All winter the forest had been sleeping.

The trees stood bare and brown. The grass lay flat and grey. Cold mists drifted between the trunks in the early mornings, and the birds had grown quiet, fluffed up against the chill. The earth seemed to be holding its breath, waiting.

And then, one morning, the season turned.

It began with a single warm breeze. It came up from the south, soft and sweet-smelling, and it slipped through the forest the way a flute melody slips through a quiet evening. Wherever it touched, something woke.

The first to answer were the mango trees. Overnight their bare branches filled with tiny pale blossoms, and the whole grove smelled suddenly of honey. Then the ashoka trees flushed scarlet with flowers, clustered so thick you could barely see the leaves. The kimshuka trees burst into flame- orange blooms until they looked like trees set gently on fire. The forest floor, grey only days before, was now sprinkled with yellow and white and rose, as though someone had walked through scattering colour by the handful.

The bees came back, drowsy and delighted, humming from bloom to bloom. The cuckoo, the koel, found her voice again and sang her long rising call across the canopy, over and over, as if she could not contain her joy. Butterflies rose in clouds. The whole world, which had been sleeping in dull colours, threw off its blanket and dressed itself in flowers.

The old sages who lived in the forest came out of their huts and breathed it in. This was Vasanta — the spring, the season the poets called kusumakara, "the maker of flowers." Of all the turning seasons, this was the one that made even tired hearts feel young again.

"Among all the seasons," Krishna told Arjuna, "I am the flower-bearing spring."

He chose the season that wakes the world up — the time of new blossoms, sweet air, and singing birds. Wherever life bursts out fresh and beautiful after a long cold wait, Krishna said, that gladness is a spark of Him.

Arjuna, sitting in his chariot in the dust of war, closed his eyes for a moment and remembered what spring smelled like. And even there, on that grim field, the thought of it lifted his heart.