Aarav had decided he was done with drawing.

The other boys in the village played cricket and mended nets and talked about boats, and not one of them sat scribbling in a notebook the way he did. So one afternoon he pushed his pencils and his battered sketchbook to the very back of a drawer and told himself, firmly, "I'm finished. I won't draw anymore. I'll be normal like everyone else."

For three days he tried.

On the first day, waiting for the fishing boats, he found a stick in his hand and a perfect little crab scratched into the wet sand before he even knew he was doing it. He rubbed it out fast and looked around, hoping no one had seen.

On the second day, sitting in class, the edge of his notebook page filled up with the curling lines of a wave and a gull, while the teacher talked about something else entirely.

On the third day Dadu found him in the dark of the back room, the drawer open, the sketchbook out, drawing the lamp flame by its own light.

Aarav froze, caught. "I keep telling myself to stop," he admitted miserably. "I don't want to be the strange one. But my hand just — it does it on its own. I can't seem to stop."

Dadu pulled up a stool and looked at the drawing — the flame caught so well you could almost feel its warmth. "Why are you fighting it, my boy?"

"Because it's not what the others do."

"The others are not you," Dadu said gently. "This is how you are made. You can spend your whole life shoving it into a drawer and feeling ashamed every time it sneaks back out — and it will sneak back out, again and again, because it is yours. Or —" he tapped the open sketchbook, "— you can stop hiding, pick up the pencil on purpose, and become as good at it as you can be. You don't get to choose whether you are an artist, Aarav. You only get to choose whether you are a hiding one or a happy one."

Aarav looked at the flame on the page, then at the real flame, and for the first time in three days he stopped feeling like he had to apologise for it.