Meera found the mirror shard on a Tuesday morning, half-buried in the
garden mud behind Nani Tara's house.
She had been digging for earthworms — a science project, something
about soil layers and composting — when her trowel clinked against
something hard. She brushed the mud away. A piece of mirror, no bigger
than her palm, triangular, its edges rough where it had broken from
something larger. She wiped it on her kurta and held it up.
The entire sky sat inside it.
Not a piece of the sky. The whole thing — the pale blue of a March
morning, the wisp of cloud drifting above the tamarind tree, the dark
speck of a kite circling high and lazy. All of it, captured in a shard
the size of a chapati.
"Nani, look!" Meera ran to the verandah where Nani Tara sat with her
reading glasses and a cup of ginger tea, a crossword puzzle open on
her lap. "The whole sky fits in this tiny piece!"
Nani Tara took the shard, held it at arm's length, and tilted it
slowly. The sky shifted and swam inside the glass. "Now put some mud
on it," she said.
"What? Why would I—"
"Just a little. On the shiny side."
Meera smeared a fingertip of garden mud across the surface. The sky
blurred. The kite vanished. The blue became a brown smudge.
"Is the sky gone?" Nani Tara asked.
"No," Meera said slowly. "It's still up there. The mirror just can't
show it properly anymore."
"Exactly." Nani Tara set down her tea. The cup clinked against the
saucer the way it always did, a sound Meera had heard a thousand
mornings. "Krishna says something beautiful in the Gita. He says that
every living creature — every person, every bird, every earthworm
in your garden — is a tiny fragment of the divine. Like this shard
is a fragment of a larger mirror."
"So we're all little pieces of God?"
"Eternal pieces. That's the word he uses — sanātana. Not broken off
and lost. Still connected. Still carrying the whole sky inside." Nani
Tara tapped the muddy shard. "But being in a body — having eyes that
get dazzled, ears that get distracted, a tongue that wants sweets, a
mind that worries about exams — it's like mud on the glass. The
reflection gets cloudy. We forget what we're reflecting."
Meera rubbed the mud off with her thumb. The sky flooded back —
brighter than before, it seemed, because she had seen it disappear
and return. The kite was still there, still circling.
"So the struggle," she said, thinking out loud, "is just the mud?"
Nani Tara smiled and picked up her crossword. "The struggle is just
the mud. And the sky never left."
