I do so much for people — and I've started keeping score of every unreturned favour.

Chapter 17 of the Gita passes three ordinary activities — worship, discipline, giving — through the three guṇas (गुण), the strands colouring every action: sattva, clarity; rajas, appetite; tamas, dullness. Verse 20 is giving in sattva. The verse that follows describes giving in rajas: a gift made for the sake of a return favour, or with an eye on some reward — and given, the verse adds, with a wince. Grudgingly. Counting.

Read those two verses side by side and something uncomfortable happens. The airport run, the dinners, the phone call — every one was a real gift when it left your hands. The Gita does not dispute that. It asks something quieter: what came stapled to it? The moment a gift carries an invoice, even an unspoken one, it has crossed from the first verse into the second. Not because you gave less. Because you were waiting.

That is what the ledger tells you. The resentment is not proof that the people around you are ungrateful — some may well be. It is proof of which verse you have been giving from. The score is the invoice. And the invoice, not the kindness, is what is eating you.

Look at the strangest word in the verse: anupakāriṇe (अनुपकारिणे) — to one who can do you no service in return, who cannot repay this one. The Gita's cleanest gift is defined by the impossibility of being paid back. A gift that could be reciprocated is a loan in nicer clothes. The only way to be sure a gift is a gift is to make it somewhere the ledger cannot follow.

The old commentators give the reason plainly. Give dātavyam iti — because it ought to be given — and remember that what you are giving was never, in the deepest sense, yours. Everything that passed through your hands arrived from somewhere: a parent's early mornings, a teacher's patience, a stranger's directions. You did not open a ledger on them. Giving is passing on what was passed to you. The invoice appears the moment you forget that.

Here is the practical bite. The second kind of giving is not condemned — the Gita ranks it below the first, not outside it. But it carries a cost the first does not: it binds you to the return. You gave the gift, and now you are also holding the receipt, watching the door, keeping the book. The kindness cost you an hour. The waiting is costing you the year.

First, read the ledger out loud, once — to yourself, in an empty room. Every unreturned favour, with the numbers. It will sound petty as it leaves your mouth, and that is the point: what is unbearable as a private mood is often very small as a spoken sentence. Then close the book. Not forgive, yet. Just close it.

Second, sort the next ask before you answer it. The phone rings: can you do the airport run again? The Gita leaves you three honest options and one dishonest one. Give it freely — right time, right place, and you have it to give. Give it knowing you want something back, and say so: 'Yes — and I'd love you to take mine next month.' Or decline. The dishonest option is the one you have been choosing: yes, plus a silent entry in the book.

Third, make one gift this week that cannot be returned — to someone who will never know it was you, or could never repay it: the neighbour moving away, the colleague on their last day, the stranger. This is not a nicer airport run. It is the antidote to it. You are teaching your hands what giving feels like without a receipt.

Be honest about difficulty: the ledger will reopen by itself. You did not choose to start it, and the next entry will simply appear when the phone rings. The practice is not never keeping score. It is noticing the entry, naming its verse, and choosing — one gift at a time — whether the receipt goes out with the kindness, or the kindness goes alone.