Ravi sat cross-legged on the cool floor of Nani's painting room, his arms folded tight, his lower lip pushed out. On the mat in front of him lay his whole treasure: a wooden top, three glass marbles, a tin whistle, and a clay elephant with one ear missing.

"If I want to be good," he announced glumly, "I suppose I have to give all this away. The priest said good people don't care about toys."

Nani looked up from her painting of a peacock and laughed — not at him, but warmly, the way she laughed at a clever puppy.

"Give them away? Whoever told you that?" She set down her brush. "Come here and watch."

She picked up the wooden top and spun it on the floor. It hummed and danced in a tight bright circle. Ravi forgot his sulk at once and leaned in, grinning.

"Look at you," Nani said softly. "You are watching the top spin and you are perfectly happy. You are not thinking, 'This is mine, no one else may touch it, I must have a finer top than the neighbour's boy.' You are just enjoying the spinning. That, Ravi, is fine. That is not the problem at all."

The top wobbled and fell. Ravi reached to spin it again.

"Now," said Nani, catching his hand gently, "imagine Moti runs in and bumps the top and it rolls under the cupboard. What happens in here?" She tapped his chest.

Ravi scowled. "I'd be cross. It's mine."

"There," she said, eyes twinkling. "That cross feeling — the clutching, the 'mine, mine, give it back' — that is the thing the wise ones ask you to set down. Not the top. Not the playing. The grabbing."

Ravi looked at his little pile of treasures with new eyes.

"So I can keep my marbles?"

"Keep every one," said Nani. "Play with them all day. Just don't let them keep you. The boy who can lose his favourite marble and still smile — he has already given up more than the man who throws his gold in the river but lies awake missing it. Giving up the grabbing on the inside is the whole of it. That is what they call being a yogi."

Ravi spun the top again, and this time, when it rolled away, he only laughed.