Every year, the school talent show at Saraswati Vidyalaya was the biggest event in Puri. Not because the acts were always good — they weren't — but because the whole town came: parents, grandparents, the tea-stall owner from the corner, even the stray dogs who wandered in through the open doors and lay down in the aisle.

Aarav's friend Kiran was the star. Every year, Kiran sang. His voice was the kind that made people stop talking mid-sentence. It started somewhere deep in his chest and rose like smoke — clear, steady, impossible to ignore. Last year he'd sung a bhajan that made three grandmothers cry and one grandfather pretend he wasn't crying.

Aarav wanted that.

Not the crying grandmothers specifically, but the feeling — that moment when the whole room goes quiet and you know, you absolutely know, that you're doing the thing you were meant to do. He wanted his moment.

So he decided to sing.

He practised for three weeks. He sang in the shower. He sang on the walk to school. He sang while Lakshmi pressed her hands over her ears and said, "Aarav, I love you, but please stop." He practised scales. He watched videos. He stood in front of his mirror and opened his mouth and tried to make the sound that Kiran made.

It didn't come. His voice was fine — not terrible, not beautiful. Ordinary. A voice for singing along to the radio, not for making grandmothers cry.

The Saturday before the show, Aarav sat in Dadu's workshop, sulking. Wood shavings curled on the floor. The room smelled like sawdust and fish oil. Dadu was planing a piece of teak for a new boat frame, the blade drawing long pale ribbons from the dark wood.

"I can't sing like Kiran," Aarav said.

Dadu blew shavings off the plank. "No. You can't."

Aarav winced. He'd expected comfort, not agreement.

"Your hands, though," Dadu said, holding up the plank so the light caught the grain. "Your hands are different." He set the wood on the bench. "Show me what you've been building."

Aarav hesitated. Then he went to the shelf where he'd left his latest project — a model fishing boat, six inches long, built from scraps. The hull was smooth. The mast was a chopstick. The sail was cut from an old handkerchief. It was small, but it was precise. Every joint fit. Every surface was sanded even.

Dadu held it in both hands, turning it slowly. "This is your voice," he said.

"It's a boat."

"It's your voice. Kiran sings. You build. His gift lives in his throat. Yours lives here." He tapped Aarav's fingers. "Don't spend your life trying to be a river when you're a carpenter. The world needs both, but it needs you to be the one you actually are."

Aarav didn't sing at the talent show. Instead, he built a working model catapult from ice-cream sticks and rubber bands, demonstrated it on stage, and launched a ball of newspaper into the third row. The grandmothers didn't cry. They laughed. Aarav laughed too. And the room went quiet at the end — the good kind of quiet — because everyone could see it: a boy doing the thing his hands were made for.

It felt exactly like he'd imagined Kiran's moment felt. Except it was his.