In the quiet lanes of Lalgudi, where the river kollidam flowed past the old temple without hurry, there lived a man named Venkat who kept a small provision shop. He sold rice, dal, and the occasional tin of biscuits that children eyed with longing. Venkat was neither rich nor poor; he was simply there, like the neem tree outside his door that shed its leaves each winter and grew them back without announcing the fact to anyone.
Every evening, when the lamps were lit and the customers had gone, Venkat would sit on the wooden bench and listen to the radio. The announcer’s voice would rise with excitement: “From a humble newspaper boy to a multi-millionaire! From studying under street lamps to becoming a High Court judge!” The stories came thick and fast, each one ending with applause and the promise that anyone could climb if only they tried hard enough. Venkat’s neighbours nodded wisely. “See,” they said, “success is the only god worth worshipping.”
Venkat listened, but something in him remained unmoved. He had seen the successful ones return to Lalgudi for festivals—faces tight, voices sharp, eyes that never rested. One had built a grand house with marble floors and still complained that the servants were lazy. Another, who had once sold newspapers, now owned a chain of shops and spoke of nothing but the next acquisition. Great success, it seemed, walked hand in hand with a sorrow that no one wished to name.
One afternoon an old school friend, Ranga, who had gone to the city and returned with a car and a bald head, stopped at the shop. “Venkat,” he said, “still here? Still selling the same rice? A man must add, my friend—add money, add name, add reputation. Subtraction is for failures.”
Venkat weighed a kilo of sugar carefully and smiled the slow smile of a man who has watched many monsoons. “Ranga,” he replied, “you keep adding. I have been trying, in my small way, to chip away. The more I chip, the lighter the load becomes. Addition is noisy; subtraction is quiet. And quiet, I find, is harder to achieve than any fortune.”
Ranga laughed, paid for his sugar, and drove away in a cloud of dust. The neighbours shook their heads. “Poor Venkat,” they murmured. “He will never amount to anything.”
But the river continued to flow, the neem tree continued to shed and renew, and Venkat continued to open his shop each morning. He lived, as the old books sometimes advised, almost anonymously—neither celebrated nor pitied. In the evenings he no longer listened to the radio’s tales of triumph. Instead he sat watching the shadows lengthen, quietly subtracting the day’s small irritations, the day’s small greeds, until only a clear space remained.
And in that clear space, for a little while each day, sorrow found nothing left to cling to.