It was the first warm week after the monsoon, and Meera had two neem seeds in her palm.

Dadaji had given them to her, plucked from the great neem tree behind the house — the one whose shade cooled the whole courtyard, whose leaves Dadi crushed into medicine. "Plant them," he had said, "and let us see what happens."

Meera thought hard about where to plant them. The first seed she pressed into the soil of a pretty painted pot — a small clay pot, just the right size to keep on her windowsill where she could watch it every day. The second seed she carried to the far edge of the garden and tucked into the open ground, near the wall, where she would not see it so easily.

For a few weeks both seeds did exactly the same thing. Both cracked open. Both sent up a thread of green. Both unfolded their first tiny leaves, no bigger than a baby's fingernail. Meera was sure her windowsill seed, the one she loved and watered every morning, would do best of all.

But by the end of the dry season, something strange had happened.

The seedling in the little pot had grown to the height of a pencil — and then stopped. Its roots had circled round and round, looking for more earth, and found only the smooth clay wall of the pot. Its leaves yellowed at the edges. It had given all it could give. The pot was full.

The seedling in the open ground, the one she had almost forgotten, had grown to her knee. Its roots had gone down and down into the deep, dark, endless earth, drinking from water she could not see. By the next year it was taller than Dadaji. One day, she knew, it would shade a whole courtyard, like the great tree it came from.

Dadaji crouched beside her in the garden. "Same seed," he said. "Same sun, same rain. What was different?"

"The space," Meera said slowly. "The pot was small, so the tree stayed small. The open earth had no end, so the tree could grow without end."

Dadaji nodded. "The heart is like that. Aim it at small things and you get small rewards that fill up and stop. Open it to the One who has no end, and there is no limit to how far you can grow."

Meera looked at the great neem above them, then at her two little seedlings, and understood.