In the middle of Kiran's village, where four dusty lanes met, grew the biggest tree anyone had ever seen.

It was a peepul — an Ashvattha — and nobody knew how old it was. Its trunk was so wide that Kiran and four of his friends, holding hands, could not reach all the way around it. Its branches spread out like a green roof over the whole crossroads, and its heart-shaped leaves never stopped moving, even when there was no wind at all. They trembled and whispered and flashed silver, as if the tree were always quietly talking.

Kiran loved that tree more than any other thing in the village. So one evening he asked Thatha why everyone gathered there.

Thatha looked up from the cloth he was painting — a tree, as it happened, with a god seated beneath it. "Watch tomorrow," he said. "And tell me what you see."

So Kiran watched. In the cool of the morning, old men came to sit in the tree's shade and argue happily about the news. By midday, the vegetable sellers spread their baskets between its roots. In the afternoon, mothers rested there with sleeping babies, and Kiran's own friends climbed its lower branches and dropped down laughing. At dusk, a wandering singer with a small drum sat against the trunk and sang stories of the gods, and a crowd gathered to listen until the stars came out. Even the parrots and the squirrels and a family of mynahs all lived in its branches.

"It's like the whole village lives around it," Kiran told Thatha that night, amazed.

"That is why the old people call it the king of trees," Thatha said. "Krishna says of all trees, he is the Ashvattha. Think of what it gives — shade for the tired, fruit for the birds, a place for stories, a roof for the whole crossroads. It asks for nothing and gives all day long." He pointed his pen at Kiran. "And that wandering singer who sat beneath it tonight? Long ago there was a sage like that named Narada, who walked the whole universe with a tune on his lips, telling everyone everywhere about God. Of all such sages, Krishna says, he is Narada."

Kiran fell asleep thinking of the great tree at the crossroads, its silver leaves whispering in the dark, gathering the whole village under its arms — and of the One who, Thatha said, was somehow the greatness in it all.