The boy had been sitting under the banyan tree for six days.

His name was Suvrata, and he was fourteen — old enough for the homesick ache in his chest that wouldn't go away. He was a student at the ashram of Rishi Vasishtha, in the foothills where the Ganga was still narrow and cold and you could hear it over the stones all night long.

Vasishtha had given his students a task: meditate on the formless Brahman. Not on Vishnu's blue face, not on Shiva's crescent moon, not on any image at all. Just the pure, shapeless truth behind everything.

The other students seemed to settle into it, sitting cross-legged under the sal trees, their faces smooth as river stones. Suvrata tried. He closed his eyes. He reached for the formless.

Nothing.

Not nothing as in emptiness — nothing as in his mind refused to be empty. Pictures rushed in. His mother's face, brown and warm, the small red bindi between her eyebrows. The courtyard of his village home where the tulsi plant grew in a clay pot. The smell of rain on dry earth — that sharp, sweet, dusty smell that made his throat tight.

He pushed the pictures away. They came back. He pushed harder. They returned louder. By the third day, he wanted to cry. By the fifth, he did — quietly, so the other students wouldn't hear.

On the sixth evening, Rishi Vasishtha came and sat beside him. The old sage moved slowly, his white beard brushing his chest. He did not ask what was wrong. He simply sat, the way a mountain sits beside a river.

After a long silence, Suvrata spoke. "I can't do it, Guruji. Every time I reach for the formless, I see my mother's face. I smell the rain. My mind won't let go."

Vasishtha was quiet. A parrot chattered above. The Ganga murmured below.

"Suvrata," he said gently. "Your love for your mother — where do you think it comes from?"

Suvrata blinked. "From... my heart?"

"And where does the rain come from? And the river? And the tulsi growing in that clay pot?"

"From... the earth? From the sky?"

"From Brahman," Vasishtha said simply. "Everything you keep seeing — your mother's face, the rain, the courtyard — those are not distractions. They are doorways. The formless lives inside the form."

He placed his hand on Suvrata's shoulder. "You are trying to leap over your own heart to reach God. Don't. Start with what you love. Love itself will carry you to what cannot be named."

Suvrata closed his eyes again. This time, he let his mother's face stay. He held it the way you hold a lamp in a dark room. And behind the face, faintly, like music heard through a wall, he felt something vast and quiet and warm — something without edges, without end.

He didn't try to grab it. He just let it be there. And for the first time in six days, he smiled.