Parvati and the Little Seed

Parvati was a daughter of the mountains, and she knew every growing thing on them by name. One morning she found a boy called Devan sitting on a bare brown slope where nothing grew at all. "Nothing will ever grow here," he said. Parvati sat down beside him. "Would you like to try?" she asked.

She opened her hand. In her palm lay one small brown seed, no bigger than a fingernail. Devan turned it over and over. It did not look like a tree. It did not look like anything at all. "This?" he said. "This," said Parvati.

So Devan dug a small hole in the hard brown earth. He set the seed inside and covered it over. He carried water up from the stream, one pot at a time, and poured it across the spot. Then he sat back and watched. And watched. And watched.

Nothing happened. Not that day, not the next, not the day after that. On the fourth morning Devan pushed his fingers into the soil and pulled the seed back out. It looked exactly the same as before. "It isn't working," he said. "It's broken."

Parvati looked up at the great mountain behind them, at its shoulders of grey stone and its cap of snow. "Do you know how long that took?" she said. "Longer than I could tell you. And all that time, it did not look like it was growing either. Put the seed back, Devan. Growing is quiet work. It happens where you cannot watch it."

So he put it back. He watered it, and then he left it alone. Days passed, and the rains came, and Devan very nearly forgot. Then one morning, on the bare brown slope, there was a small green curl of leaf pushing up into the light. Devan knelt down beside it and did not touch it. "It was working the whole time," he whispered. And Parvati smiled.