In a hermitage beside a slow green river lived a family unlike any other in the valley. The grandfather meditated. The grandmother meditated. The mother and father, the uncles, even the old aunt who cooked the rice — all of them, every dawn and every dusk, sat with closed eyes and quiet faces while the river murmured by.

Into this family a baby was born. They named him Ketu.

From the very first, Ketu was a strange and peaceful child. While other babies in the village screamed and squirmed, Ketu would lie still and watch the light move across the ceiling for an hour at a time, perfectly content. When he learned to sit up, he liked best to sit cross-legged near the meditating elders, swaying a little, his small face calm.

"He sits like he remembers how," the grandmother said one evening, watching him.

"Perhaps he does," said the grandfather. And he told the family an old teaching — that a soul who had practised meditation in a former life, but had run out of time before reaching the goal, might be born again into a home exactly like theirs. Born among yogis. Born where the very air smells of stillness.

"Such a birth," the grandfather said softly, "is the rarest of all. Far rarer than being born into riches. Most souls are scattered into noisy, grabbing households and must find the quiet path the hard way, alone. But a few — a precious few — open their eyes already cradled in wisdom, with teachers waiting all around them like a forest waits for a seed."

Little Ketu, hearing none of this, reached out and closed his small fist around his grandfather's thumb, and then closed his eyes, and breathed slow.

The family said nothing more. The river ran on. And the boy who had perhaps practised long ago, in a body none of them had ever seen, sat among them in the dusk as though he had simply come home.