What’s the best thing you’ve ever found randomly on the street?

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 The Best Thing I Ever Found on the Street Was a Street

WordPress Daily Writing Prompt  |  1 September 2026

What is the best thing you have ever found randomly on the street?

John Britto Kurusumuthu

 It is a quarter past nine, and the road is closed.

Not officially. There is no barricade, notification, or diversion board. Just a trench the colour of brick dust running across the carriageway, a heap of red earth, four lengths of pipe stacked like sleeping animals, and a man in a green shirt holding a torn red flag as though he is not entirely convinced of his own authority. Behind him, traffic has folded in on itself. An autorickshaw sits sideways, unable to turn back, while someone leans relentlessly on a horn.

I have files under my arm and a meeting at half past nine.

The pavement has disappeared into the same trench. Going around by the main junction would take at least nine minutes on foot, perhaps more with the crowd at the crossing. I do the arithmetic that everyone does at such moments and arrive at the same unhappy figure. Twelve minutes late, in front of people who will not say anything about it and will not forget it either.

Then I notice a gap between two compound walls.

It is wide enough for a car, though there is no car there. I have passed it for months without noticing it. A lamp post stands at the entrance, wrapped with old wire. Beyond it, the tar gives way to an older, browner path, worn smooth where wheels have travelled.

I turn in.

The noise stops almost at once. Two steps in, and the horns become a distant complaint. Instead, I hear a tailor’s sewing machine: stop and start, stop and start. He does not look up. A faded film poster curls on the wall beside him.

The lane smells of wet earth and coconut husk. It rained during the night.

A dog lifts its head from a doorstep, looks at me, and settles down again. A woman throws water across her front step and sweeps it flat with a coconut-rib broom, and the water runs to the edge and finds the drain without being told. She moves aside to let me pass.

Neither of us speaks.

A drumstick tree leans over a wall. Jasmine grows along a wire, and its fragrance reaches me before I see it.

The lane bends.

Somewhere nearby, a radio announces the nine-thirty news. A hen crosses with four chicks hurrying behind her. A boy pushes a bicycle far too large for him, steering around me with the effortless confidence of someone who knows every inch of the lane.

Then the lane bends again and appears to end at a gate.

For a moment, I can feel twelve minutes becoming eighteen.

The gate is rusted and padlocked. I am already composing the explanation I will give at the meeting when I notice that the lane does not end. It turns right, narrowing between a plantain patch and a culvert with a concrete slab across it. The slab has a crack in it shaped like the letter Y.

I cross the slab.

Forty feet. Fifty.

A wall on my left looks unfamiliar. Then I recognise the next one. I have seen it every working day, from the other side.

I emerge beside the junction, ahead of the traffic still trapped behind the trench. There is a tea shop at the corner with a bench in front of it, and two men on the bench who have watched me arrive from a direction nobody arrives from.

I look at my watch.

I am four minutes early.

That was twenty-three years ago.

I walked that lane perhaps four thousand times afterwards. The main road was widened, made one-way, dug up, and repaired again. The lane was never touched.

The tailor’s room became a photocopy shop and eventually a permanently shuttered room. The dog died, and another dog took its place, and it too, in time, stopped lifting its head at me. The boy with the oversized bicycle must be past forty now.

The crack in the culvert slab is still shaped like the letter Y.

I showed the lane to three colleagues over the years and to nobody else. Each of them, within a week, began speaking of it as though they had discovered it themselves, which is the correct way to hold such a thing.

Everything else I have ever found on a street I eventually spent, returned, or lost. A coin goes. A note goes faster. A wallet is handed back. A key sits in a drawer until it is forgotten. A photograph may be looked at once and never again.

But the lane remains.

The best thing I ever found on the street was a street.

And the only reason I found it was that the way I meant to go was closed.

Rise & Inspire  —  riseandinspire.co.in

Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt for September 1  2026.

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