The kitchen smelled of tamarind and roasting cumin, and Meera's stomach was making sounds that could be heard two rooms away.

"That," Nani Tara said from the stove, stirring a pot of sambar with a long steel ladle, "is extremely rude and extremely honest."

Meera pressed her hands against her stomach, embarrassed. The growl came again — low and rumbling, like a small animal trapped under a blanket. Her cousin Ravi, visiting from Hyderabad, burst out laughing from the dining table where he was laying out banana leaves.

"Don't laugh," Nani said, pointing the ladle at Ravi. "Your stomach was making the same speech ten minutes ago."

Dinner appeared in waves. First the rice — a white mountain on each banana leaf, steaming and fragrant. Then the sambar, poured in a golden river alongside it. Avakaya pickle, bright red, so sour it made the inside of Meera's cheeks tingle before she even tasted it. Pappu — thick dal, soft as velvet. Curd, cool and white, to calm the fire of the pickle. And a small steel cup of rasam for each of them, thin and peppery, to be sipped at the end.

Meera ate with her right hand, mixing the rice and sambar into neat little balls. The flavours were so good she closed her eyes. Ravi was eating twice as fast and making twice the mess.

Halfway through, Meera's stomach growled again — but differently this time. Not the angry growl of hunger. A softer, churning sound, like water turning in a pot.

"Nani, what's happening in there?"

Nani set down her own banana leaf and folded her hands over her stomach. "That rumble, Meera, is a fire. Not the kind that burns your finger — a quiet, invisible fire that lives inside every person, every animal, every creature that eats. The old books call it Vaishvanara — the universal flame."

"A fire? In my stomach?"

"As real as the fire in this stove. When you chew the rice, the fire begins. When you swallow the sambar, the fire meets it. When you lick the pickle from your fingers and sip the rasam — four different kinds of food, four different ways of eating — the fire knows what to do with each one. And all the while, your breath feeds it, in and out, in and out, like a bellows keeping a forge alive."

Ravi looked up, a grain of rice on his chin. "So we all have a temple fire inside us?"

"Exactly," Nani said. "Every meal is a small offering. Every belly is a small temple. You carry something sacred inside you and you didn't even know it — until your stomach decided to announce the evening prayers."

Meera laughed so hard that a grain of rice nearly came out of her nose, and Nani pretended to be horrified, and Ravi clapped, and the kitchen felt, for a moment, like the warmest temple in the world.