One afternoon, Tammanna finds the owner’s wife coming towards the coconut grove. She looked worried and anxious. However, Tammanna knew why she looked so. Then, he narrates the story of Tammanna and Basavaiah and finally confesses that he was Tammanna, Basavaiah’s rival, and how he had given up all his property and come to Chennarayapatna. Before telling her that Basavaiah had died, Tammanna tells her he had come to realize that human nature is very strange. He offers an explanation of why he thinks so.

According to Tammanna, though man needs wealth, education and many more things, they do not give him a compelling reason to live. In his opinion ‘Man lives for some kind of unbearable vengefulness’. He arrives at this inference based on his own experience of life. As long as he was staying in his village, Basavaiah had considered him his rival and had gone on trying to out beat him in wealth, health, art and so on. The very fact that there was a rival to him and he had to strive to compete with him in every aspect, gave him sufficient reason to live. It is here that one finds human nature strange.

All through his life, though man struggles to earn wealth, education, food etc., he does not find real happiness in these things. But he derives a kind of pleasure when he finds that there is someone competing with him in these areas. Though it is the making of his own imagination yet he finds pleasure accepting his imaginary rival as real and fighting to out beat him. This gives him the real reason for his existence.

Having come away from Basavaiah, to punish him with the news of his death, Tammanna realizes that human nature is very strange. After the death of Basavaiah, he realises that he had become a non-entity and had lost his name and fame. He tells his own story along with the truth that he had realized, only to convince the owner’s wife that she needs to mend her husband.