The bus dropped us where the tar gave up, at a chai stall whose owner has watched forty years of walkers set out too fast. He poured, looked at our shoes, and said we'd learn.
The path climbs through betel groves the maps have stopped naming. Every hour or so it forgets it's a path and becomes a stream bed, a threshing floor, somebody's yard with a dog who has seen it all before.
“You do not finish a walk like this.
You just stop somewhere flat.”
By day nine the arithmetic of the walk had replaced the arithmetic of everything else. Kilometres to water. Hours to shade. Bananas remaining, divided by optimism.
