Growing Up Indian, Anywhere

One morning it was the rabbit's turn. The little rabbit walked slowly, very slowly, and arrived long after the sun was high. "Forgive me," he panted. "On the way, another lion stopped me and claimed to be the true king of this forest!"

The lion roared with fury. "Show me this impostor!" The rabbit led him to a deep well and pointed down. "He lives there." Peering into the water, Bhasuraka saw his own fierce reflection and roared at it, and the echo roared back. He leapt in to fight his rival, and that was the last the forest heard of him.

From that day on, the animals played freely under the trees. And whenever a young one asked how such a small creature had won, the elders smiled and said: "A calm mind is stronger than the loudest roar."

One evening the crocodile carried some apples home to his wife. She tasted them and thought: if the fruit is this sweet, the monkey's heart must be sweeter still. "Bring me his heart," she said, "or I shall fall ill." The crocodile was horrified, but at last he agreed.

The next day the crocodile invited the monkey to dinner across the river. Halfway through the water, he confessed his wife's wish. The clever monkey did not panic. "Oh, dear friend!" he cried. "Why didn't you say so earlier? We monkeys keep our hearts safely hanging in the trees. Carry me back and I'll fetch it!"

The moment he touched his branch, the monkey laughed and climbed high out of reach. "A friend who plots harm is no friend at all," he said kindly. "You may keep my apples, but my heart stays with me." And the crocodile swam home, wiser and a little ashamed.

So Morya hid his tail in the bushes and practised singing instead, alone, in the dark. His voice stayed exactly the same, and the garden grew quiet without his bright dances. Even the nightingale missed him. "Why have you stopped dancing?" she asked one morning.

"No one wants to watch a peacock who sings like me," Morya sighed. The nightingale laughed gently. "I cannot dance at all, and no one loves me less. The world doesn't need two nightingales. It needs one you."

So Morya stepped out into the sun, opened his great fan of colours, and danced, with his rusty-gate voice singing joyfully along. The children of the temple clapped the loudest. From that day, whenever his voice cracked, he simply danced a little brighter.

That very night, a storm rolled through and the whole city went dark. Every dazzling light blinked out at once, and the streets grew quiet and uncertain. Children cried at the sudden blackness, and even the grown-ups felt lost.

But on that one windowsill, the little diya kept burning. Its small golden circle of light fell across the street below, and a girl looking out her window saw it, one warm point glowing in the dark. She called to her family, they lit their own old diyas, and one by one, windows across the city began to glow.

By midnight, the city twinkled, not with a million borrowed lights, but with thousands of small flames, each one tended by somebody's hands. And people remembered what Diwali had said all along: it is not the biggest light that pushes back the dark. It is the one you light yourself.