Meera had been drawing rangoli since she was four, tracing chalk circles on the cool marble of their veranda while her grandmother hummed old songs nearby.

This Diwali, the housing society announced a competition. Best rangoli would win a hamper of dry fruits — and a photo pinned on the notice board for a whole month.

Meera planned a peacock, tail feathers spread wide in seven colours. She practised for a week, filling notebook pages until the lines came without thinking.

On competition morning, she woke before the sun and began. Her hands moved fast — too fast. Halfway through the tail, her elbow brushed the edge, and orange powder smudged straight across the peacock’s eye.

She tried to fix it. That made it worse. By evening, the results were pinned up. Priya’s lotus — first place. Meera’s peacock — not even mentioned.

Meera sat on the veranda steps and didn’t go in for dinner.

“Too proud to eat, or too angry to admit you’re hungry?” her grandmother asked, settling beside her with two cups of something warm.

Meera didn’t answer. She picked at the hem of her kurta.

“I remember the year I made a rangoli of Lakshmi’s feet,” Dadi said. “Every year for three years, I got the toes wrong. Fat, stubby things, like a duck’s.”

“Did you win?”

“Fourth year, I did. Not because the toes suddenly became beautiful. Because by then I’d drawn feet so many times my hand simply knew where to go.”

Meera looked at her smudged plate of powders, still sitting where she’d left it, the orange bleeding faintly into the yellow.

“I don’t want to draw anymore,” she said. “What’s the point, if it goes wrong again?”

Her grandmother didn’t argue. She simply picked up a pinch of green powder and let it fall in a slow, thin line across the floor — not fixing anything, just adding to it.

“Try it your way,” Meera muttered. “Nothing’s stopping you from failing too.”

“Nothing ever is,” Dadi said, and smiled like that settled it.

The next morning, Meera didn’t wait for another competition. She carried her plate down anyway. She drew the same peacock — smaller this time, tail feathers less ambitious — and kept her elbow tucked close to her body the whole time.

It still wasn’t perfect. One wing came out lopsided. But when Priya walked past on her way to school and stopped to look, she said, “You did this again? After yesterday?”

“I wanted to see if my hand remembered,” Meera said.

It had, mostly. Not all of it. But enough that the peacock looked like a peacock, and not like it had been caught in the rain.

Mrs Kulkarni saw it too, on her way to the vegetable vendor, and said nothing about the competition being over. She just looked a long moment and said, “Better than yesterday’s.”

Meera didn’t need the hamper of dry fruits after that. She had already found what she’d come down for at five in the morning — not a prize, just her own hand, steadier than the day before.