Epilogue. The Answer by the Lamp

Almost exactly a year later, the friend whose question had started everything came to the house for the first time, with a school project as the excuse. Dusk arrived while they worked. 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 and 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. White light is one, and the prism shows seven colors. The murti, the statue in the shrine, a doorway, like the photo of someone you love. The lamp. She smiled. The lamp is a four-thousand-year-old attention anchor, a fixed point for the mind. It was also her great-grandmother’s. Both facts are true at once, and neither one embarrasses the other.

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

An old man stood in the verandah doorway with his newspaper, pretending not to listen. No sound came from him. 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, without beginning or end.