Lakshmi had a friend named Priya who was everything Lakshmi was not.

Priya was calm the way the sea is calm on a windless day. She never rushed. She never made lists. Her desk at school looked like a cheerful explosion — papers stacked at odd angles, pens without caps, a half-eaten mango hidden under a textbook — and yet Priya never seemed stressed. She floated through exams, through group projects, through life, with a loose, easy grace that made everyone around her feel relaxed.

Lakshmi, by contrast, was a list-maker. She had a notebook where she wrote down every task for the day, numbered and underlined. She checked her homework twice. She organized her desk every evening, pencils sorted by length, books stacked by subject. Aarav called her "the general." She pretended to be annoyed but secretly liked it.

Then one week, Lakshmi decided she wanted to be more like Priya.

She stopped making her lists. She left her desk untidy. She did her homework once and didn't check it. She tried to be "chill" — a word Priya used often and Lakshmi had never once used in her life.

By Wednesday, she was miserable.

She forgot to bring her geography project to school because it wasn't on a list. She lost her favourite pen under a pile of unsorted papers. She got a careless mistake on her maths test — a mistake she would have caught if she'd checked. And worst of all, she didn't feel calm. She felt like a bird in a cage, beating her wings against something invisible.

That evening she sat on the steps of the house, chin in her hands, watching Dadu untangle fishing line on the verandah. He worked slowly, following each knot with his fingers, never pulling too hard.

"I tried to be like Priya," she said. "It didn't work."

Dadu didn't look up. "Why did you want to be like Priya?"

"Because she's so... easy. She doesn't worry. She doesn't need everything in order."

"And you do."

"Yes. And I hate that about myself."

Dadu set down the line. He looked at her — really looked, the way he did when he was about to say something that would stick.

"A river cannot pretend to be a mountain," he said. "And a mountain cannot pretend to be a river. The river moves. That is its gift — it carries things, it nourishes the fields, it finds its way around every obstacle. The mountain stays. That is its gift — it shelters, it holds the snow, it gives the river a place to begin."

He picked up the line again. "Priya is a river. You are a mountain. If you try to flow, you will crumble. If she tries to stand still, she will dry up. Your nature is your gift, Lakshmi. The lists, the checking, the organizing — that is not a flaw. That is how you hold the world steady for the people around you."

Lakshmi sat with that for a long time. The next morning, she made her list. She checked her homework twice. She sorted her pencils.

And she didn't feel ashamed of it anymore.