Prologue — The Question by the Lamp

The evening Meera came home with the question, the rain had just stopped. She was fifteen, the kind of fifteen that keeps a magnifying glass in one pocket and a folded star-chart in the other, and she found her grandfather, her Thatha, on the verandah, lighting the small brass lamp he lit every dusk, the way his father had, and his father before that.

“Thatha,” she said, “today my friend asked me why we have so many gods, and whether it’s true we worship statues and cows, and whether any of it is, you know… real. And I didn’t know what to say. I got angry, and then I got quiet, and I hate both of those.”

Thatha did not look up from the lamp. He steadied the flame, and then he smiled. “Good,” he said. “Anger and silence are what we reach for when we do not know. So we will fix the not-knowing. Every evening, you and I will sit by this lamp, and we will walk through the whole inheritance — the books and the seers, the gods and the worlds, the yoga and the temples, the duties and the purpose — the way your great-great-grandfathers walked their students through it, under trees, beside rivers, a very long time ago.”

“And I can ask anything?”

“You must ask everything. That is the first rule of this house and, as you will discover, the first rule of this dharma. Its foundational sentence is an inquiry, and its greatest teachers were children who could not be bribed out of a question. We will follow three rules on this journey: everything I teach you, I will show you where it is written; we will always say plainly whether a thing is a teaching, a practice, or a resonance; and we will never, ever pretend a poem is a proof, because the poems are magnificent enough without pretending.”

Meera pulled her chair closer to the lamp. Outside, the last clouds cleared, and the first stars, the seven of the Saptarishi mandala among them, though she did not know their name yet, came out over the roof. “Okay, Thatha,” she said. “Start at the beginning.”

“There is no beginning,” he said, delighted. “That is the first lesson.”