Long ago, the gentle devas and the grasping asuras both lived under the same sky, and at the centre of the world there hung a great golden bell. When the bell was rung, its sound carried a single message to anyone who would listen: "Come home. You are loved. Turn this way."

The devas heard the bell each morning and turned toward it, the way a sunflower turns to the sun. Their faces softened. Their hands opened. Year after year they grew lighter and kinder.

There was one asura named Vidha who lived close enough to hear the bell too. But Vidha was always busy. There was a neighbour to envy, a grudge to polish, a treasure to guard, a slight to remember. "Later," he told himself each morning when the bell rang. "I will turn toward it later. First I must get even. First I must get more."

And a strange thing happened, so slow he never noticed it. Each time he refused to turn, the bell sounded a little fainter to him, not because it rang less loudly, but because he had wandered a little further away. His ears grew used to ignoring it. His heart grew used to the cold.

Many lifetimes passed. The devas, who had turned toward the bell again and again, lived in a world full of light. Vidha, who had said "later" again and again, woke each time in a harder, narrower, darker place, and could barely remember that a bell had ever rung at all.

Krishna told Arjuna this so that he would understand: no one is thrown away. The bell never stops ringing. But the longer a person refuses to turn toward the light, the harder it becomes to hear — until "later" has quietly cost them everything. The only thing Vidha ever needed to do was turn his face, one single time, toward the sound that had been calling him home all along.