Chapter 13: Ishan

# Chapter 13: Ishan

## Sapna

Day 46 of the walk. Day 53 of the virus.

The dream comes on the twelfth night in the camp.

I am in the flat in Aundh. A flat is exactly as it was — the furniture in its place, the TV on the wall, the kitchen clean, the smell of Aai's amti simmering on the stove. Baba is in the living room, reading the newspaper, the Sakal, folded to the editorial page, his reading glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. Aai is in the kitchen, humming. She always hummed when she cooked — old Marathi abhangs, devotional songs that she learned from her mother, the melodies simple and repetitive and deeply embedded in the architecture of my childhood.

I stand in the hallway. I know this is a dream. I know it because the light is wrong. Too golden, too even, the light of memory rather than physics. And I know it because Baba and Aai are alive, and in the waking world, they are not alive, and the distance between these two facts is the distance between sleeping and waking, between the world I want and the world I have.

That water from the hand pump was cold. Not cool, not tepid, but cold, the underground temperature of the Deccan aquifer, the water that had been sitting in basalt fissures at fifteen degrees while the surface baked at forty-two. I pumped the handle and the water gushed, clear and metallic, splashing onto the concrete platform, the sound sharp and liquid, the spray hitting my ankles, the cold shocking against sun-heated skin. Omkar stuck his entire head under the stream. He gasped, laughed, shook water from his hair like a dog, the droplets flying in an arc that caught the afternoon light and became, for one instant, a small private rainbow.

Baba looks up from the newspaper. "Ishan. Where have you been?"

"Walking," I say. The word is inadequate. It covers 250 kilometres and thirty-four days and a concrete cell and a wire and a baby and a river and a boy with a cricket ball, and it says none of it.

"Walking where?"

"Solapur."

"Solapur? Why Solapur?"

"To find Meera's brother."

"Who is Meera?"

"She is, " I pause. The categories available to me, neighbour, companion, friend, are all inadequate. "She is someone I walk with."

Baba folds the newspaper. He removes his glasses. He looks at me the way he looked at me when I was twelve and came home with a report card that was disappointing but not catastrophic. look of a father who is trying to understand his son and who recognises that understanding requires patience and that patience is a resource he has in limited supply.

"Are you eating properly?" he asks.

"Yes."

"Are you studying?"

Question, are you studying, is so fundamentally Baba, so essentially Sadashiv Kulkarni, that it breaks something inside me. Because the answer is no, I am not studying, I have not studied since the virus, I have not opened a physics textbook since Day 1, and the BSc degree that I was three months from completing is now as irrelevant as the factory where Baba worked and the production schedules he maintained and the quality metrics he measured.

"No," I say. "I am not studying."

"Then what are you doing?"

"Surviving."

Baba considers this. He puts the newspaper down. He stands. He walks toward me; the walk of a man who spent twenty-three years walking the assembly line at Bajaj Auto, the walk of precision, of rhythm, of a body that moves with the efficiency of the machines it supervised.

He puts his hand on my shoulder. The weight of it, specific, familiar, the weight of my father's hand, the hand that held mine when I crossed the road at age four and that shook mine when I got my HSC results at age eighteen, settles on me like an anchor.

"Surviving is studying," he says. "You are learning. Different things. But learning."

I wake up. The tent is dark. Meera is asleep on the other side of the partition, Reyansh on her chest. Omkar is sprawled on his cot, one arm hanging off the edge, his cricket ball clutched in his sleeping fist. Yash is reading by candlelight. The flame flickering, his face half-lit, the novel open on his lap.

He sees me sitting up. "Bad dream?"

"Good dream. Which is worse."

He nods. The nod of a man who understands. Who has had his own good dreams, his own visits from the dead, his own mornings where the waking is worse than the sleeping because the sleeping was a world where the loss had not happened.

"Premchand wrote about this," he says. "About the dreams of farmers. How the farmer dreams of rain during drought, and the dream is crueller than the drought itself, because the dream shows him what he cannot have."

"I am not a farmer."

"We are all farmers now. We all dream of rain."

---

The dream stays with me. Not the details — the details fade, as dream details do, dissolving into the general category of dreamed about home. What stays is the feeling. The specific, physical feeling of Baba's hand on my shoulder. The weight. The warmth. The solidity.

I carry that feeling through the next days. It sits behind my ribs, below my sternum, in the place where grief and love coexist in a chemical compound that cannot be separated, that defies analysis, that simply is. Heavy, warm, persistent.

I think about what Baba said. Surviving is studying. You are learning.

What have I learned?

I have learned to walk, not the walking of going somewhere, but the walking of being somewhere, the walking that is its own purpose, the walking that measures distance not in kilometres but in changes. Changes in the body: the blisters that hardened into calluses, the muscles that ached and then strengthened, the lungs that burned and then expanded. Changes in the mind: the fear that sharpened into vigilance, the grief that compressed into memory, the hope that stretched and stretched until it became not hope but habit, the habit of looking forward, the habit of moving, the habit of expecting tomorrow.

I have learned to cook. Khichdi, bhakri, rice and dal, the basic repertoire of survival cooking. I have learned to cook the way Aai cooked, not with recipes but with ratio, the eye measuring the rice, the hand measuring the salt, the nose measuring the spice. The cooking is not good, it is functional, utilitarian, the cooking of a man who needs to eat rather than a man who wants to eat. But it is mine. And the ownership of a skill, however basic, is a form of wealth that the virus cannot take.

I have learned to read people. Suraj's voice — soft, reasonable, the voice of a man who uses politeness as a weapon. Dagadu's shrug, the shrug of a man who has survived everything and expects to survive everything else. Appasaheb's bearing — the bearing of a leader who leads because someone must and because he is the best someone available. Meera's silence, the silence of a woman who has compressed everything into a space the size of a fist and who releases it only when the fist unclenches.

I have learned that the world does not end. It changes. It diminishes. It transforms. But it does not end. The sun rises. The water flows. The jowar grows. The bhakri is on the plate. The children play cricket. The professor teaches under the neem tree. The grandmother tells stories. The baby tries to walk.

World does not end. It begins again. From zero. From shunya.

---

On the thirteenth day in camp, I make a decision.

I am sitting outside the tent, watching the sunset — the Solapur sunset, flat and wide, the horizon unobstructed, the sky turning colours that the Deccan plateau specialises in: ochre, vermilion, the deep, saturated purple that arrives just before darkness. Meera sits beside me. Reyansh is on her lap, reaching for the sky, his small hand opening and closing as if he can grasp the colour.

"I want to go back," I say.

Meera looks at me. "Go back where?"

"Pune."

The word sits between us. Pune, the city we left, the city of the dead, the city that is 250 kilometres west and that contains everything we escaped from.

"Why?" she asks.

"Because there are people there. People who helped me before the virus — people who might still be alive. And because", I pause, searching for the right words — "because the road between here and there is not empty. Pangri has Dagadu and Laxmi. Vairag has Appasaheb and fifty-three people and a school. Akluj has, nobody, but Akluj has kitchens full of food. Karad, Satara, Baramati — these are not empty places. They are places with survivors, with resources, with potential. And nobody is connecting them."

"Connecting them how?"

"The way Appasaheb suggested. Communication. Exchange. Information about who is alive, where they are, what they have, what they need. A network. Not the internet. Not technology. People. People who walk between communities and carry information."

"A postal system."

"Something like that."

Meera considers. She has the engineer's consideration, the silent processing, the variable weighing, the output that arrives fully formed.

"You want to walk back to Pune," she says.

"Yes."

"Alone?"

"Not alone. With anyone who wants to come."

"And when you get to Pune?"

"I will find the communities that exist — the relief camps, the shelters, the villages. And I will connect them to the communities on the road. And the communities on the road to each other. And we will build — not a government, not a country, not a civilisation. Just a line. A line of people who know each other, who share information, who trade food and medicine and skills. A line from Pune to Solapur, through every village and town on the route."

"That is a 250-kilometre line."

"It is a start."

She is quiet. Reyansh has stopped reaching for the sky. He is looking at me, his dark eyes round, his expression the expression of a baby who is watching an adult make a decision and who is categorising the decision as either interesting or boring. He decides it is interesting. He reaches for my face. I let him grab my nose.

"I will stay here," says Meera. "With Yash. With Reyansh. Yash needs time. Reyansh needs stability."

"I know."

"But you do not need stability."

"No. I need, movement. Purpose. A road."

"You are very much like Omkar."

"I am not twelve."

"No. But you are restless the way he is restless. You cannot stay still because stillness feels like death. And so you walk."

She is right. She is, as always, right. The engineer's analysis, applied to the human system, returning the correct output: Ishan Kulkarni is a walking machine. He walks because walking is living, because the road is the only place where the gap between here and there feels like progress rather than distance.

"When do you leave?" she asks.

"Tomorrow."

"Of course. Tomorrow." She pauses. "Take Omkar."

"He is twelve."

"He is twelve and he can walk faster than you and he knows every village between here and Pune because he talked to every person we met and remembered everything they said. He is your map. Take him."

I look at Omkar, who is playing cricket in the fading light, his bare feet on the dusty ground, his stick-bat swinging through the warm air.

"I will ask him," I say.

"He will say yes. He has been waiting for you to ask."

She is right.

She is always right.