In the quiet town of Lalgudi, where the river Kollidam flowed with unhurried grace and the mango trees cast long, patient shadows, there lived a man named Gopal who one day noticed something rather peculiar about himself. He discovered, quite without intending to, that he was empty.
Not the sort of emptiness that comes from missing a meal or losing a favourite book, mind you. This was a deeper sort—an emptiness that sat inside him like the hollow space inside a clay pot, silent and vast. He felt lonely too, though he could not quite say for what or from whom. And like most people who stumble upon such uncomfortable truths, Gopal became frightened.
“Why,” he asked himself, pacing the veranda of his modest house, “am I so frightened of this loneliness, this emptiness?”
He tried various remedies. He talked more loudly at the coffee-house. He took long walks to the railway station merely to watch the trains come and go. He even considered joining the local philosophical society, where gentlemen debated the nature of the soul until the tea grew cold. Each activity, however, only seemed to leave him more troubled than before. A quiet antagonism grew in him—towards the emptiness, towards himself, and sometimes even towards the harmless postman who passed by every afternoon.
One evening, as Gopal sat under the old banyan tree near the temple, an elderly schoolmaster named Mr. Srinivas, who had retired years ago, joined him on the stone bench. Mr. Srinivas had a way of speaking that was neither hurried nor profound, but simply clear, as if stating the time of day.
“You see,” the old man said, brushing a fallen leaf from his dhoti, “any activity that takes you away from what is actually there is bound to bring sorrow. Conflict is nothing more than the denial of what is, or the running away from it. There is no other conflict, really.”
Gopal frowned. “But it feels so complicated.”
“Ah,” replied Mr. Srinivas with a small smile, “our conflicts grow more and more complex and insoluble precisely because we refuse to face what is. There is no complexity in what is. The complexity lies only in the many escapes we invent.”
Gopal sat quietly for a while. In the distance, a temple bell rang once and fell silent. He thought of the emptiness again—not as an enemy this time, but simply as a fact, like the heat of the afternoon or the dust on the road.
Later that night, lying on his cot and staring at the ceiling, Gopal remembered something he had read long ago in a school science book. We are made of atoms, and an atom is mostly empty space—ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent empty, the book had said. The universe itself, the scientists claimed, was largely empty. Eighty percent, or thereabouts.
He smiled in the dark. Emptiness was not some personal failing, then. It was a fact of the world, as ordinary as the space between the stars or the hollow inside a bamboo flute. There was nothing to fear, nothing to escape. One had only to face it.
And so, in the gentle way of Lalgudi, where even large truths arrive without ceremony, Gopal stopped running. He simply sat with what was there. The emptiness remained, but the fear of it began, very slowly, to dissolve—like mist lifting from the river at dawn.