On a clear night in Mithila, when the power in the village had gone out and the houses sat in friendly darkness, Ravi climbed onto the flat roof with his grandmother. Moti, his puppy, scrambled up the last step after them and flopped down between their feet.

"Lie back," said Nani. "All the way back. Let your eyes get used to it."

Ravi lay down on the warm clay roof and looked up. At first he saw only a handful of stars. But Nani was right — the longer he looked, the more appeared. The few became dozens. The dozens became hundreds. Faint ones swam up out of the black like fish rising in a dark pond, until the whole sky was crowded with light.

"How many are there?" Ravi whispered.

"Count them," said Nani, with a smile in her voice.

So Ravi tried. He counted a bright one near the rooftop edge, then another, then a cluster he couldn't keep separate, then a smudge of light that turned out to be a thousand stars too close together to tell apart. He lost his place. He started again. He lost it again.

"I can't," he laughed. "Every time I think I've got them, there are more."

"That's the right answer," said Nani. "Some things are not made to be counted. They are made to be wondered at."

Ravi noticed then how *different* every star was. Some were tiny and blue, some big and orange, some pulsed, some sat perfectly still. Some hung in arcs, some in scattered handfuls, some in a great river of light that Nani called the Akash Ganga. No two were quite the same.

"It's like one sky wearing a thousand faces," he said.

Nani reached over and squeezed his hand. "Now you understand the verse I was telling you about. When Krishna said, *Behold my forms — by the hundreds, by the thousands, every kind, every colour, every shape.* This is what he meant. Not one God in one body, but the One appearing as all of it. Every star. Every colour. More shapes than you could ever finish counting in a hundred lifetimes."

Ravi lay very still under the endless sky, feeling at once very small and very lucky. Moti sighed and rested his chin on Ravi's arm, and the two of them watched the countless, colourful, shining faces of the night.