Kiran had stopped painting.

He sat very still on the workshop floor, staring at a half-finished cloth where Thatha had been outlining the god Yama, lord of death, with his great buffalo and his coiled rope. Kiran did not like looking at it.

"Thatha," he said in a small voice, "why does the Gita say Krishna is death? Death is the scariest thing there is. How can the best of everything also be the thing that takes people away?"

Thatha put down his pen. He came and sat on the floor beside his grandson, his old knees cracking, and for a while he said nothing at all.

"Come outside," he said at last.

They walked to the back of the house, to the patch of garden where Thatha grew marigolds for the temple. The earth there was dark and turned over. Thatha knelt and pushed his finger into the soil.

"Last season," he said, "this whole bed was full of flowers. Bright orange, the kind we string into garlands. Then the season ended, and every one of them withered and died, and I dug them all back into the ground." He pressed a single hard seed into the wet earth. "And now — look."

Kiran looked. All across the bed, tiny green shoots were pushing up through the dark soil. New plants. Hundreds of them, where the old flowers had been buried.

"The same ground that took the old flowers," Thatha said softly, "is making the new ones. The ending and the beginning are not two different places. They are the same hands, turning a wheel. Krishna says, 'I am death, the great taker — and I am also the birth of all that is yet to come.' He is holding both. So even when something ends, the new thing is already on its way, the way these shoots were waiting inside the soil all along."

Kiran touched one of the small green shoots with his fingertip.

"And the lovely things you carry through life," Thatha added, smiling, "your good name, your good luck, your sweet speech, your memory, your cleverness, your courage to hold on, and your patience to forgive — all seven of those are sparks of Him too. He is in the wheel that turns, and He is in every gentle gift along the way."

Kiran went back inside and, this time, he did not mind looking at Yama in the painting at all.