Valluvar has 1,330 couplets ahead of him. He will write about kings who ruin nations and lovers who cannot sleep. He will catalogue the anatomy of friendship, the physics of war, the arithmetic of poverty. But before any of that, he does something strange: he refuses to name his God. Ten couplets of praise — and not once does he say Shiva, Vishnu, Mahavira, or Buddha. Instead he offers a series of portraits drawn in negative space: a being without desire, without aversion, without equal. A being who extinguished the five cravings of the senses and whose conduct is cleansed of every falsehood. The result is an opening invocation so carefully unnamed that Shaivites, Vaishnavites, Jains, Buddhists, and twentieth-century atheists have all claimed it as their own — and all of them are right, which means none of them are. What Valluvar builds here is not a prayer. It is a foundation. And the argument underneath it is ruthless: find this foundation or drown.