Dawn had not yet broken over Nathdwara, but Dadi was already awake.

Meera padded into the courtyard, rubbing her eyes, and found her grandmother sitting cross-legged on a low wooden stool. In her lap was a brass bowl heaped with pearls — small, round, soft-white — and beside it a little mound of fresh tulsi leaves still wet with dew. Every morning Dadi strung a fresh garland for Shrinathji, the child-Krishna of the temple, before the priests opened the silver doors.

"Can I help?" Meera asked, sitting down close.

Dadi smiled and handed her a single pearl. It was beautiful — it caught the first grey light and glowed. Meera turned it in her fingers. "It's so pretty," she said. "Look how it shines."

"It is pretty," Dadi agreed. "But put it down on the floor."

Meera set it on the stone. It rolled a little and stopped, a lonely white bead going nowhere.

Dadi picked up her work again. Her fingers moved without looking — pearl, tulsi leaf, pearl, tulsi leaf — and slowly a garland grew, looping down toward the floor in a graceful curve. When it was long enough she lifted it high with both hands so it hung shining in the lamplight.

"Now look," she said. "What do you see?"

"A garland," said Meera. "Pearls and leaves."

"And what holds them up?"

Meera leaned close. She could just make out, hidden inside every pearl, a fine pale thread — so thin it almost wasn't there. "The thread," she whispered.

"The thread," said Dadi. "When you wear the garland, you see only the pearls. Nobody praises the thread. Nobody even notices it. But take the thread away —" she pretended to pull it out, "— and what happens?"

"Everything falls," said Meera. "All the pearls roll away on their own."

Dadi nodded slowly. "The Gita says the whole world is like this garland. The sun, the rivers, the mountains, you, me, every person and animal and star — we are the bright pearls. And running through all of us, holding us together so quietly that almost no one sees it, is the one Lord. He is the thread. Without him, not a single pearl would stay."

She lowered the garland gently into the brass bowl to carry to the temple.

Meera looked at her own pearl on the floor, then at her grandmother's hands, then at the brightening sky. For the rest of that day she kept catching herself wondering about the thread she could not see, running quietly through everything that she could.