The battle had paused. A grey hush lay over Kurukshetra, the kind of quiet that comes when ten thousand soldiers stop to breathe at once. Arjuna sat in his chariot, but his mind was not on the field anymore. It had wandered somewhere far above the dust and the drums.

He turned to Krishna, who held the reins as easily as another man might hold a flower.

"Krishna," Arjuna said, "yesterday you used words I keep turning over in my head. Brahman. The Self. Action. The world of beings. The world of gods. You spoke them like they were ordinary, but they are not ordinary to me. They are like locked doors, and I keep pressing my ear against them, trying to hear what is on the other side."

Krishna smiled, the way a teacher smiles when a student finally asks the right question.

"When I was small," Arjuna went on, "I drove my mother mad with asking. Why is the sky blue? Where does the river go? Who lit the very first fire? She would laugh and say, 'Arjuna, your questions never sleep.' And she was right. They still do not sleep. They have only grown bigger."

A breeze moved across the plain and lifted the white horses' manes. Far off, a single conch sounded, low and long, and faded.

"So I will ask them now," said Arjuna, sitting up straighter, "the way I asked when I was a boy — without shame, without pretending I already know. What is this Brahman that holds everything together? What is the Self that wakes up inside me each morning? What truly is action, when even sitting still is doing something? And these worlds — the world of things that change and crumble, the world of the bright gods above — what are they made of?"

Krishna did not answer at once. He let the questions stand in the air, one after another, like a row of lamps waiting to be lit.

"Good," he said softly. "A question asked with the whole heart is already halfway to its answer. You have stopped fighting the world long enough to wonder about it. That is where wisdom begins — not with knowing, but with asking honestly, 'What is this, really?'"

Arjuna leaned forward, and for the first time that day, his eyes were not afraid. They were curious. And curiosity, his mother had once told him, is just love wearing the clothes of a question.