Chapter 16: Ishan

# Chapter 16: Ishan

## Baramati

Day 60 of the virus. Day 7 of the return.

Baramati is the first real town on the return.

Villages have been our world for sixty days. Villages where everyone knows everyone, where the social structures are visible and legible, where the sarpanch or the eldest farmer or the loudest woman runs things and everyone knows the hierarchy. Villages where the economy is tangible, the jowar in the granary, the water in the well, the cattle in the shed, wealth that you can touch and count and smell.

Towns are different. Towns have complexity that villages lack. Multiple power centres, competing interests, strangers who share space without sharing trust. Towns have markets, and markets have middlemen, and middlemen have agendas that are rarely aligned with the people on either end of the transaction.

Baramati, before the virus, was a town of sixty thousand. A sugar belt town, the sugar cooperative the economic engine, the cooperative's chairman the de facto ruler, the politics of sugar indistinguishable from the politics of everything else. Sugarcane fields surrounding the town like a green ocean, the crushing season transforming the air for four months every year into a sweet, humid, almost suffocating fog of molasses and bagasse.

Now the sugar cooperative is a relief centre. Crushing plant, with its massive iron rollers and its conveyor belts and its centrifuges, sits silent. Yard where trucks once queued for sixteen hours to deliver cane is now a parking lot for military vehicles. Two army trucks, painted the olive drab of the Indian Army, parked precisely, their tyres chalked, their canvas covers tied down, their presence a statement of order in a landscape of disorder.

We approach from the south road, the road that connects Baramati to Pandharpur, the road that runs straight through the sugarcane belt. Cane is overgrown. Nobody has harvested. Stalks are three metres tall, thick as a man's wrist, the leaves brown and rustling in the dry wind. Walking through the cane fields is like walking through a corridor of whispers, the stalks brushing against each other, the dry leaves scraping, the sound a continuous shh-shh-shh that fills the ears and makes conversation impossible.

Omkar walks ahead of me, his hands trailing along the cane stalks, his fingers breaking off the dry outer leaves with the idle destructiveness of a bored child. He pulls a stalk from the ground. It comes up with a snap and a spray of red soil. He strips the outer layers with his teeth, exposing the pale green inner stalk, the juice already beading on the surface, catching the light.

"Dada, ganna khaycha?" Want some sugarcane?

He holds out a piece. Juice is sweet, sweeter than I remember sugarcane being, perhaps because sugar has been absent from our diet for two months, perhaps because the cane has been growing unchecked and has concentrated its sweetness without the intervention of harvest schedules and cooperative quotas. I chew. Fibres resist, then release their juice in a slow, sweet flood that fills my mouth and throat and triggers a memory so specific it stops my walking: my grandfather's farm in Sangli, Deepavali, the ganna ras stall outside the temple, the hand-cranked juicer, the green liquid pouring into steel glasses, the ice (when there was ice), the adrak and limbu that the stall owner added with a flourish.

Memory is sugar. Sweet, dissolving, gone before you can hold it.

Military checkpoint at Baramati's south entrance is staffed by two soldiers. Young, both of them, perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three, their uniforms too big (they have lost weight; everyone has lost weight), their rifles slung across their backs with the casual familiarity of men who carry them every day and have forgotten their presence.

I produce Major Bhosale's letter. Soldier reads it. His eyes move across the lines with the slow deliberation of someone who is reading not for comprehension but for authenticity, checking the letterhead, the signature, the stamp, the specific vocabulary of military authorization.

"Civilian liaison," he reads aloud. He looks at me. He looks at Omkar. He looks back at the letter.

"Ye laahaan porga pan civilian liaison aahe ka?" This small boy is also a civilian liaison?

"He is my colleague."

Omkar straightens. Shoulders back. Chin up. Posture of a twelve-year-old who has been called a colleague and who intends to live up to the title.

Soldier suppresses a smile. He waves us through.

Baramati greets us with ghosts.

The town where Suraj and Dhanraj found us. The medical store where we were loading Crocin and Candid-B when the white Tata 407 pulled up and two men with a shotgun turned our survival story into a kidnapping story. The main road, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Road, where every shuttered shop is a reminder of what was taken.

I have not wanted to come here. The body remembers what the mind rationalises. My chest tightens as we enter the town limits, my hands clench, the muscles of my back contract as if preparing for a blow. The last time I was on this road, Suraj's hand was on my collar and the barrel of the shotgun was pressing into the small of my back, the cold metal circle a punctuation mark at the end of every sentence I did not say.

Omkar senses the tension. He walks closer to me, his new chappals slapping the tarmac, his cloth bag held tight against his body.

"Ithech ka?" he asks. Here?

"Yes. This is where they took us."

He looks around. The main road is empty, the standard emptiness, the shuttered shops, the silent intersections. The MSRTC bus stand is visible at the end of the road, the red buses parked in their bays, their destinations still displayed.

"Te truck vaale? Ithech astat ka?" The truck men? Do they stay here?

"I do not know. Their farmhouse is on a hill, west of the town. Maybe twenty kilometres."

"Tithe jaaycha nahi." We are not going there.

"We are not going there."

We move through Baramati quickly. I am mapping, not lingering — noting the resources, the infrastructure, the potential for habitation. This town has what every mid-sized Maharashtrian town has: a hospital (the sub-district hospital, a three-storey building, its emergency lights dark, its corridors visible through the glass doors, empty, but equipped), a grain market (the mandi, warehouses full of stored grain — jowar, bajra, rice, the accumulated produce of the October harvest, now sitting unclaimed), a water tower (the municipal water system, gravity-fed, the tower visible above the roofline, the tank full, the monsoon filled it, and without consumption, it remains full).

I write: Baramati. Population: Unknown (no contact made — security concern). Resources: SIGNIFICANT, sub-district hospital (equipment intact, no power), grain market (multiple warehouses, estimated 500+ quintals stored grain), municipal water tower (full, gravity-fed distribution functional in some areas). Sugar factory: potentially operational with diesel/power. CAUTION: Hostile elements reported — Suraj and Dhanraj, white Tata 407 MH-12-BS-4771, armed with shotgun, farmhouse on hill 20km west. Recommend military assessment before establishing permanent presence.

That entry is longer than any other in the notebook. Baramati is the most resource-rich location on the route. The grain alone could feed hundreds for a year. But the resources are locked behind the threat, and the threat is real, and until the threat is addressed, Baramati is a treasure chest with a snake coiled on the lid.

---

We leave Baramati by the northern road, heading toward Jejuri. The road climbs. The Deccan plateau tilting upward as it approaches the Western Ghats, the landscape changing from flat farmland to rolling hills, the vegetation shifting from dry scrub to mixed deciduous forest.

Jejuri appears in the afternoon, the temple town, the golden spire of the Khandoba temple visible from five kilometres, catching the sun and throwing it back in a warm, honeyed glow. The town sits at the foot of a hill, the temple at the top, connected by a staircase of stone steps that pilgrims have climbed for centuries.

Town is not empty.

I see them from the ridge above — people moving in the streets, smoke rising from cooking fires, the unmistakable activity of habitation. My pulse quickens. Every encounter with new people carries the dual potential of help and harm, and the memory of Baramati, of the last time I encountered strangers in a town — sharpens the anxiety.

"Lok aahey," says Omkar. People.

"Yes."

"Changla ki waeet?" Good or bad?

"We will find out."

---

A Jejuri community is run from the temple.

This makes a kind of cosmic sense — the Khandoba temple has been the centre of Jejuri for eight hundred years, the gravitational point around which the town orbits, the place where marriages are consecrated and festivals celebrated and disputes settled and vows made. When the virus stripped away every other institution, the municipal office, the police station, the school, the hospital — the temple remained. Not because of faith (though faith persists, stubbornly, irrationally, beautifully) but because of architecture. A temple is the strongest building in the town. The walls are stone, three feet thick. The courtyard is vast, large enough to hold two hundred people. The water supply is ancient — a step well behind the temple, fed by an underground spring that has not failed in eight centuries.

The community leader is not a priest. He is a retired schoolteacher named Madhukar Bhagwat — a small, energetic man in his sixties with steel-rimmed spectacles and the specific bearing of a man who has spent his life in front of a classroom and who regards every interaction as a teaching opportunity.

"Ya, ya!" he says when we approach the temple gate. "Pahune! Kuthun aalat?" Come, come! Guests! Where did you come from?

"Solapur. Walking."

"Solapur! Chalat! Kithi divas lagle?" Solapur! Walking! How many days?

"Seven. On the return."

"Return? Mhanje aadhi gele hote?" Return? So you went before?

"Yes. From Pune to Solapur. And now back."

Madhukar's eyes widen behind the spectacles. widening is genuine. reaction of a man who has been in Jejuri for sixty days and who has not heard of anyone voluntarily walking five hundred kilometres.

"Infun ya. Cha ghya. Sagle sanga." Come inside. Have tea. Tell me everything.

---

The Jejuri community has thirty-seven people. They live in the temple complex — the main hall serves as a dormitory, the courtyard as a common space, the kitchen (attached to the temple, designed for festival cooking) as a communal kitchen. The step well provides water. The temple's stored grains, offerings from devotees, accumulated over months — provide food.

Madhukar has organized the community around two principles: education and agriculture. Every morning, the children (nine of them, aged three to fifteen) attend school in the temple courtyard, taught by Madhukar himself. Every afternoon, the adults work the fields, the temple's land, eight acres, traditionally farmed by warkaris (devotees) and now farmed by survivors.

"Shikshan aani sheti," Madhukar says. Education and farming. "Baaki sagle yetach. Shikshan dilas tar lok vichar kartat. Sheti dilas tar lok khaatat. Vichar aani khaana, baaki kay lavta?" The rest follows. If you give education, people think. If you give farming, people eat. Thinking and eating, what else do you need?

I present the network idea. Madhukar listens with the attention of a teacher hearing a student's presentation. Nodding at the good points, frowning at the weak ones, his fingers tapping his knee in a rhythm that suggests he is already grading.

"Changli idea aahe," he says. Good idea. "Pan ek problem aahe." But there is one problem.

"What?"

"Baramati. Tumhi mhanala — goonda aahey tithhe. Shotgun. Truck. Hya line var Baramati aahe, Solapur aani Pune madhye. Agar Baramati secure nahi, tar line tutta." Baramati. You said — thugs are there. Shotgun. Truck. Baramati is on this line, between Solapur and Pune. If Baramati is not secure, the line breaks.

He is right. Baramati is the bottleneck. The richest node on the network is also the most dangerous, and until it is secured, the line from Solapur to Pune has a gap. A gap that Suraj and Dhanraj patrol in a white Tata 407 with a shotgun and a philosophy of ownership.

"The army," I say. "Major Bhosale in Solapur. If we can get a message to him, "

"Message kasa? Radio nahi. Phone nahi. Internet nahi." Message how? No radio. No phone. No internet.

"The relay. If Ramu walks from Pangri to Vairag, and Vairag sends someone to Barshi, and Barshi to Solapur. The message reaches Bhosale in four days."

"Chaar divas. Chaar divas madhye te goonda kahipan karu shaktat." Four days. In four days, those thugs can do anything.

"Yes. But four days is better than never."

Madhukar considers. He taps his knee. The rhythm changes. Faster, more complex, the rhythm of a mind working through a problem.

"Mi ek karto," he says. I will do one thing. "Mi Pandharpur la manus pathavto. Pandharpur madhye army aahe — chhota camp, pan aahe. Pandharpur Baramati la javal aahe, teesek kilometre. Army yeun Baramati secure karu shakte." I will send a person to Pandharpur. There is an army presence in Pandharpur — small camp, but it exists. Pandharpur is close to Baramati, thirty kilometres. The army can come and secure Baramati.

A solution is elegant. I had been thinking in straight lines, Solapur to Pune, a single route. Madhukar is thinking in networks, lateral connections, alternate routes, the web that is stronger than any single thread.

"Madhukar sir," I say. "Tumhi teacher aahat, he disat." You are a teacher, it shows.

He smiles. The smile of a man who has been complimented on the thing he values most.

"Shikshan sagle shikvata," he says. Education teaches everything. "Aani sagle mhanaje, sagle." And everything means, everything.

I write in the notebook: Jejuri. Population: 37. Resources: temple complex (stone construction, step well, kitchen, 8 acres farmland), grain stores (temple offerings), education system (Madhukar Bhagwat, daily classes). Leadership: Madhukar Bhagwat (teacher, de facto leader). Needs: medical supplies, tools, contact with other communities. Strategic value: HIGH — controls Pune-Solapur route at key junction. Lateral connection to Pandharpur (army presence). Willing to participate in network: YES. Action item: Madhukar sending runner to Pandharpur re: Baramati security.

That web grows. The nodes multiply. The line from Solapur to Pune is becoming less a line and more a mesh. A mesh of villages and temples and farms and people, connected by feet and bhakri and the stubborn, ancient conviction that no village is an island.