Ravi couldn't sleep. Something had woken him — not a sound exactly, but the absence of one. The ceiling fan had stopped. Power cut, again.

He lay in the dark for a moment, listening. Then he heard it: the soft scrape of a match being struck, and a tiny golden light bloomed through the gap under his bedroom door. He swung his feet off the bed and padded across the cool floor.

His mother was in the kitchen. She had lit the brass diya before the small shelf of gods, and its flame made her shadow stretch tall against the wall. She was already moving — filling the steel water filter, sweeping the courtyard with the short broom, setting the heavy pressure cooker on the gas stove, all by the light of that single flickering flame.

"Amma," Ravi whispered from the doorway. "It's not even five o'clock. Why don't you sleep more?"

She looked up and smiled. She didn't seem tired at all. Her eyes were calm, the way the surface of the pond near their house looked at dawn before anyone threw stones into it.

"Come, sit," she said, patting the stone step beside her. Ravi sat. The courtyard smelled of neem leaves and the first hint of jasmine from the vine climbing the wall. Somewhere a rooster was waking up, trying out its voice.

"Do you see the lamp?" his mother asked, nodding toward the diya. "I light it before I do anything else. Then I fill the water, because your father's throat is always dry in the morning. I sweep the courtyard because the sparrows come early and I like them to land on clean ground. I cook because your little sister is always hungry before school."

"But that's just... chores," Ravi said.

His mother laughed softly. "Is it? When I fill the water for your father, I think of him. When I sweep for the sparrows, I think of them. When I cook for your sister, every roti I roll has her face in my mind. I'm not doing chores, Ravi. I'm praying."

The pressure cooker began to whistle. The first pale line of light crept over the courtyard wall. Ravi watched his mother move from one task to the next, unhurried, graceful, as if each action were a bead on a mala and she was counting them quietly in her heart.

He understood something then that he couldn't quite put into words. When you offer every action — even the smallest, most ordinary one — to the people you love, the doing itself becomes devotion. You don't need a temple. The kitchen is enough. The courtyard is enough. The lamp before dawn is enough.