Nani Tara knelt in the garden, and Meera knelt beside her.

The soil between them was the deep red-brown of Andhra earth, still damp from the morning watering. It smelled rich and alive — that particular smell of wet mud and green things growing that Meera had loved ever since she was small enough to eat fistfuls of it. Nani had set out a row of small clay pots, each one no bigger than a teacup, and beside them lay a single tulsi seed in Meera's palm. It was impossibly tiny — smaller than a mustard seed, almost too small to see.

"That little thing is going to become a whole plant?" Meera asked, squinting at it.

"If you treat it well," Nani said. She showed Meera how to press the seed into the soil with her thumb — gently, not too deep — and cover it with a thin blanket of earth. Meera patted the surface smooth and set the pot on the east-facing windowsill, where the morning sun would find it first.

Then she waited.

Day one: nothing. Day two: nothing. Day three she poked the soil with a stick and Nani caught her hand. "Would you open an oven every five minutes to check if the cake is rising?" Day four and five: still nothing. Meera began to suspect the seed was dead, or that she had buried it too deep, or that the sparrows had somehow stolen it through the drainage hole.

On the seventh morning, she almost didn't look.

But she did — and there it was. A tiny green hook, no thicker than a thread, curling up through the crack in the soil. It was the most stubborn, determined little thing she had ever seen. It had pushed through pure darkness, shoved aside crumbs of earth ten times its weight, and now it stood trembling in the sunlight like someone stepping out of a cave for the first time.

"Nani!" Meera's voice came out as a whisper, as if speaking loudly might scare it back underground.

Nani Tara came, wiped her hands on her cotton sari, and knelt beside the windowsill. She looked at the shoot for a long time. Then she said, very quietly: "Who do you think pushed it up?"

"The seed?"

"The seed is the size of a grain of sand. Something stronger pushed it. There is a force inside the earth, Meera — the same force that holds up the mountains and keeps the rivers in their beds and stops the ground under our feet from crumbling into nothing. That force entered the soil and said to this seed, 'Grow.' And the moonlight that falls on the leaves at night — that is the sap of life, feeding every plant while you sleep."

Meera touched the tiny shoot with one fingertip. It was warm from the sun, cool from the soil, and somehow — impossibly — already reaching higher.