AN EMPTY BOX

- Sajid Ahmed

13^th April 2026

The bell rang. There was a delivery boy at the door. A big cardboard box, the size of a football, was in his hand. I wasn’t expecting any deliveries, so I asked him, “Are you sure the name and address are correct?”He replied in the affirmative. I received the box. It felt very light. I asked the people in my house if they had ordered anything, but all said no.

So, I took it to my room and studied it. It was a normal box. My name and address were printed and pasted on the side. The sender’s address was not mentioned. I thought it strange.I lifted the box and gave it a gentle shake. I put my ears to it but heard nothing. It felt empty. So I took a paper cutter and opened the box carefully.

The box was empty!

I searched it for some time and realized that it was indeed empty. I examined the covering and the address once again. No mistake.For a while, I stared at it. There is a lot of emptiness inside a box. The corners revealed nothing. I took a sniff inside; it smelled exactly like cardboard. I thought maybe a friend had gone to all the trouble to prank me, but it wasn’t April Fool’s Day.

I was about to throw it away as a harmless joke, but I decided to keep it on my study table. Late in the evening, when everything was quiet, I looked at the box, and the box just sat there—plain and ordinary. I thought of Tom Hanks in the movie Castaway talking to the volleyball and I laughed.

Of all the things that we own, many are valuable, a few are priceless, but the things that we discard are mostly like empty cardboard boxes. The valuables that arrive in carefully wrapped boxes, the birthday gifts in shiny wrapping paper, the tiny boxes with expensive jewellery inside—all are treasured, and the box is discarded.

Suppose I had not opened the box. Kept it in a quiet corner, gathering dust, forgotten with each passing day.

So, I decided to do just that. I sealed the box again and kept it on top of a cupboard in my room—visible to me but unobtrusive.

About a week later, I was clearing out my desk, and I needed to store a lot of things away—I just couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. I looked around, and my eyes fell on the box.

I took it down, wiped the dust away, and opened it again. Still empty.

Then I started to put away the things I needed to clear from my desk.

I found my first driving licence. I had worked hard to obtain it because I learnt driving very late in life, made a lot of dents in my first car, and made a whole lot of memories driving around with my family. I looked at it carefully; a younger, serious self of mine stared back. The typewritten letters had still not faded. I put it in the box.

A card—“Happy Birthday Pops.” Written by my son when he was just about five years old. Carefully coloured in crayons with a lot of crooked smileys. A hot summer day in the plains, lockdown, and an eternal smile on my face. It was a surprise from him. It went into the box.

I found a doctor’s prescription. Mine. About ten years old. The diagnosis was grim—a serious infection. But how my family and friends had rallied behind me and helped me fight the odds and recover fully. Days of taking medicine, resting, reading, and recovering, but always with my loved ones around. I put it away carefully.

An old ATM card from a bank. The plastic currency. Long queues at the bank. Times of crisis, shortage, and want. Working around the year, putting in faithful hours of duty to wait for the one day in a month when you would be paid in full. Then lining up at the machine, watching other souls withdraw their hard-earned money—money earned by tears, blood, and sweat. I wiped it clean and kept it inside.

Some other papers I threw away. Discarded like forgotten people—some who were just transactional in nature, give and take. Not worth keeping at all.

The receipt for a piano. A digital Yamaha. Also purchased for my elder son during the lockdown. I remember how it was delivered at night; we kept it outside. It also came in a giant cardboard box. We sprayed sanitizer on the box and only opened it the next day. Then the joy of listening to Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and his original compositions. The amount written on the receipt was far less than the amount of joy we received. The box was now filling up.

A photograph. Coloured and printed on matt paper. A group of students with me. My heyday as a teacher, a motivator, and the gleaming row of cups lined up on the ground. All serious-looking young men. Oh, the sweet smell of victory. Small challenges that would teach the boys the spirit to face future ones. It left me wondering where all of them could be now. The box now had faces.

A tiny piece of paper. Again, a receipt for a gold ring. My first real purchase of jewellery. A one-tola 24k gold ring. Dated more than twenty years ago, but I still remember the price of gold—a princely amount of Rs. 11,500/- per tola. It seems like a fairytale! The ring is gone now, sold to buy something more valuable. But the receipt goes into the box.

I finished up and looked around. The dustbin was full, but the box still had a lot of space in it. I packed it up and kept it back on top of the cupboard.

I made myself a cup of tea and sat outside my veranda. I had started with an empty box. All of us do, filling it slowly with the fragments of a life lived.

Some things fade, some are forgotten—but a few remain, quietly waiting to be found again.

Now it rests quietly on top of the cupboard—no longer empty.

And perhaps, it never really was.

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