Bhoomi had redone the same fraction problem four times, and four times the answer came out wrong. Her exam was two days away, and the notebook page had more crossed-out lines than solved ones.

She set the pencil down at the edge of the desk, careful, the way she set down everything.

Dadi arrived with two steel tumblers of turmeric milk, though only one chair was pulled out. She set the spare tumbler on the desk anyway, the way she always did in case someone dropped by.

“You’ll wear a hole in that page before you solve the sum,” Dadi said. “Come. Let me tell you about the biggest thief in Vrindavan.”

“Dadi, I have to study.”

“Five minutes. Then back to your sums.”

Bhoomi turned her chair around, the way she always did — reluctant on the outside, already listening underneath.

“Little Krishna,” Dadi began, “used to sneak into every house in the village. Not for jewels, not for coins. For butter. Fresh, cool, kept high on a shelf so no child could reach it.”

“I know this story, Dadi.”

“You know the ending. You don’t know why he did it.”

“The gopis hid the butter pots higher each week — behind grain sacks, tied to the rafters, inside locked cupboards. And each week Krishna found a new way in. He stacked pots into towers, climbed on Balarama’s shoulders, slipped through windows no wider than a cat. By the time his fingers reached the butter, half of it was already smeared on his cheeks, his knees, the floor, his friends.”

“So he got the butter. That’s the point, no?”

Dadi shook her head. “Watch what happens after. The gopis would run out shouting, waving their ladles, and Krishna would run — laughing, butter dripping off his chin, not one drop of guilt on his face. Some days he barely tasted it before it fell out of his hands. And still he came back the next morning.”

“Why would he come back if he didn’t even get to eat it?”

“Because the eating was never the reward, kanna. The climbing was. The plan. The second before a gopi turned around and caught him red-handed and couldn’t stop laughing either. That whole morning — the thinking, the trying, the getting caught, the running — that was what he came back for. The butter just happened to be sitting at the top of it.”

Bhoomi looked down at her own hands, then at Dadi’s, and noticed for the first time that the turmeric stain on Dadi’s fingers had probably been there, in one shade or another, for forty years of cooking the same dishes and still trying to get them right.

“If Krishna had thought only about the butter,” Dadi said, “one failed climb and he’d have stopped forever. Nobody remembers how many pots he actually reached, three thousand years later. They remember how he tried.”

She reached over and turned Bhoomi’s notebook the right way round, the way Bhoomi always held it sideways when she was stuck.

Bhoomi looked at the second, untouched tumbler still sitting on the edge of the desk, the milk skin already forming on top, and didn’t ask who Dadi had really poured it for.

She picked her pencil back up and looked at the fraction again — not at the blank space where the answer should sit, but at the first line, where she’d have to decide what to try next.

For the first time all evening, she wasn’t thinking about ninety percent.

She was thinking about the climb.