The road to Vachanakonda isn’t on most maps. If you try to search for it on your phone, the blue dot drifts, then gives up — as if even satellites are reluctant to come this far. From the highway, a narrow mud track breaks away like a stitched scar. We took it because there was nothing else to take.

The driver, a thin man with a tobacco-stained smile, kept glancing at me in the rearview mirror. I could see the question he didn’t ask: Are you sure?

I wasn’t. But curiosity has its own stubborn legs. It keeps walking even when the head shakes no.

By noon, the heat had thinned the colour out of everything — the fields, the trees, even the sky. We passed a canal that carried more silt than water, stray cows that regarded us like we were an inconvenience, and one tea stall where a boy of nine stirred a pot larger than his chest. When we finally rolled into the village square, the engine sighed as if relieved to find other engines.

A few men sat under a neem tree, discussing the weather as if it were a person they all disliked but could not avoid. A woman with a brass pot balanced on her hip paused to stare. Children paused, too, but only until they decided I was dull.

I had come to the temple. Not a temple exactly, people kept correcting me — more like the memory of one. A poet in Hyderabad — half-drunk, wholly sincere — had told me about it weeks earlier.

 “A temple without a god,” he said, letting the words sit between us like a dare. “No idol. Never had one. You know why? Because the gods refused.”

He laughed then, but the laugh curled into something softer.

“Or maybe the people refused the god. That happens too.”

It took an hour of polite questions and impolite silences before someone offered to take me there. His name was Ramayya. The bones in his hands looked like roots, his shoulders carried a permanent tilt to the left, but his feet were sure.

“You write?” he asked as we walked.

“Sometimes,” I said.

He nodded like he had guessed as much.

The path to the temple cut through tamarind trees, then a patch where the ground had given up on grass. From a distance, the structure looked like a hump on the earth’s back. Closer, the details rose: the plinth, square and steady; the mandapa, its pillars etched with the old stories — Hanuman leaping, Arjuna aiming, Draupadi pleading — their lines blurred by rain and time but still breathing. A peepal had taken root on the southern wall, its thin roots like long, patient fingers exploring the stone.

At the threshold, I took off my shoes out of habit. The floor was cool and dusty. The sanctum faced east; a stub of light lay across the floor like a blade. There was the pedestal — shouldered, carved — waiting. No idol. No garland. No ash, no kumkum, no lamp-black stain on the ceiling to say someone had lit a flame here last night or the one before.

It was not an abandoned place, exactly. It felt watched. Or remembering.

“King Dharanendra built it,” Ramayya said, his voice the same volume whether he spoke of kings or coconuts. “Wanted the biggest temple anywhere around. They say he spent seven years. Stone from the hill. Craftsmen from the coast. Everything ready. On the night before the prana pratishtha — the consecration — he ate dinner, went to sleep, and didn’t wake. Some say poison. Some say a bad star.”

“And after?” I asked.

“They tried,” he said. “Priests came from three districts. One slipped on the steps and broke his head. Another took a fever that wouldn’t leave. Once, a cart bringing a black-stone idol overturned near the canal. Buffalo spooked, ran, cart turned like a beetle. People said… leave it. The temple has decided.”

He shrugged. “We listen when earth speaks.”

I moved slowly along the inner wall, tracing what was left of inscriptions with my fingertips. The script curved and curled, older than anything I could read, older than the village perhaps. Bits of colour clung to the stone — a saffron smear from some long-ago festival, powder-blue from someone’s shirt. In one corner, a persistent spider web had become a lace curtain, flecked with dust and sunlight.

Then I saw the line. Not a crack so much as a seam, the way a cupboard door almost fits. It ran like a shallow smile across two flagstones before disappearing beneath the pedestal.

“Has anyone ever…” I didn’t finish.

Ramayya knew what I meant. He shook his head.

“Not since my father’s time. And he said not since his. But you can look. Looking is not a crime here.”

He said it with a half-smile, which I chose to take as permission.

We fetched a crowbar from a neighbouring hut. The boy who owned it — barefoot, bright-eyed — wanted to come too, but his mother caught his elbow and pulled him back with a look I recognised. Not anger. Not fear. The tight look a mother wears when something larger than her love stalks the edges of a day.

Back at the sanctum, the bar found the seam’s shallow mouth. The first stone resisted like a stubborn tooth, then yielded with a sound that startled a pigeon from the rafters. Beneath it, a darker square. Another stone. We lifted three before the empty square grew into a throat.

The stairs were narrow, cut from the same stone, breath cool against the face. I went first. It wasn’t bravery — just impatience masquerading as it. The air had the steady damp of places that remember water. The beam from my small torch glanced off something metallic and dim.

There was a room, no larger than a field hut. A stack of scrolls lay wrapped in cloth that had once been red. In one corner, a sword leaned, its edge so eaten it looked soft. A chest sat in the middle, its lid unwilling but not locked. When it lifted, the smell rose — like old books and rain that never reached them.

Inside, more scrolls. No jewels. No deity. I let a laugh sneak out of me, quickly swallowed by the stone.

It took three days to find someone in the nearby town who could read the script. An old lecturer from the college came in a rumpled white shirt and a kindness that made him look younger than he was. He ran his finger under the first lines like a schoolboy.

“Grantha, with a drift into Telugu,” he murmured. “Whoever wrote this wanted to be read.”

The story that unrolled from those scrolls wasn’t the story I expected. It rarely is. The king appears, yes — Dharanendra, beloved by some, feared by more. But the center of the story was a priest: Varahadeva. Young in the beginning, then older and thinner in the lines. He wrote of seasons, of the temple rising, of pilgrims arriving before there was anything to pray to.

He wrote of the king’s pride growing like a banyan — offering shade, sending roots into other people’s houses. He wrote — slowly at first, then with sharpness — about the king’s plan to fold prayer into rule, to make devotion another tax.

One passage the lecturer read twice, then again, because he liked the sound of it as much as its sense:

“If the ruler installs the god so the people kneel to the ruler through the god, then let the pedestal be the god. Let emptiness hold the place. Let the breath of those who come be the offering, not their coins.”

The scrolls told what happened the previous night. No poison, no curse. Varahadeva and two helpers — names lost in a smudge — carried the idol out through the north door, down to a water tank. They wrapped it in cloth and oil, hid it under a shelf of stone near the steps. They closed the north door from the inside, came back through the secret stairs, and sealed the floor.

His vow was written in a hand that pressed so hard it cut into the palm: No god will stand here until power learns humility.

The tales of accidents were spun afterwards, protection for a truth too fragile to be left uncovered.

On my last morning in Vachanakonda, I returned to the sanctum alone. I stood before the pedestal and tried to picture a black-stone god seated upon it. What rose instead was the memory of my grandmother, standing by a window at dusk, whispering a prayer that wasn’t written in any book. She prayed for rain that year, not for herself but for the soil that held her house in place.

The sanctum smelled faintly of oil from long-ago lamps. A leaf skated in on a private wind and came to rest by my shoe.

“We could put the idol back,” I said aloud. Saying it made the room smaller.

Ramayya’s voice came from the entrance. “You will write?”

“I will.”

“You will tell them the temple is empty?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, then touched the edge of the pedestal with two fingers, the way one greets an elder. “Sometimes we leave a seat open. Not because the guest is late. Because the guest is not a person.”

We took the long path back, past the tank. “Is the idol still there?” I asked.

“If it is,” he said, “it is only a stone under water. If it is not, it is only a story in the air. Either way, it does its work.”

That afternoon, the villagers offered me buttermilk and puffed rice under the neem tree. The woman who had watched me on the first day watched me again, but with less suspicion — as if I had failed to do the thing she most feared and she was relieved.

Before I left, the driver topped the radiator with water from the same tank that might have been the idol’s resting place. The village shrank in the rearview, first to a line of roofs, then to a suggestion. I thought about the kings of small kingdoms, the priests who were brave in quiet ways, the pedestals that hold more than what’s placed upon them.

Weeks later, a photograph arrived from an unknown number. The pedestal stood as I had left it — but on it was a brass bowl filled with water, three marigolds floating like small suns. The message read:

 “Festival tomorrow. We will not close the temple. We will not open it either. We will sit.”

I imagined them sitting — women with their bangles, men with their knees drawn up, children practising the art of stillness. Sitting as an offering. Sitting as a refusal. Sitting as a promise none of them had made, yet all had inherited.

The photograph is now the wallpaper on my phone. Sometimes I see my reflection in the black glass, and it looks as if I belong there, in that room, in that light. Other times, I remember I am only a visitor who wrote a story and left.

If one day an idol is installed there — if money, need, and conviction outvote an old vow — I will not be the one to judge them. Temples change. People change. But I hope, selfishly, that the bowl remains.

It is a small thing that claims nothing. It asks only to be kept filled, to mirror what comes near it, to hold three flowers until the water warms and the petals let go.

When people ask me now what I found in Vachanakonda, I say:
“I found a temple without a god.”

And when that is not enough, I add:
“I found a place where emptiness is not a lack but a choice. I found a village that keeps a promise it never spoke of. I found the courage it takes to leave a pedestal unoccupied.”

.    .    .