Deep in the great forest, where the trees grew so close that the sunlight came down in thin gold ribbons, there lived a Bhil tribal woman named Shabari's kin — though this is the story of another woman, older still, whose name the forest kept to itself.

She was poor. She owned a clay pot, a grinding stone, and a single faded shawl. No priest had ever come to her village. She could not read a word of the Vedas. She had never seen the inside of a grand temple with its bells and its lamps and its chanting.

But beside the forest path stood a smooth grey stone, half-sunk in the earth, worn round by a thousand rains. And one morning, long ago, she had decided in her simple heart that the divine lived in that stone. She did not know if this was allowed. She did not know the proper mantras. She only knew that her heart needed somewhere to pour its love.

So every single day, before the birds were fully awake, she came to the stone. She washed it with water carried from the stream in her cupped hands. She rubbed it with a little wild turmeric until it glowed soft yellow. She laid a single forest flower before it — a flame-of-the-forest blossom, red as a coal. And she talked to it the way you talk to your dearest friend: about her aching back, about the deer she had seen, about her hopes and her small sorrows.

A learned pilgrim passed through one day and saw her. "Old mother," he said, not unkindly, "that is only a stone. You do not even know the right way to worship. You have no temple, no scripture, no priest."

She looked up at him with eyes as clear as the stream. "I have my love," she said simply, "and I give it every day."

That night the pilgrim dreamed. In his dream a voice said: Do not pity her. Her faith is one of the steadiest in all the forest — and do you know why? I am the one who keeps it steady. Whoever loves Me through any form, with a true heart, I myself make their faith unshakable. She does not hold on to Me. I hold on to her.

The pilgrim woke before dawn, walked back along the path, and bowed — not to the stone, but to the woman who knelt before it, her face lit gold by her little lamp.