It had been a thin harvest. The rains had come late and stopped early,
and when Jeeva's father carried the last sacks of grain into the house,
they were lighter than anyone wanted to say out loud. His mother counted
them twice, her lips moving, and then went very quiet.
"Will there be enough?" Jeeva asked Aaji that night, after the lamp was
out. He could hear his parents talking low in the next room, the worried
kind of talking.
"I don't know," Aaji said honestly. "It is a lean year."
Jeeva's stomach tightened. "Then what do we do?"
"We do what we always do," said Aaji. "We work. We share what we have.
And we trust." In the dark he could hear the smile in her voice. "Sleep
now."
The next weeks were careful ones. His mother stretched the dal thin. His
father took on extra work mending a neighbour's roof. Aaji painted a wall
for the potter's wedding and was paid in two clay pots of rice. And then,
one morning, Jeeva's uncle arrived unannounced from the next village,
his cart loaded with millet — "too much for one house," he said, waving
away thanks, "it would only spoil." A few days after that, a trader
bought every basket Aaji could paint, more than she had sold in a season.
It was never grand. It was never extra. But somehow, every single day,
there was enough. The pot was never empty when it mattered. And the
little they did have — the goat, the seed grain, the roof — none of it
was lost.
At the end of the lean year, Jeeva sat with Aaji as she ground her rice
paste, and he said, "We made it. I was so scared, and we made it."
"We did," she said. "Did you notice how? Not a flood of riches. Just —
enough. The right thing, at the right time, again and again."
"Like someone was watching," Jeeva said slowly.
Aaji dipped her finger and drew a small white figure on the wall, arms
raised. "Someone was," she said. "When you give your whole heart to the
One, He carries two things for you. He brings what you are missing. And
He keeps safe what you already have. We trust Him — and He looks after us.
Not always with more than we need. But never with less."
