It had rained all morning, so Kiran could not go out to the river. Instead
he sat in the doorway of Thatha's workroom, watching his grandfather paint,
while the smell of wet earth drifted in from the courtyard.
Thatha had pinned a long strip of cloth to his low wooden table. On it he
was painting two faces, side by side. The first face was smiling, its eyes
crinkled with joy, a little curl of a smile at each corner of the mouth. The
second face — Thatha was working on it now — was weeping, with two careful
teardrops falling from each eye.
Kiran wrinkled his nose. "Why would you paint a crying face, Thatha? It's
sad. Paint two happy ones."
Thatha dipped his kalam into the black myrobalan dye and steadied his hand.
"Watch," he said. "Look at the smiling face. Now look at the crying face.
What is the same about them?"
Kiran looked. "Um. They're both faces."
"And what are they painted with?"
"The same black ink. The same red. The same cloth."
"Exactly," said Thatha. "One cloth. One pot of dye. One hand holding one
kalam. The smile and the tears come from the very same source. They look
like opposites — but they are made of the same thing."
Kiran came and crouched by the table. "But happy and sad are opposites,"
he insisted. "When I'm happy I feel one way and when I'm sad I feel another."
"True," said Thatha, adding a tiny highlight to the weeping eye. "And yet —
where does your happiness come from? And where does your sadness come from?
From inside you. The same you. The same heart feels both. Just like this
same cloth holds both faces."
He set down his kalam and turned to Kiran. "Krishna says something like this.
Your sharp thinking, your patience, your honesty, your calm — all of it comes
from the one source. But so does your joy. And so does your sorrow. Even
your fear, and even your courage when the fear goes away. Big feelings and
small feelings, the bright ones and the heavy ones — they all rise from the
same place, the way both these faces rise from the same hand."
Kiran looked at the two faces for a long time. The smiling one and the
weeping one, painted in the same colours, on the same cream cloth.
"So when I feel sad," he said slowly, "it's not... a mistake? It's not
something separate that snuck in?"
"No," said Thatha softly. "It's part of you. It comes from the same source
as everything good in you. Nothing in you is left out."
Outside, the rain began to ease, and a thin gold light slid across the
courtyard, touching both faces on the cloth at once.
