The afternoon had turned the colour of old metal. Ravi stood alone in the open field behind Nani's house, and above him the sky was doing something he had never quite seen before.

A storm was building. Not the small grey rain that came most evenings, but a great wall of cloud that climbed and climbed until it seemed to touch the very top of the sky. Its edges glowed pale gold where the last sun caught them. Lower down it was bruised purple and deep blue and a strange greenish grey, all the colours layered together and moving. Far off, lightning cracked the dark in long branching lines, and each time it did, a piece of the cloud lit up from inside like a lamp.

Moti the puppy had already run for the doorway. But Ravi stood still.

He had wanted to watch the storm. He had told Nani so. Yet now that it filled the whole sky above him, he felt how very small he was — a single boy in a wide flat field, no taller than the grass was long. The thunder rolled, and he felt it in his chest before he heard it in his ears, a deep shudder that went straight through him.

His heart was pounding. His hands had gone cold. It was not quite fear, and it was not quite delight. It was both at once, twisted so tightly together that he could not find the edge of either. He wanted to run inside, and he wanted to keep looking, and he could do neither steadily.

"Ravi!" Nani called from the door. "Come and stand with me."

He ran to her, and she put a warm hand on his shoulder, and together they watched the rest of the storm climb the sky.

"Big, isn't it," she said softly. "So big it makes your heart shake."

"I couldn't stay still," Ravi admitted. "I wanted to watch, but I couldn't keep calm."

"That is what happens," Nani said, "when something is far larger than you. Arjuna felt it too, you know, when he saw the whole sky was the face of God. He told Krishna the same thing you just told me: I cannot find my steadiness, I cannot find my calm. There is no shame in it. It only means you have seen how vast the world truly is."