In the quiet lanes of Lalgudi, where the sun always seemed to rise a little more gently than elsewhere, lived a man named Krishnan. He was neither young nor old, neither rich nor poor—simply a clerk in the municipal office who had, of late, taken to sitting cross-legged on a worn mat in the backyard of his small house each morning before the town fully woke up.
His neighbours often wondered at him. The vegetable vendor would call out prices at the top of his voice, the postman’s bicycle bell rang sharply, and once a quarrel broke out two houses away over a straying goat. Yet Krishnan remained as he was, eyes half-closed, breathing evenly. “Nothing disturbs him,” they said, half in admiration, half in mild annoyance. “Not even the temple loudspeaker on festival days.”
Krishnan himself never claimed any special virtue. He had simply begun, years earlier, to practise what the old books called Yoga. “Yogas chitta-vritti-nirodhah,” he would murmur to himself, the words tasting of quiet certainty. Yoga is the restraint of the mind’s restless movements. That was all. No grand philosophy, no dramatic renunciation—only the steady effort to keep the inner water still, so that the smallest external ripple left no lasting mark.
Flattery reached him one day when the municipal commissioner praised his punctuality in front of the entire office. Krishnan smiled politely and returned to his desk. Threats came too, of a sort: a neighbour once warned that if the peepul tree in Krishnan’s yard dropped leaves on the common path again, there would be trouble. Krishnan listened, nodded, and later swept the path himself without a word of protest or defence. Even the daily din of Lalgudi—the hawkers, the schoolchildren, the distant horn of the bus—passed over him like wind across a calm pond.
“You are at peace with yourself,” an old friend remarked one evening, “when no noise readies you for battle, when no word—whether sweet or sharp—shakes the ground beneath your feet.”
Krishnan only smiled. He did not need to explain that the peace was not given; it was practised, day after day, through the simple restraint of those restless waves within. And so, while the town hurried and fretted and made its usual noise, Krishnan sat on his mat, unruffled, as though the external world were no more than the gentle lapping of water against a distant shore.