Siddhartha called them the child-people. The merchants, the women at the market, the gamblers, the labourers, the masters and the servants. They wanted things. They were afraid of losing things. They laughed loudly and wept loudly and forgave each other and held grudges and believed that the next festival, the next wedding, the next coin would at last make them whole.

At first, he only pitied them. He was a Samana who had put on merchant's clothes for a little while, he thought. His real home was still elsewhere.

Then the years passed. The house became his house. The gold became his gold. He gambled, because the risk felt alive on his skin. He drank, because it made the night feel softer. He ate too much. He slept late. When a beggar came to the door, his first thought was not pity, but irritation.

He began to feel, late at night, that he had become one of them. That there was no higher place where he still belonged. That the Samana Siddhartha had died somewhere along the way without his noticing.

The Samana Siddhartha had died somewhere along the way without his noticing.