Aarav had been to the Jagannath temple in Puri many times, but always in the rush of a festival, swept along in the crowd. Today Dadu took him at dawn, when the great courtyard was almost empty and the stone was still cool under their bare feet.

They sat against a pillar near the inner hall. A few priests moved in the half-dark, lighting lamps. Then, somewhere ahead, an old man began to chant. He drew in a long breath and let out a single sound, low and round: "Ommmmmm."

The sound did not stop where Aarav expected. It rolled out across the floor, climbed the pillars, and gathered up under the high ceiling until the whole hall seemed to hum with it. Other voices joined, and the one syllable became a wide, slow sea of sound.

Aarav felt it before he understood it. The chant moved into his chest, into the soles of his feet against the stone, into the small bones behind his ears. His fidgeting stopped. His breathing slowed to match the rise and fall of the sound.

"Dadu," he whispered when it faded, "it's just one sound. Why does it feel so big?"

Dadu's eyes were closed, a small smile on his face. "Because that one sound holds everything," he said softly. "The morning and the night. The first thing that was ever born and the last thing that will ever rest. People have said 'Om' for thousands of years, Aarav, in caves and on riverbanks and in halls like this. When you say it, you say it with all of them."

Aarav tried it himself. He breathed in, and let the sound out: "Ommmmm." It wobbled at first, thin and shy. He tried again, and this time he let it sit low in his belly the way the old man had. The sound steadied. He felt his whole body settle around it, the way a boat settles when the waves go calm.

"If a sound like this is the last thing on your lips," Dadu said, "and someone you love is in your heart while you say it, then you are pointing yourself toward the highest place there is. You don't need long words. You don't need to be clever. You only need that one true sound, and love behind it."

They sat a while longer in the cool dark, and Aarav said Om once more — quietly, just for himself — and felt it carry far past the pillars, out the temple door, into the brightening sky.