The Katha Upanishad opens with a small, sharp act of defiance. A boy named Nachiketa watches his father perform a yajna in which he gives away his cattle, old, spent animals that will yield neither milk nor calves. Nachiketa asks, three times, to whom his father will give him. Irritated, his father says: to Yama, the god of death. So Nachiketa goes.
He arrives at Yama's house and waits. Yama is away for three days, and no one feeds the boy or offers him shelter. When Yama returns and finds a brahmin child sitting hungry at his door, he is troubled. A guest left unattended is an inauspicious thing. He offers Nachiketa three boons, one for each day he waited without complaint.
