The tide was going out.

Aarav stood ankle-deep in the warm shallows off Puri beach, watching the sea pull back and leave the wet sand shining like a mirror. In that mirror he could see himself — a thin boy with knobbly knees, his hair sticking up, his shadow stretching long behind him in the late afternoon sun.

He waggled his fingers. The reflection waggled back. He stuck out his tongue. So did the boy in the sand.

"Dadu," he said, without turning around, "is that me?"

His grandfather was sitting on an upturned fishing boat further up the beach, mending a net with a wooden needle. He didn't look up. "Is what you, child?"

"That. In the sand. The reflection." Aarav frowned at it. "It's got my face. But it's not really me, is it? It's just a picture of me."

Dadu's needle paused.

"And these." Aarav held up his hands and turned them over. "My hands, my legs, my belly. When I was a baby my body was tiny. Now it's bigger. One day it'll be old and wrinkly like yours." He grinned. "So my body keeps changing. If it's always changing... is the body really me? Or is it just something I'm wearing?"

Now Dadu set down the net.

"And my thoughts," Aarav went on, the questions tumbling out faster now, the way they did when something had been buzzing in his head all day. "A minute ago I was thinking about mangoes. Now I'm thinking about this. My thoughts come and go like the waves — splash, gone, splash, gone. So my thoughts can't be me either, can they?"

He turned at last to face his grandfather, his feet sinking a little in the soft sand.

"Dadu — there's a *me* watching all of it. Watching the body change. Watching the thoughts come and go. Watching this reflection wave back at me. *That* watcher — the one who's noticing everything — is *that* the real me?"

For a long moment Dadu said nothing. A gull cried overhead. The sea hissed in and out.

Then the old man smiled, and it was a slow, surprised, delighted smile.

"Aarav," he said softly, "do you know that thousands of years ago, on a battlefield, a great warrior named Arjuna asked his teacher Krishna the very same question? He wanted to know which part of us is the changing field — the body, the world, the thoughts — and which part is the quiet knower who watches it all. Come. Sit. Let me tell you what Krishna said."