Kiran sat cross-legged on a warm flat rock at the edge of the Krishna river, watching the brown water slide past. Thatha sat beside him, a strip of cream-coloured cloth across his knees, his bamboo kalam dipped in rust-red dye as he drew the curling tail of a peacock.

"Thatha," Kiran said, trailing his fingers in the cool water, "where does this river start?"

"In the hills, far to the west," said Thatha. "A place called Mahabaleshwar. A tiny spring you could cover with your two hands."

Kiran frowned. "And where does the spring start?"

"From rain. Rain that fell from clouds."

"And the clouds?"

"From the sea, lifted up by the sun."

Kiran sat up. "And the sea? And the very first water? And the first cloud? What was the very, very first thing — the thing that nothing came before?"

Thatha laughed, a soft sound, and set down his kalam. "Now you have asked the question the great sages asked. The ones who sat in caves for a hundred years. They followed everything back, the way you just did — water to spring, spring to rain, rain to sea — looking for the very first beginning."

"Did they find it?"

"No," said Thatha. "And do you know why? Because to point at the beginning of something, you have to be standing outside it, before it. But there is nothing before the source of all things. The gods came from it. The sages came from it. The sun and the sea and this little river came from it. They are all inside the story. None of them was there before the story began."

Kiran looked at the water rushing past, endless and silver in the afternoon light. "So nobody knows where it starts?"

"The river knows it flows," said Thatha gently. "But it cannot turn around and watch its own first drop. Krishna says the same of himself: even the wisest cannot trace his origin, because he is the origin. He is the place everything begins — and a beginning has nothing before it to begin from."

Kiran was quiet for a long while. The peacock on the cloth seemed to watch the river too. "That's a little bit scary," he finally said.

"Or wonderful," said Thatha, picking up his kalam again. "It means the deepest thing of all is something even the greatest minds can only bow to, not capture. Some mysteries you do not solve. You sit beside them, the way we are sitting beside this river, and you let them be big."