Ravi pressed his nose against the window of Nani's painting room. On the far wall hung her newest Madhubani — a great tree filled with birds and fish and tiny suns, every space packed with curling lines.

"I've looked at it a hundred times," Ravi grumbled, "and it's just a tree."

Nani looked up from her brush and smiled. "Just a tree? Come here, beta."

He went and stood beside her stool. Moti, his puppy, trotted after him and flopped across his feet.

"Now," said Nani, "I want you to find me the elephant hidden in the branches. And the seven peacocks. And the river that runs around the whole edge."

Ravi stared until his eyes watered. "There's no elephant. I can't see any of it."

Nani took off her own spectacles — the thick ones she wore for the finest lines — and gently settled them on Ravi's nose. The room blurred, then sharpened in a strange new way.

"Look again," she said softly. "Slowly. Not at the whole tree. Let the tree show itself to you."

And it did. Where Ravi had seen only a tangle of lines, an elephant's curved trunk swam up out of the branches. A peacock's eye opened in what he had thought was a leaf. The border he had ignored became a winding river full of silver fish. The painting had not changed at all. But suddenly it was full of a whole world he had never been able to reach.

"How did the glasses do that?" Ravi whispered.

"They didn't do anything," Nani laughed. "Your eyes were always good enough to walk to school and find your dinner. But some things are too big, or too fine, or too hidden, to be seen with everyday eyes. For those, you need a different kind of seeing — a gift."

She lifted the spectacles back onto her own nose.

"Long ago," she said, "a great teacher told his friend: you cannot see My true form with the eyes you were born with. They were not made for it. So I will give you a divine eye — and only then, behold. The friend did not become cleverer or stronger. He was simply given new sight. And the whole universe opened in front of him, the way that tree opened for you."