painting — the curve of the divine figure's smile — with a tenderness Ravi had never seen her use before. Her whole face had gone soft and bright, as though the painting were not paint at all but someone she loved.

"There," she breathed, when it was done. She sat back.

"Did you see how I drew that last line?" she asked.

Ravi nodded. "You looked... different. Happy. Like you forgot I was even here."

"I did forget. For a moment there was only the love in my hand, going into the line." She smiled at him. "That is the answer to your question, beta. You can sit still all you like. You can breathe and read and do everything correctly. But the seeker the Lord holds closest of all is the one who turns his whole heart toward the truth with love — who does it not as a chore, but as a gift to something he adores."

She touched the painting gently, not smudging it.

"Sitting quietly is good. But sitting quietly with a heart full of love — that is the highest meditation there is. That is what I was doing just now. And it is the best thing I know how to teach you."

The diya flickered. Moti sighed in his sleep. And Ravi looked at the smiling face Nani had drawn, and understood.