The Sanskrit demonstrative stem begins with this letter, and it is the most heavily worked pronoun in the language. It supplies the words for that, those, he, she and it, declined through three genders and eight cases, and it does duty as the ordinary third-person pronoun because the language has no separate one. A sentence of any length is likely to contain it more than once, and the forms are among the first a reader of inscriptions learns to recognise on sight.
The letter carries a second load as a suffix. The past passive participle of a very large class of Sanskrit verbs is formed by adding this consonant with its inherent vowel to the root, and those participles behave as adjectives, as nouns and as the main verb of a sentence in their own right, so an enormous share of the vocabulary ends in this sound. Between the pronoun and the participle the letter is among the two or three commonest consonants in any Sanskrit or Prakrit text.
Being common has a consequence for how it is written. A frequent letter accumulates a large stock of standard conjuncts, because it meets every other consonant sooner or later, and a reader learns those combined shapes as units rather than assembling them from their parts each time. The clusters this letter forms with the semivowels, with the sibilants and with the other dentals are among the most familiar shapes in the script.