Paths to the Well

As a child, I knew many paths to the well. The straight one through the maidan, hot in summer but quick, dust rising in small puffs at every step. The one that bent past my aunt’s house, where I stopped, to score the juiciest Banganapalli mangoes in season. The longer one through the seeraga samba paddy, I walked with my grandmother because she liked watching the green come in. The one behind the temple that the older boys used because they wanted to smoke beedis without their mothers seeing. None of these paths were on any map. They existed because we walked them.

What is a path? A path is a piece of ground that has been walked enough times to be remembered.

Then the phones arrived. The phone showed us the shortest route to the well, and we all took it, because why wouldn’t we? The grass grew back on the path past my aunt’s house. The paddy path became harder to find, then impossible. The temple path closed first because the boys grew up, and the next set of boys never learned it existed.

Ask any of us how the walk to the well is going, and we will tell you it has improved. We are right. We get there faster. Anyone who says otherwise is being sentimental about a slower, harder time.

Then one year the rains are bad and the shortest route floods. The phone has no other suggestion to make, because there is no other path for it to suggest. We stand at one end of a closed road, trying to remember how our grandparents used to go. The names of the plants my grandmother taught me on the paddy walk are names I cannot teach anyone now, because I have not walked that walk in twenty years. And the aunt who gave mangoes to people walking past died, but it took a while for any of us to notice.

Can something be a gift at the level of one person and a loss at the level of all of us together? When we all choose the same path, do the paths we are not choosing close quietly behind us?

Because a path is a piece of ground that has to be walked to stay open, and we have stopped walking.

Once they are gone, the phone has nothing to learn them from. We are the only record of those paths, and only while we are still walking them.

Thx for the nudge Anna Biswas 🙂

Originally written for LinkedIn on 27 April 2026. View original →