My dear Reyansh,
You are eight months old today, and you have begun to make sounds.
They are not yet words. They are the things that come before words — the soft ba, the wet ga, the surprised oh that escapes you when something falls. You discover a new sound the way another person might discover a new country. You hold it in your mouth, turn it over, listen to yourself, and then say it again to see if it still works.
I have been watching you do this for weeks now. And I want to tell you something I have not told anyone else.
When I watch you make these sounds, I am not watching a baby learn to talk. I am watching Krishna's engineering.
Reyansh, you do not yet know this, but the sounds you are making right now — a, ā, i, u — are the first sounds of the Sanskrit alphabet. They are the first sounds of every alphabet. Every human throat in every century has begun here. The reason is not cultural. The reason is anatomical. These are the sounds the human voice is built to make first, before the tongue learns its harder work.
Someone designed that throat. Someone designed it so carefully that a child anywhere on earth, given only milk and time and a mother's voice, would arrive at these exact sounds in this exact order. Not taught. Discovered.
I have spent my life reading about that Someone. And when I see your small mouth shaping its first ba, I do not see biology. I see a verse.
In the Bhagavad-gītā, in the tenth chapter, Krishna tells Arjuna:
yad yad vibhūtimat sattvaṁ śrīmad ūrjitam eva vā tat tad evāvagaccha tvaṁ mama tejo-'ṁśa-sambhavam
"Whatever is glorious, beautiful, or mighty — know it to be a spark of My splendour."
This is not a poetic verse. It is an instruction. Krishna is telling us how to see. He is saying: when something stops you, when something makes you marvel, when something seems too perfectly made to be accidental — that is Me. Look there.
Reyansh, when I look at you, I am following His instruction.
I want to tell you what I see.
I see fingers small enough that all five of them close around one of mine, and yet each finger has its own tiny nail, its own knuckles, its own pattern of lines that no one else in the history of the world has ever had or will ever have again. I see eyelashes that someone counted before they grew. I see a soft place on the top of your head that has not yet closed because your brain still needs room to expand, and someone knew it would need that room, and built the bone to wait.
And now I see your mouth, learning sounds it has never made before, in an order it was never taught, building toward language it does not yet know it will need.
This is not a child. This is a poem the Lord is writing in real time, and I have been given the seat closest to the page.
So when I look into your mouth as you try to say a sound you have never said before, I will tell you what I see.
I see a small throat that knows things it was never taught. I see vowels arriving in the same order they arrive for every child on earth, an order Krishna decided before there was a first child. I see a tongue learning to do what a billion tongues have learned to do, and yet your tongue is the only one doing it like this, with these eyes watching me as it happens.
I see the engineering of the Lord.
And I marvel.
One day, Reyansh, you will read this letter and you will be old enough to ask the question that some of my friends have already asked me, gently, because they love me:
Grandfather, isn't it dangerous to love a grandchild this much? The scriptures warn about attachment. At your age, shouldn't you be turning your mind inward?
They mean well. They are not entirely wrong. There is a kind of love that binds — the kind where the loved one becomes the whole sky, and Krishna disappears behind them.
But there is another kind of love, Reyansh. The kind where the loved one becomes a window — and through that window, more of Krishna becomes visible than was visible before.
I am not attached to you, my child. I am attached to the One who made you. You are how He came close enough this time for me to see Him.
Your grandfather, who is still learning