By Subramaniam Cheemalapati
My grandfather never laughed loudly. He always let out a quiet giggle, mouth slightly open, his breath coming out in bursts. He was sincere in his smile and laughs. I remember that laugh more than almost anything else about him. More than his words, more than his stories, sometimes even more than his face. It was the laugh of a man who had made his peace with the world, who trusted it completely.
He trusted God the same way.
There was something else about him. Something nobody fully understood. Something he never explained. Not to my father, not to anyone in the family, and certainly not to me, a young schoolboy visiting from Jamshedpur every six months, more interested in his stories than in the reason he had left Mysore.
My grandfather had earlier worked in the Royal Court of the Wadiyars of Mysore. The Wadiyar court was one of the most cultured, refined establishments in all of India. A world of scholarship, music, art, and power. My grandfather moved in that world. He had a position there, proximity to something grand. And then, at some point in the early part of the last century, he left, quietly and completely.
He returned to Munganda, a small village in East Godavari, Andhra Pradesh, that appeared to exist slightly outside of time. He never went back. He bought a farm in the village. Grew rice. Settled into village life as though the court had never happened. As though Mysore were a dream he had quietly decided to stop having.
No one knows why he left.
He never said. He felt no need to explain. He had simply followed the wind, and the wind had brought him home. That was the part I could never name.
Every six months, I would travel from Jamshedpur to Munganda, crossing the distance between India’s two worlds – North and South. My grandfather would be waiting at the railway station. Within hours, we would ride together to the market, buying potatoes, onions, spinach, dal, and groceries, and then, go as always, to the Ganapati Temple nearby.
The temple was not magnificent. We would sit in a corner, hands folded, eyes closed, lips trembling quietly as we recited the shlokas[1]. I never understood them.
Around us, other devotees sat in the same silent trance. Couples, elders, young mothers. All of them somewhere between this world and another.
My grandfather prayed for everyone. Not just for us. Sarve Janah Sukhino Bhavantu. May all people be happy. That was his ask. Every day. Every week. Until the time he died.
A man who had prayed in the royal court now prayed in a modest village temple. He seemed more at peace here. More himself. As though the grandeur had been a detour. Simplicity was always the destination.
I did not fully understand it then. I was unfamiliar with temple rituals and prayers. I went along with him. I sat. And something impacted me — that I would only recognise much later.
At night, back in the village, he would tell me stories, Panchatantra, Vikram Betal[2], tales of clever monkeys and wiser kings.
Munganda had that quality of being a place where age-old stories felt recent. You could almost believe the sages had only just left. The dust on the path still seemed to carry their footprints. My grandfather sat in that world completely naturally. He belonged to it. For those visits every six months, so did I. The visits were truly memorable.
He had a way of talking about God. It was always matter-of-fact, almost cheerful, delivered with that gentle giggle. As though the divine were simply an old friend he knew well. “Gods have bigger eyes all around us,” he told me once, on one of those evenings. “We cannot see them. They can see all our actions, like an eye in the sky. Perhaps those stars are our Gods.”
The words stuck me deeply.
One night, while lying on the verandah on the floor mat, I woke up suddenly. There were no street lights, due to a power cut. I looked up at the sky full of stars. They were extraordinary, scattered across the vast expanse of the sky. I looked around, and the stars shone. I could feel my grandfather’s words. The stars looked down upon me.
I wonder sometimes whether he looked at those same stars and saw something he recognised from another life, whether the eye in the sky watched him in the Wadiyar Court. Perhaps he made his quiet decision to leave and return to this village, this farm, and this temple, and said nothing because nothing needed to be said. Because he already knew the reason. Time went by. My grandfather passed away. The village remained. The temple remained. The farm remained. The voice which had explained the stars to me was gone. His secret went with him, buried well beneath the Munganda farmlands, below a sky full of watching stars, within God’s domain.
Then the drifting began, slowly at first, almost without my noticing.
I drifted far from Munganda into cities, apartments, deadlines, airports, and a world of satellites and search engines. The questions my grandfather answered with a giggle and a glance at the sky seemed to require more complicated responses.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped looking up.
I moved between belief and uncertainty, between the temple and the rational mind, not always knowing which direction I was heading. Sometimes I didn’t care.
Then one ordinary night, something happened.
It was two in the morning. Unable to sleep, I stood by a window and looked at the stars.
And suddenly, I felt watched. Not by a person. Not by anything I could name. Just a strange awareness that I was not alone beneath that sky. I wasn’t afraid. The way the sky spread across the horizon, it appeared very large, and I was too small.
Then there is this feeling of the unknown out there. In the darkness of the sky, I feel it sees you. It has always seen you. Like a satellite passing overhead, patient, all-encompassing, recording nothing, judging nothing, simply present.
“Like an eye in the sky.” My grandfather had said decades ago, pointing at stars.
I felt the words, standing in the modern world, thinking: this is what he meant. That was when I grasped what he really meant, without ever going in circles for years.
My grandfather’s secret wasn’t meant to be a secret at all. He had left the Royal court carrying a knowledge: that peace does not live in grand corridors.
What I found in my Munganda travels and time with my grandfather was that peace lives in smaller places: a village temple, folded hands, rice fields at dusk, stories told to grandchildren below a sky full of stars, relationships within the family.
He just didn’t say the reason. He knew his reasons.
My relationship with God has changed. I am no longer superstitious. I do not bargain with the divine. What I have instead is a trust that things will work out. Not magically. Not without effort or pain. If you are honest, if you have not harmed others, if you have moved through the world with some decency, the cycle turns in your favour. Paths are formed for your navigation. The destination appears closer. Life becomes what you expected.
I think of it now as wind. You cannot see wind. You cannot hold it or command it. But if you are willing to flow with it, it will carry you, and share your destination with you, as though it always knew where you were going.
My grandfather knew this. He left a royal court and carried the reason with him. He grew rice, told stories, pointed at the stars, and giggled gently, mouth wide open, completely sincere.
Perhaps the stars knew why he came back all along. They kept their silence.
They did not tell us.
They never told us.
[1] Hymn or religious chant
[2] Stories about a king (Vikram) and a demon(Betal) penned in the 11th-century by Somdev Bhatta
Subramaniam Cheemalapati is a writer based in Mysore. His work explores memory, family, faith, caregiving, and place. He is working on a memoir, a literary novel, and personal essays.
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