The afternoon was hot in the Warli village, and Jeeva had climbed up the bare brown hill behind the houses to watch the clouds. Up here the wind was strong. It tugged at his shirt, flung dust into little spinning circles, bent the dry grass flat, and roared in his ears.

Aaji came slowly up the path behind him, her white hair loose, a small pot of rice-paste and a frayed bamboo stick in her hands — she had been painting Warli figures on the wall of the grove shrine.

"Aaji!" Jeeva called over the wind. "The wind is so strong today! It's everywhere. It's pushing me!"

Aaji sat down beside him on a flat rock, smiling, her painting things in her lap. "Yes," she said. "The great wind. It goes everywhere, doesn't it? Over the hill, through the mango trees, into your hair, around the whole sky."

"It's huge," said Jeeva. "It feels like it could pick up the whole world."

"It is huge," Aaji agreed. "But tell me something, little one. Where does the wind live? Where does all that rushing, roaring air *move*?"

Jeeva opened his mouth and then closed it. He had never thought about it. He looked up at the wide, pale-blue sky stretching from hill to hill.

"In... the sky?" he said. "In the open space?"

"In the open space," Aaji nodded. "The wind never leaves the sky. It can blow as wild as it likes — north, south, up, down — but it is always inside the open air. The sky holds it. The wind lives in the sky and never, ever steps outside it. Even now, the strongest wind you have ever felt is resting inside the quiet open space."

Jeeva watched the dust spin and settle. The wind tugged at him again, but now he noticed the great stillness all around it, the open sky that the wind was moving through.

"That," said Aaji softly, "is how everything lives inside God. You, me, the wind, the trees, the cows, the river — we are all the wind. We rush about, we move and play and grow. But all of it happens *inside* God, the way the wind happens inside the sky. We never leave him. Not for one breath. He holds us, always, even when we are too busy blowing about to notice."

She dipped her stick in the white paste and, on the flat rock, drew a tiny Warli figure — a stick-person with arms flung wide — and around it a big open circle.

"There," she said. "You, in the sky. Always held. Now hold *that* firmly in your heart, the way Krishna asked."

Jeeva looked at the little white figure inside its circle, and then up at the enormous sky, and he felt, for the first time, completely safe in all that wind.