It was at this moment that he realised what Daa might be driving him to think. “You don’t mean that nothingness is something, Daa!” he cried, looking up at her.

Daa looked at him earnestly. “Of course, Chandu, that’s what it all leads to, doesn’t it? Mother Nature leaves us a last residue which can neither be classified as existence or non-existence. The absence of everything, as you have seen, is still an entity to the observer.”

Chandu’s eyes widened further. “You mean all these stars coming out of nothing and merge into nothing again?” he asked.

“No, Chandu, I mean that nothingness is an entity which logic and science cannot explain or deny. It dangles between existence and non-existence like the void which had nothing in it and yet is there.”

Chandu mused at all he had heard. “Ah, I think I know an easy answer, Daa. There is no such thing as nothingness in the physical world. The void is an entity which we have not yet understood, far less defined. The day we do that we must believe that the worlds, the stars, the universes, which we pinpoint as things come out of this undefinable entity we call a void.”

Daa was a bit distant to that piece of logic. Chandu felt that it didn’t appeal to her or had she not understood his reasoning?

“Let’s go back, Chandu,” said Daa.

“But which way?” asked Chandu.

“Any way, it doesn’t matter,” she replied.

“In that case, you say in which direction we should walk,” Chandu said.

So they walked back in the direction Daa had decided. But Chandu didn’t hold Daa’s hands any longer.

To be continued

Manu Mahadevan’s short story, Black Hole first appeared in the children’s magazine Target edited by Rosalind Wilson. It was later published in the short story collection, The Carpenter’s Apprentice, by Katha, a Delhi-based non-profit organisation and publishing house.