Before the birds woke, before the smoke of the first cooking fires curled into the sky, a young hermit named Dhruva walked down to the bank of the Ganga and sat upon a flat grey stone.

For years he had practised. In the beginning his mind had been a storm — wanting, worrying, planning, regretting, never still. He had brought it back a thousand thousand times, gently, the way one calls a wandering animal home. And slowly, over the seasons, the storm had quieted. The wanting had cooled. The restless heat that the sages call *rajas* had settled, the way river mud settles to the bottom and leaves the water clear.

This morning he sat, and there was nothing left to settle.

His breath came slow and even. His mind was a still pool with no ripple on it. He was not waiting for anything, not chasing anything, not afraid of losing anything. There was simply a vast, clear quiet, and in that quiet he felt that he was not separate from the river, or the sky, or the cool stone beneath him. The small, worried Dhruva had grown still, and something boundless had opened where he used to be.

Then the sun lifted over the far shore.

The first thread of light touched the water and ran toward him across the river in a road of gold. It touched his closed eyelids. And up from the very centre of his stillness rose a joy — but not a joy that came from outside, not from the warmth or the beauty of the morning. It rose from within him, the way light rises from within a lamp. It had no reason and needed none. It was simply there, vast and clean and full, like the morning itself.

Dhruva did not laugh or weep. He only sat, brimming, as the gold spread over him.

A fisherman drifting past in his boat saw the hermit on the stone, perfectly still, his face lit from inside as much as from the sun. The fisherman did not know what he was looking at. But he rowed very softly, so as not to disturb it, and carried home the strange feeling that he had passed something holy on the water.

For Dhruva had found the supreme joy — the one the storms had hidden all along. It had been waiting beneath the restlessness the whole time, the way the still, clear water waits beneath the churning of the river.