Meera came home from school one afternoon kicking pebbles all the way up
the lane, because a girl in her class had told her she would never be any
good at painting.
She slumped down on the cool stone floor of the workshop, where her
grandfather sat surrounded by his Pichwai cloths — those great hangings of
Shrinathji, painted in deep blues and warm golds, that travelled from
Nathdwara to temples far away.
"Dadaji," she said, "what's the point. I'll never paint like you."
Mohanlal did not look up from the lotus he was outlining. "Hand me the fine
brush," he said. "And tell me — what do you say to yourself, inside, when
you sit down to paint?"
Meera shrugged. "That I'm going to mess it up. That my lines will be crooked."
"Ah." He dipped the brush. "And do they come out crooked?"
She thought about it. "...Usually."
Her grandfather smiled and finally looked at her. "Listen. When I was your
age I had a teacher who told me something I have never forgotten. He said
that a person is made of what they keep believing. Not what they say once.
What they believe over and over, quietly, every day."
He pointed his brush at the window, where her grandmother Radha Bai was
stringing marigolds for the evening offering, humming, her fingers quick and
sure. "Your Dadi believes, every single morning, that her hands can make
something beautiful for the deity. So they do. She has believed it for fifty
years. She has become it."
"But that's just garlands," Meera said.
"It is the same with everything," he said gently. "A girl who believes,
every day, that she is careless — she slowly becomes careless. A girl who
believes, every day, that she can learn if she keeps trying — she slowly
becomes that. You are not born finished, Meera. You are being painted. And
you are holding the brush."
He turned the cloth toward her and put it in her hands. "So. What will you
believe today?"
Meera looked at the empty corner of the cloth where a leaf needed to go. She
took a slow breath. Then, instead of the old thought, she tried a new one:
*I can make this leaf. Line by line.* And she leaned in, and began.
The first line came out almost straight.
