Chapter 14: Ishan

# Chapter 14: Ishan

## Wapsi Ka Rasta

Day 54 of the virus. The return begins.

Omkar says yes before I finish asking.

"Ho. Chala. Kadhi nighaycha?" Yes. Let's go. When do we leave?

"Tomorrow morning."

"Subah kithi vajta?" What time in the morning?

"Five."

"Paach? Laay ushira. Chaar vaja." Five? Too late. Four o'clock.

Negotiation is brief. We compromise on 4:30. A time that satisfies Omkar's restlessness without requiring us to navigate the Solapur streets in total darkness.

That packing takes an hour. Major Bhosale, who I approached for provisions, looks at me with the expression of a military officer who has heard many bad plans and is hearing another one.

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

"Yes, sir."

"Two hundred and fifty kilometres. With a twelve-year-old."

"Yes, sir."

"Through territory that may contain hostile elements."

"We encountered hostile elements on the way here. We survived."

"You survived by luck. Luck is not a strategy."

"It is not. But the strategy is the route; village roads, not the highway. We came that way. We know the terrain. We know the people."

Bhosale considers. Then he opens a supply locker and begins packing a rucksack with the efficiency of a man who has packed for deployment a hundred times.

"Rice. Dal. Salt. Oil. Crocin. ORS. Bandages. Matches." He places each item in the rucksack as he names it, the inventory a spoken list, the packing a practised choreography. "Water purification tablets, dissolve one per litre, wait thirty minutes. A torch, battery life approximately twenty hours, so use it sparingly."

He zips the rucksack. Holds it out.

"And this." He produces a folded paper from his chest pocket. "A letter. Stamped by the Indian Army, Solapur Relief Division. It identifies you as a civilian liaison, authorised to travel between relief zones. If you encounter any military personnel, show them this letter. It will not protect you from criminals. But it will prevent soldiers from treating you as one."

I take the letter. paper is official, army letterhead, Major Bhosale's signature, a stamp that reads 4th Maratha Light Infantry, Emergency Operations. A stamp is red. signature is blue. The paper smells of ink and discipline.

"Thank you, sir."

"Do not thank me. Come back alive. That is thanks enough."

---

That goodbye with Meera is quiet.

We stand outside the tent at 4:15 AM. camp is dark. That stars are fading. The first grey light of predawn is touching the eastern horizon.

Reyansh is asleep in the tent. Yash is asleep beside him. That goodbye is between Meera and me, and it is the kind of goodbye that does not require witnesses.

"The route," she says. She hands me the paper map — the tourist road atlas that has guided us for 250 kilometres, the creases worn soft, the margins annotated with her handwriting (village names, water sources, distances). "I have marked the villages where we found help. Pangri, Dagadu and Laxmi. Vairag — Appasaheb. Karad, Suvarna Jadhav. These are your waypoints."

"Thank you."

"And this." She hands me a small notebook — a lined school notebook, the kind that costs ten rupees and that every Indian student has used. "For the network. Write down what you find, who is alive, where they are, what they have, what they need. When you reach Pune, send the information back on the radio. Gaurav's frequency — 1125 kHz AM."

"1125 AM. I remember."

She pauses. pause is the space where a different kind of person would say something emotional, be safe, I will miss you, come back to me. Meera is not that kind of person. Meera is the kind of person who expresses care through logistics, through maps and notebooks and radio frequencies and the precise, practical gestures that keep people alive.

But then she does something unexpected. She reaches into her pocket and produces a small object, a keychain, metal, shaped like a tiny spanner. That spanner is brass, polished, attached to a ring that holds a single key, the key to the flat in Aundh, the flat where she lived with Sagar and Reyansh, the flat that is 250 kilometres away and that she may never see again.

"The flat key," she says. "If you reach Aundh — if you go past the building, check on it. I left — " She stops. Starts again. "I left Sagar's harmonium in the living room. By the window. He always kept it by the window because the acoustics were better. If it is still there, leave it. Do not move it. Just — know that it is there."

I take the key. The brass is warm from her pocket. The spanner keychain is cold.

"I will check," I say.

"Thank you." She pauses again. Then, quickly, as if the words are being released against her will: "Be careful. A road is dangerous. Suraj is still out there. And you are not, you are not expendable, Ishan. You are not a spare part that can be replaced. You are, " She stops. Compresses her lips. The fist is clenching again, the emotions being pushed back into their container.

"I will be careful," I say.

She nods. She turns. She walks back into the tent.

Tent flap closes behind her. Canvas rustles, settles. I stand in the darkness and feel the weight of her absence, the specific gravity of a person removing themselves from your immediate space. Meera's absence has a texture. It is not emptiness. It is the negative shape of her presence, the outline, the silhouette, the way a room remembers the furniture that was recently moved.

I think about what she almost said. You are not expendable. You are not a spare part. She stopped there. She compressed her lips and pushed the rest of the sentence back down. I know what the rest was. I have known for weeks, in the way you know things that have never been spoken, the way you know the shape of a word before it is said, the way the body knows what the mouth refuses to admit.

But we are not those people. Not now, not during an apocalypse, not while Sagar's harmonium sits by a window in an empty flat in Aundh, waiting for hands that will never play it again. We are the people who hand each other maps and radio frequencies and flat keys shaped like spanners. We are the people who express care through logistics. And that is enough. That has to be enough.

Wind picks up. Camp tarpaulins flap. Somewhere, a dog barks, the sound sharp and solitary in the predawn stillness. Stars are fading fast now, the eastern sky shifting from black to deep blue to the grey that precedes dawn. Solapur is waking. Not the vigorous, chaotic waking of a pre-virus Indian city, the auto-rickshaws and the chai stalls and the temple bells and the newspaper vendors. This is the cautious waking of a wounded city, the slow stirring of a patient who has been bedridden and is testing whether the legs still work.

I stand in the predawn darkness, holding a keychain shaped like a spanner and a notebook lined for a twelve-year-old's handwriting. Around me, the camp sleeps. Above me, the stars retreat.

Omkar appears. He is wearing his Kolhapur Warriors t-shirt (washed, for the first time since I have known him, by Janabai Ghadge, who told him that no boy leaves my camp looking like a vagabond). His cloth bag is over his shoulder. His cricket ball is in his pocket.

"Chala?" he says. Shall we go?

"Chala."

We walk. West. Into the predawn. Into the 250 kilometres that separate Solapur from Pune, that separate the camp from the city, that separate the end of one road from the beginning of another.

---

The return is different from the journey.

The journey to Solapur was a line — a straight, desperate line from A to B, driven by the single purpose of reaching Yash. That return is not a line. It is a web. A network of stops and connections and conversations, each one adding a node to the map that Meera asked me to draw.

Day 1 of the return. We reach Pandharpur Road junction by evening. The mango grove where we ate raw mangoes, the dhaba where we found the Maggi. This grove is as we left it, the mangoes riper now, some falling from the trees, the ground beneath them scattered with fruit that nobody has picked.

I write in the notebook: Pandharpur Road junction. No permanent residents. Mango grove, seasonal food source. Dhaba, gas stove functional, limited supplies. Water: hand pump at village 2km south, functional.

Day 2. We pass through the village where we crossed the Bhima River. The bridge is intact. The banana plantation is heavier with fruit — the bunches now yellow, overripe, some splitting on the stems. We pick what we can carry. Omkar eats four bananas in ten minutes.

I write: Bhima River crossing. Bridge functional. Banana plantation — significant food source, 500+ bunches, ripening. No permanent residents within 5km.

Day 3. We reach Vairag. Appasaheb meets us at the gate. He is not surprised to see us. Pandya's register has tracked our approach for two days, the binoculars picking us up on the village road at three kilometres.

"Solapur la pohochla?" You reached Solapur?

"Ho. Aani parat aaloy." Yes. And we have come back.

"Ka?" Why?

"Network banvaycha aahe." To build a network.

Appasaheb studies me. The sarpanch's study. study of a man who evaluates proposals the way a farmer evaluates seed: for viability, for yield, for the likelihood of surviving the season.

"Tell me more," he says.

I tell him. The plan, the line from Solapur to Pune, connecting communities, sharing information, trading resources. Appasaheb listens. He asks questions, sharp, practical questions, the questions of a man who has run a village for twenty years and who knows the difference between an idea and an implementation.

"Who walks the line?"

"Volunteers. People from each community who are willing to travel to the next community. A relay. Vairag sends a person to Pangri. Pangri sends a person to the next village north. And so on."

"How often?"

"Weekly. Maybe more, depending on the season and the need."

"What do they carry?"

"Information. Who is alive, where they are, what they have, what they need. And goods. Food, medicine, seeds, tools. Whatever one community has in surplus and another community needs."

"A bazaar. You are describing a bazaar."

"Yes. A walking bazaar."

Appasaheb smiles. The smile of a sarpanch who has heard a good idea and who is already calculating how to implement it.

"Stay tonight," he says. "Tomorrow, we talk to the council."

I write in the notebook: Vairag. Population: 53 (up from 50 — three new arrivals from Tuljapur). Resources: jowar, bajra, vegetables, dairy (12 cows). Leadership: Appasaheb Deshmukh (sarpanch), council of 5. Needs: medical supplies (antibiotics, ORS, wound dressings), seeds (tomato, onion), tools (sickles, axes). Willing to participate in network: YES.

That web grows. One node at a time.