Aarav lived in Puri, by the sea, and on summer evenings he liked to sit on the steps with his grandfather, whom everyone called Dadu. Dadu had been a fisherman all his life, and now that his arms were tired he spent his days watching the world and thinking about it.

One evening a stray dog limped past, thin and dusty, and Aarav wrinkled his nose. "It's so ugly, Dadu," he said. "And dirty. Not like our nice cat."

Dadu didn't scold him. He just patted the step. "Sit," he said. "Let me show you a game I learned long ago. It is called Spot the Light."

"What light?" Aarav asked.

"Watch the dog," said Dadu. "Don't look at the dust or the limp. Look in its eyes. There — see? Something looking back. Something that is awake. That is the light. It wants to live, just like you do. It feels hungry, just like you do. It feels happy when it's safe. That little glow inside it is the very same glow that is inside you."

Aarav looked, really looked, and the dog's eyes met his. Something passed between them, and the dog didn't seem so ugly anymore.

"Now the gull," said Dadu, pointing up. Aarav found the light in the gull. "Now the fisherman mending his net. Now your mother calling us for dinner. Now the old buffalo by the well." One by one, Aarav spotted it — the same awake, alive glow, peeking out of every different body.

"They all look so different on the outside," Aarav said slowly. "But inside, it's... it's like the same lamp, just in different lanterns."

Dadu's eyes crinkled. "That," he said, "is the truest thing a person can learn to see. One light, undivided, hiding in everyone and everything. The sea looks like a million separate waves, but it is one sea. People who learn to see the one light stop being unkind, because how can you be cruel to your own light?"

That night Aarav left a bowl of rice at the bottom of the steps. In the morning it was empty, and far down the beach the limping dog wagged its tail at him, and Aarav waved back, at the light he now knew was there.