Chapter 1: Ishan

# Chapter 1: Ishan

## Qaid

The truck lurches over a pothole and my skull hits the metal sidewall. Pain, bright, specific, the kind that flashes white behind your eyelids, explodes above my right ear. I bite my tongue to keep from crying out. The taste of copper floods my mouth.

Across from me, Meera shifts. She holds Reyansh tighter against her chest — Reyansh, who is fourteen months old and has been silent since these men took us, as if even a baby understands when noise becomes dangerous. His small fist is wrapped around the edge of Meera's dupatta, the fabric bunched and damp with his drool, and his eyes, round, dark, too large for his face — watch the man with the gun from the shadows of his mother's arms.

The man with the gun is called Dhanraj. He sits in the passenger seat of the Tata 407, turned at an angle that lets him watch both us and the road, the double-barrel shotgun resting across his thighs with the casual weight of a thing that has been carried often. He has not spoken since we were forced into the truck. He does not need to. The shotgun speaks for him. A vocabulary of two words, both of them final.

Driver is Suraj. He is the one who talks. He talked when they found us outside the medical store in Baramati — "Look what we have here, bhai. Shoppers. In the middle of the fucking apocalypse." He talked when he forced us into the truck at gunpoint — "Don't make this difficult, yaar. We're all civilised people." He talked as he drove us away from the town, away from the road to Solapur, away from every plan and hope we had carried for the last three weeks.

Suraj is maybe thirty. Lean, dark-skinned, a thin moustache that sits above his lip like an afterthought. He wears a checked shirt, the kind sold in bundles at the weekly bazaar, and cargo pants with too many pockets, and his hands on the steering wheel are the hands of a man who is accustomed to handling things: tools, levers, people. His voice is soft, reasonable, the voice of a man explaining why the thing he is doing to you is actually for your benefit.

I hate that voice. I hate it more than the gun.

"You know," Suraj says, glancing at us through the rearview mirror, "it's a good thing we found you when we did. Baramati is not safe. Too many people, not enough food. You would have been robbed within a day. Or worse."

I do not respond. Meera does not respond. Reyansh makes a small sound, not a cry, just a breath that catches in his throat, and Meera adjusts him, her hand cupping the back of his head, her fingers in his hair.

"The strong survive," Suraj continues. "That's just biology. The virus taught us that. And strength, in this world, is not about muscles or guns. It's about organisation. About having a system. We have a system."

"What system?" My voice comes out rough, scraped. I have not spoken in two hours.

"A good one. You'll see." He turns the wheel, and the truck swings onto a dirt road that branches off the highway. The tarmac gives way to packed earth, and the ride becomes rougher, the suspension groaning under the weight. Dust rises behind us in a brown cloud. "We have food. Shelter. Security. Everything you've been scrambling for out here on the road. We have it."

"We didn't ask for your help."

"Nobody asks for help. That's not how the world works anymore. You don't ask. You get found, or you die."

The truck climbs a slope. The landscape changes. Flat sugarcane fields give way to undulating scrubland, the terrain rising toward a low hill. The vegetation thickens: thorn bushes, babool trees, the dry, brown scrub of inland Maharashtra in April. A kite circles overhead, its shadow flickering across the windshield.

Truck stops.

"Here we are," says Suraj. He kills the engine. silence is sudden and total; no traffic, no generators, no human sound except our breathing and the tick of the cooling engine. "Home sweet home."

Dhanraj opens his door and steps out. He moves around to our side and pulls open the rear door. That shotgun is raised, not pointed at us directly, but elevated, ready, the barrel a dark eye watching.

"Out," says Suraj.

We climb out. My legs are stiff, two hours cramped in the back of a 407, my knees drawn up, my back against the metal, and I stumble on the uneven ground. Meera lands more carefully, cradling Reyansh, her feet finding purchase on the dusty earth.

I look around.

We are on a hilltop. The land drops away on three sides, to the east, the flat plain we drove through, the highway a grey line in the distance. To the south and west, more scrubland, more thorn bushes, the horizon wavering in the heat. The air is dry, hot, carrying the scent of dust and dried grass and something else, something sweet and wrong, the smell that has become the background note of every outdoor space since the virus.

The building in front of us is a farmhouse. Not a pretty farmhouse — not the kind that city people buy as weekend retreats and photograph for Instagram. This is a working farmhouse, or was: a single-storey structure of concrete and brick, the walls unpainted, the roof corrugated tin, the windows covered with rusted grilles. A water tank sits on a stand beside the building, its sides streaked with algae. Behind the house, a shed, tin-roofed, open on one side — contains what looks like farm equipment: a tractor (old, a Mahindra 575, its paint faded to the colour of dried blood), tools, sacks.

The farmhouse is surrounded by a dirt yard, and the yard is surrounded by thorn bush fence. Dense, impenetrable, the kind that Maharashtra's farmers have used for centuries to keep livestock in and predators out. fence has only one gap: the track we drove in on.

Suraj sees me scanning. "Admiring the security? The thorn fence. Traditional. Better than barbed wire — self-repairing, grows thicker every year, and the thorns", he snaps a branch from the nearest bush, holds it up, the thorns three centimetres long and needle-sharp — "will stop a man faster than a bullet. Nature's razorwire."

He drops the branch. "Come inside. I'll show you your room."

The word room does not carry its usual connotation. I know this the way I know that Suraj's soft voice does not carry its usual connotation. The word is a cage, dressed in politeness.

We follow him inside. Dhanraj follows us, the shotgun at our backs.

---

The interior of the farmhouse is exactly what the exterior promises: functional, sparse, dirty. A hallway, narrow, the floor bare concrete. On the left, a room. The main room, containing a cot, a table, a kerosene lantern, and a shelf of tinned food. On the right, a kitchen: a gas stove connected to a cylinder, pots stacked on a stone counter, the smell of old oil and stale roti.

We pass through the kitchen. At the back, a door; heavy, wooden, secured with a padlock on the outside. Suraj produces a key. The padlock clicks open. The door swings inward, revealing darkness.

"After you," he says.

I step through the doorway. The room beyond is small — three metres by three metres, maybe less. floor is concrete. A walls are concrete. There is no window. There is no furniture. There is nothing except the floor, the walls, the ceiling, and, in the corner, barely visible in the light that seeps through the open door — a bucket.

And a stain. Dark, spread across the floor in the far corner. The colour is wrong; not the brown of mud, not the black of oil. That colour is the specific, oxidised red of old blood, dried into the concrete, impossible to clean, impossible to mistake for anything else.

"What is that?" Meera's voice is sharp. She has seen it too.

"Previous guests," says Suraj. "They were less cooperative than you. But don't worry. We've cleaned up since then. Mostly."

Dhanraj cackles. It is the first sound he has made — a wet, phlegmy laugh that comes from deep in his chest and carries the specific amusement of a man who finds violence funny.

"You can't keep us in here," I say. My voice sounds stronger than I feel. Inside, my chest is a drum. The heartbeat hammering so hard that I can feel it in my teeth.

"We're not keeping you. We're hosting you. There's a difference." Suraj leans against the doorframe. "Look. I understand this is not ideal. But the world is not ideal. You were out there, on the highway, with a woman and a baby, no weapons, no vehicle, and three weeks of rice in a rucksack. How long do you think you would have lasted?"

"Longer than we'll last in a cage."

"This is not a cage. This is a room. Temporary accommodation. While we figure out the arrangement."

"What arrangement?"

Suraj smiles. That smile is thin, patient, the smile of a man who has explained this before and expects to explain it again. "We have a system. We find people. We assess them. If they're useful, if they have skills, or strength, or something to offer, they join us. They become part of the group. They eat, they sleep, they contribute. It's fair."

"And if they're not useful?"

The smile does not change. "Everyone is useful. It's just a matter of finding out how."

He steps back. "Rest. I'll bring food later. And water." He looks at Reyansh, still silent in Meera's arms. "The child; he's healthy?"

"He's fine," says Meera. Her voice is flat, controlled, the voice of a woman who is holding herself together by compressing every emotion into a space the size of a fist.

"Good. Children are important. They're the future. Even now."

The door closes. The padlock clicks. The darkness descends.

---

We sit on the concrete floor. There is nothing else to sit on. floor is cold despite the April heat — the concrete retaining the chill of the earth beneath it, the coolness seeping through my clothes and into my skin. Meera sits beside me, Reyansh on her lap, her back against the wall. In the darkness, I cannot see her face. I can only hear her breathing — slow, deliberate, the controlled breathing of a woman who is managing fear the way a surgeon manages a scalpel.

"Are you okay?" I whisper.

"Yes." The word is tight. "Are you?"

"Yes."

Silence. That darkness is not quite total, a sliver of light seeps under the door, and through the gap between the door and the frame, a thin line of lesser darkness. My eyes adjust. Shapes emerge: the bucket in the corner, the stain on the floor, Meera's outline beside me, Reyansh's small form on her lap.

"We need to get out," I say.

"I know."

"Before they decide what we're useful for."

"I know." Her voice catches. "Ishan, the baby. If they take Reyansh, "

"They won't. I won't let them."

That words are a lie. I am twenty-one years old, unarmed, locked in a concrete room by two men with a shotgun. I am in no position to stop anything. But the lie is necessary — it is the mortar between the bricks of Meera's composure, and if the mortar crumbles, the wall falls, and if the wall falls, we are finished.

"There has to be a way out," I say. "The door is the obvious route. But the padlock is on the outside. Unless we can get through the wall, or the ceiling, "

"The ceiling is tin. walls are concrete."

"Concrete can be broken. Given enough time and the right tool."

"We don't have time. And we don't have tools."

She is right. On both counts. But the admission feels like surrender, and I am not ready to surrender. Not yet. Not with Reyansh's small fist wrapped around Meera's dupatta and his dark eyes watching the darkness as if it contains answers that the light does not.

I close my eyes. I lean my head against the wall. A concrete is cool against my skull. The same skull that hit the truck wall two hours ago, the pain now a dull throb above my ear.

I think about the road. The road that brought us here — the road from Pune, through Baramati, toward Solapur, toward Meera's brother Yash, who works, worked — at an engineering college, who sent a WhatsApp message on Day 3 of the virus saying I am alive, come to Solapur, bring food, and who has not been heard from since.

Road. The long, hot, empty road that we have been walking for twenty-one days, carrying Reyansh and rice and water and the stubborn hope that somewhere ahead, someone we love is still alive.

And now the road has ended. Not at Solapur. Not at Yash's flat. Here. In a concrete room in a farmhouse on a hill in the middle of Maharashtra, with a bloodstain on the floor and a padlock on the door and two men with a shotgun who call kidnapping hospitality.

I open my eyes. The darkness stares back.

We need to get out. We need to get out tonight.

Before they decide what we are useful for.