The rooster hadn't even crowed when Meera's eyes flew open.

Something was different about the light. She pushed aside her cotton blanket and padded barefoot to the east-facing window of their house in Vijayawada. The rice paddies stretched out flat and silver-grey in the pre-dawn dark, and then — there — the first edge of the sun broke the horizon line, orange as a ripe persimmon, and the whole world caught fire. The water in the paddies turned molten gold. The palm trees became black silhouettes with crowns of flame. Even the dust motes drifting past Meera's nose lit up like tiny planets.

"Nani, come look!" she called.

Nani Tara was already awake, sitting on her wooden stool in the kitchen, oiling her long silver braid. She smiled. "I've watched that sunrise for sixty-seven years, Meera. It still surprises me."

By afternoon the sun was too fierce to admire. Meera spent the hot hours helping Nani sort seeds at the kitchen table — mustard, fenugreek, coriander — while the ceiling fan ticked overhead. But that evening, after dinner, the sky did something new. The moon rose over the neighbour's tamarind tree, fat and almost full, the colour of warm milk. It poured a completely different kind of light through the window — cool, blue-white, gentle, the kind of light that makes everything look like a dream.

"Nani," Meera said slowly, pressing her nose against the glass, "the sunlight this morning was hot and gold. The moonlight right now is cold and silver. How can they both be light?"

Nani set down her reading glasses and came to the window. "Wait," she said. "One more."

She led Meera to the puja room, where the brass deepam sat on its small stone shelf. Nani struck a match, and the cotton wick caught. A single flame — no bigger than Meera's thumbnail — pushed the darkness back in a warm, flickering circle. The brass figures of Krishna and Radha on the shelf seemed to move in the wavering glow, as if they were breathing.

"Three lights," Nani said. "The sun lights the rice fields. The moon lights the dreams. The lamp lights the prayer. And yet —" she placed her warm hand over Meera's, "it is the same light wearing three different clothes."

"Like one singer's voice coming through three different radios?" Meera asked.

Nani laughed, the lines around her eyes crinkling. "Exactly like that. The Gita says all this splendour — the fire in the sun, the cool of the moon, the warmth in every lamp — is God's own radiance, lent to the world so that nothing has to sit in the dark."

Meera looked at the little flame. It flickered, steadied, held. She thought about the sunrise, the moonrise, and this tiny brass lamp, and for one strange, clear moment she could almost feel the thread that connected all three — the same brightness, wearing different faces, shining on and on and on.