In the quiet town of Lalgudi, where the river Kollidam flowed past the railway station with the same unhurried patience it had shown for generations, lived a man named Krishnan. He was neither rich nor poor, neither particularly clever nor foolish—just an ordinary clerk in the local post office who spent his days stamping letters and his evenings worrying about them.
Krishnan’s worries were many and of the common variety. His salary never quite stretched to the end of the month. His son’s school fees arrived with the regularity of the monsoon. His wife complained that the roof leaked in three places, and his neighbour’s buffalo had developed a habit of eating the hibiscus plants in his tiny courtyard. Each evening he returned home carrying these troubles like a heavy postman’s bag, and each night he lay awake turning them over in his mind until they grew larger than the room itself.
One afternoon, while sorting a batch of foreign journals that had somehow wandered into the ordinary mail, Krishnan came upon an old copy of a magazine devoted to distant things. In it he read, almost by accident, about the Council of Trent—how bishops and cardinals had once argued for years over points of doctrine in a far-off Italian town. The names were strange, the arguments stranger still, and yet something in the long-forgotten disputes held him. He read further. Then he read about the life history of stars—how they were born in clouds of gas, burned for millions of years, and finally collapsed into silence. The post office ceiling fan continued its slow creaking, the clock on the wall ticked, but Krishnan forgot both.
That evening he walked home with a lighter step. When his wife mentioned the leaking roof, he listened, nodded, and said he would look into it tomorrow. When his son asked for new notebooks, he promised to see what could be done. The buffalo next door still chewed the hibiscus, but Krishnan found himself thinking instead of those distant bishops and those even more distant stars. For a little while the personal demands of life—those insistent voices that always asked for more than a modest post-office salary could give—grew quieter.
In the days that followed, Krishnan made a quiet habit of it. Whenever the weight of household accounts or the neighbour’s buffalo pressed too heavily, he would open an old book or a stray journal and lose himself for half an hour in the Council of Trent or the slow death of stars. He returned from these excursions not richer, not free of worry, but somehow steadier. The roof still leaked, the fees still came due, yet he faced them with a calm that surprised even his wife.
“You seem different these days,” she said one evening, as they sat on the verandah watching the fireflies.
Krishnan smiled the small, private smile of a man who has discovered a simple truth. “The world is very large,” he replied, “and our own powers are limited. If all one’s happiness is tied only to the leaking roof and the hungry buffalo, life is asked for more than it can reasonably give. But if one can forget oneself for a while among distant councils and dying stars, one comes back able to manage the roof and the buffalo a little better—and one has, in the meantime, known a genuine, if temporary, happiness.”
His wife looked at him for a long moment, then went inside to prepare the evening meal. The buffalo lowed next door. The stars, indifferent and ancient, began to appear above the neem trees. And Krishnan, sitting quietly on the verandah of his ordinary house in Lalgudi, felt for a brief span the poise that comes when a man remembers how vast the world is, and how small, after all, are the worries that once seemed to fill it.