Epilogue — The Answer by the Lamp

It was almost exactly a year later that the friend — the one whose question had started everything — came to the house for the first time, some school project as the excuse. Dusk arrived while they worked, and Meera, without interrupting her sentence, got up, fetched the taper, and lit the brass lamp herself. Her friend watched. “Can I ask you something? Why do you guys do all this? The lamp, the statues, the… all of it. Like, is any of it real?”

Meera felt the old ghosts of the question — the anger, the silence — stir and then settle, like the lamp’s flame steadying after the match. She heard herself answer easily, the way you answer questions about your own family: one reality, many faces, the way white light is one and the prism shows seven colors. The murti a doorway, like the photo of someone you love. The lamp — she smiled — the lamp is a four-thousand-year-old attention anchor, and also it was her great-grandmother’s, and both facts are true at once, and neither one embarrasses the other.

“Huh,” said the friend, and then, after a moment: “That’s actually kind of beautiful. How do you know all this?”

From the verandah doorway, where an old man stood with his newspaper pretending not to listen, came no sound at all, but the lamp-light caught his face, and Meera saw it. “My Thatha and I,” she said, “took a long walk. I can show you the first step, if you want. There’s no beginning, that’s the first lesson.”

The relay had a new runner. It always does. It is, after all, sanatana.