The monsoon was late that year over Mithila, and the whole village kept one eye on the sky.

Ravi sat on the roof with Nani in the heavy, waiting heat, watching a single grey cloud drift in from the east. It looked promising — fat and dark at its heart. "Rain," Ravi said hopefully. "Finally."

But as they watched, a high wind got into the cloud and began to pull it apart. First it stretched thin. Then it tore. Ragged grey scraps drifted off in three directions, thinner and thinner, until there was nothing left but a smudge, and then not even that. No rain fell. The cloud had not joined the great storm-banks gathering over the hills, and it had not poured its water on the fields either. It had simply scattered into nothing, belonging nowhere.

Ravi groaned. "It just... disappeared. It didn't rain and it didn't even stay a cloud. It wasted itself."

Nani was quiet for a moment, watching the empty sky. "That torn cloud," she said at last, "is exactly the fear that worried the great Arjuna, long ago on the battlefield."

Ravi turned to her. "A cloud worried Arjuna?"

"A cloud like that one." She tucked her shawl around her shoulders. "Arjuna had asked Krishna about the seeker who tries to find calm but slips before he gets there. And then a darker fear came over him, and he had to say it. 'Doesn't such a person lose *both* ways?' he asked. 'He let go of his ordinary, comfortable life to chase something higher — but he never reached the higher thing either. So now he has neither. Doesn't he just scatter and vanish, like a cloud torn apart by the wind, with no ground to stand on, lost and confused on the road to the Highest?'"

Ravi looked back at the smear of nothing where the cloud had been. He understood the fear in his stomach. To give up one thing and not reach the other — to end up with nothing at all, belonging nowhere. It was a lonely, frightening picture.

"Did Krishna let that be true?" Ravi asked in a small voice.

Nani smiled, and far over the hills, the real storm clouds were stacking up dark and full. "No," she said. "And what he answered is one of the kindest things in the whole Gita. But Arjuna had one more thing to say first."