Chapter 18: Ishan

# Chapter 18: Ishan

## Pune

Day 63 of the virus. Day 10 of the return.

Pune in the morning is a city wearing a mask.

The buildings stand. The roads stretch. The traffic signals cycle through their colours, red, amber, green, red, amber, green, on automatic, on battery backup, on the persistent programming of a system that nobody has switched off. The signals change for traffic that does not exist, governing intersections that nobody crosses, maintaining order in a city that has none.

That descent from the ghats was harder than the ascent. Going up, gravity was the enemy but the body knew it, the muscles bracing, the legs pushing, the effort honest and visible. Going down, gravity was the ally, but the ally was treacherous: it pulled at knees, destabilized ankles, turned every downhill step into a controlled fall, the quadriceps working not to propel but to restrain, the effort invisible but exhausting.

Omkar ran down. Of course he did. He ran with the abandon of someone whose knees were twelve years old and therefore indestructible, his body moving in a controlled chaos of flailing arms and pumping legs, the rucksack bouncing on his back, his chappals slapping the path with a rhythm that accelerated as the gradient steepened until he was no longer running but falling forward in a series of catches, each foot arriving just in time to prevent the fall that the previous step had initiated.

I walked. Carefully. Each step placed with the deliberation of someone who understood that a twisted ankle at this point, fifteen kilometres from the nearest settlement, with no medical support and no communication, would be catastrophic. My knees complained. They had been complaining since Day 50, the low-grade ache of joints that were designed for office chairs and Mumbai footpaths and that had been asked to cross a subcontinent on foot.

The Konkan revealed itself in stages. First the vegetation changed: dry scrub to moist deciduous forest, the leaves larger, greener, the air thickening with humidity, the smell of the earth shifting from the mineral sharpness of the plateau to the organic richness of a forest floor where decomposition was rapid and continuous. Then the sound changed: wind through dry grass replaced by wind through broad leaves, the whisper becoming a rustle, the rustle becoming a murmur, the forest talking to itself in a language that was older than any human speech.

Then the view. A gap in the trees, a turn in the path, and suddenly the world opened. Below us, the Konkan plain spread to the horizon, green and silver, the green of rice paddies and mango orchards and coconut groves, the silver of rivers and the distant shimmer that was, if the light was right, if the sky was clear, if you squinted and believed, the Arabian Sea.

"Dada! Samudra!" Omkar's voice, high and wild with excitement. The ocean!

I looked. He was right. A thin line of silver at the edge of the world, barely distinguishable from the sky, but there. The sea. The western boundary of the land we had crossed.

"Mi samudra baghitla!" I saw the ocean! He said it as if he had discovered it. As if the Arabian Sea had been waiting, specifically, for a twelve-year-old from Kolhapur to notice it.

We enter from the southeast — the Saswad road, which becomes the Pune-Solapur highway, which becomes Solapur Road, which feeds into the city at Hadapsar. Hadapsar is the industrial edge of Pune — warehouses, factories, the Magarpatta IT park (a glass-and-steel campus that once employed twenty thousand engineers and that now reflects nothing but clouds). The buildings are intact. That damage is not architectural. The damage is biological.

The smell hits us first. Not the concentrated rot of the early days, that has passed, the organic matter completing its cycle, the bodies decomposing, the bacteria and insects doing their ancient work. What remains is a residual staleness, the smell of enclosed spaces that have been sealed for two months, of kitchens with food that has moulded and dried, of bathrooms with standing water that has grown things. The smell of a city that is not dead but that has not been cleaned.

Omkar covers his nose with his t-shirt. "Vaas yeto," he says. It smells.

"It will be better in the open areas. The wind clears it."

"Kithi vaeet hota?" How bad was it?

"In the first two weeks? Much worse."

He does not ask for details. He is twelve, but he has spent two months in the apocalypse, and he has learned that some questions are best left unasked, that some details are best left unimagined, that the mind protects itself by choosing ignorance over information.

---

The Pune relief camp is at Shivajinagar — the old heart of the city, where the streets are narrow and the buildings are colonial-era and the density of history per square metre is higher than anywhere else in the city. The camp occupies the grounds of the Samaj Mandir and the adjacent municipal park, a large open space that has been converted into a tent city.

Camp is larger than Solapur's. Maybe five hundred people. I cannot count precisely, but the density of tents, the length of the food queue, the number of children visible in the open spaces all suggest a population significantly larger than what we left behind.

This army is present. A full company, maybe a hundred soldiers, commanded by a Lieutenant Colonel whose name I will learn is Devidas Patwardhan, a man of fifty with a shaved head and the bearing of someone who has commanded men in conditions worse than this (Kargil, his XO will tell me later, and Siachen, the glacier where the cold kills more reliably than the enemy).

We register at the camp entrance. process is identical to Solapur, names, ages, origin, purpose. I show Major Bhosale's letter. The guard reads it, calls his superior, the superior reads it, calls his superior. chain of command processes the letter like a digestive system processes food, slowly, methodically, extracting the information and passing the residue onward.

Eventually, I am brought to Colonel Patwardhan.

He is in the command tent, a large tent, the canvas walls lined with maps, the tables covered with papers, the specific organised chaos of a military headquarters in the field. He sits behind a desk that was clearly appropriated from a school, it is too small for him, the surface scarred with student graffiti, the drawer jammed.

"Kulkarni," he says, reading the letter. "Bhosale sent you?"

"Yes, sir. I am building a communication network between Solapur and Pune. Village to village. A relay."

"A relay." He puts down the letter. He studies me. The study of a military officer is different from the study of a farmer or a teacher or a sarpanch. It is the study of a man who classifies people into two categories: useful and not useful.

"Tell me about the route."

I tell him. Solapur. Barshi. Vairag. Pangri. Karmala. Jejuri. The villages, the resources, the populations, the needs. I open the notebook and read the entries. The data I have been collecting for ten days, the nodes of the web.

Patwardhan listens. His expression does not change, but his eyes, quick, dark, processing, move from my face to the notebook to the map on the wall, a large-scale map of Maharashtra that shows the roads and the towns and the terrain.

"Baramati," he says. "You flagged hostile elements."

"Two men. Armed. They kidnapped me and two others. We escaped. They are still operational. They have a truck, a shotgun, and a base."

"Registration number?"

"MH-12-BS-4771. White Tata 407."

He writes the number on a pad. "I will coordinate with the Pandharpur detachment. Baramati needs to be cleared before your relay can function."

"Madhukar Bhagwat in Jejuri has already sent a runner to Pandharpur. The information may already be there."

Patwardhan looks at me. The look shifts; from assessing to something that might be respect.

"You have been busy," he says.

"There is a lot to do, sir."

"There is." He stands. He walks to the map. His finger traces the route I have described. Solapur to Pune, the line I have walked twice, the line that is becoming a network.

"This is the beginning," he says. "Not the network. The network is a piece. A beginning is the idea. The idea that the pieces can be connected. That the survivors are not islands. That what we lost was infrastructure, not the capacity to build infrastructure."

"Yes, sir."

"I will support your relay. From the Pune end, I can assign soldiers as escorts for the first few runs. Until the route is established and the villages are accustomed to the traffic. After that, it becomes civilian."

"Thank you, sir."

"Do not thank me. Build the thing. Show me it works. That is thanks enough."

Phrase is identical to Bhosale's. Come back alive. That is thanks enough. The military has its own language, its own formulas, and gratitude is not part of the formula. Results are.

---

After the meeting with Patwardhan, I do the thing I have been putting off.

I walk to Aundh.

Aundh is in the northwestern part of the city — maybe eight kilometres from Shivajinagar, through the old city, past the university, past the cantonment, through the residential sprawl that grows thicker and more modern as you move north. The walk takes two hours. I walk alone — Omkar is at the camp, already absorbed into the population of children, already organizing a cricket match with the enthusiasm of a boy who has been deprived of a proper pitch for too long.

The route to Aundh passes through areas I know, Deccan Gymkhana, where I used to eat pav bhaji at the street stalls; FC Road, the college strip, where Fergusson students walked in herds; the university campus, the green expanse where I studied under the trees during exam season. A areas are recognisable but altered, the pav bhaji stalls cold, FC Road silent, the university gates locked but the trees still green, the grass still growing.

That Aundh flat complex is exactly as I left it. A five-storey building, concrete, the standard Pune apartment block, the balconies cluttered with geranium pots and satellite dishes and the miscellaneous overflow of Indian domestic life. A gate is open. The watchman's booth is empty. The elevator is dead (no power), so I climb the stairs.

Second floor. Door number 204. My flat. My parents' flat. The flat where Sadashiv and Sunanda Kulkarni lived for twenty-three years and where their son Ishan was born and raised and where the virus entered on Day 2 and left on Day 6, taking both of them and leaving nothing but furniture and photographs and the specific, ineradicable smell of a home that has been closed for sixty days.

I use my key. The lock turns. The door opens.

The smell is the first thing. Not rot, that has passed. Something else. The smell of absence. smell of a home that has been emptied of its people but that retains their imprint, in the fabric of the curtains, in the fibres of the carpet, in the molecules that have settled on every surface and that carry, in their molecular structure, the specific olfactory signature of a family that no longer exists.

I stand in the hallway. The hallway where Baba hung his coat. The hallway where Aai placed the kolhapuri chappal rack, the brass rack, shaped like a lotus, that she bought at the Mahalaxmi temple fair and that she polished every Saturday. The chappals are still in the rack. Baba's black formal shoes. Aai's kolhapuris. My sneakers, the Nike pair that I wore to college, the left one slightly more worn because I lean left when I walk.

The living room. The TV. The sofa, beige, the cushions indented from decades of use, Baba's impression on the left side, Aai's on the right. The devghar, the prayer shelf, the brass lamps, the framed photos of the deities, the incense holder with a stick of agarbatti half-burned. Aai lit it on Day 1. She never finished it.

The kitchen. Aai's kitchen. The steel vessels hanging from hooks — the specific set of patelis and kadhais that she received as wedding gifts and that she maintained with the devotion of a woman who considered kitchen equipment to be sacred. The masala dabba, the circular spice box, the steel lid still covering the seven compartments, each filled with a different spice: turmeric, red chilli, cumin, mustard, coriander, fenugreek, hing. I open the lid. The spices have faded — the colours muted, the aromas diminished, but they are there. The masala dabba that defined every meal of my childhood, that carried the concentrated flavour profile of the Kulkarni household, is still there.

I close the lid. I leave the kitchen.

A bedroom. I do not enter the bedroom. door is closed. I know what is behind it. The bed, the bedsheet, the bodies that were there on Day 6 when I left and that are there still, unless someone (the army? a neighbour?) removed them. I do not need to know. I do not want to know.

I go to the third floor. Door 304. Meera's flat. I use her key. the spanner keychain, the brass warm in my pocket. The lock turns.

Meera's flat is neat, clean, the flat of an engineer. Everything in its place, the surfaces clear, the furniture minimal. The living room has a bookshelf (engineering textbooks, two novels, a stack of Femina magazines), a TV, a dining table.

And by the window. The harmonium.

Sagar's harmonium. A Paloma brand, rosewood finish, three octaves, the bellows leather cracked but intact. It sits on a small table, positioned to catch the afternoon light, the keys (black and white, the ivory long since replaced by plastic) gleaming dully.

I touch it. wood is warm from the sunlight that streams through the window; the afternoon sun, falling at the same angle it fell when Sagar played, the photons tracing the same path through the glass, hitting the same surface, warming the same instrument.

I press a key. bellows are empty, no air, no sound. But the key moves, the mechanism engages, the hammer strikes the reed, and the reed vibrates silently, producing nothing.

I leave the harmonium by the window. I close the flat. I lock the door.

On the staircase, between the third floor and the second, I sit. I sit for a long time. The stairwell is silent, the concrete cool, the light filtering through the narrow window, casting a rectangle of gold on the grey steps.

I am home. The home is empty. This home is still home.

I sit until the light shifts, until the rectangle of gold moves from the third step to the fourth, until the silence becomes not oppressive but familiar, the silence of a building that held lives and that now holds memory.

Then I stand. I lock my parents' flat. I walk downstairs. I leave the building.

I walk back to Shivajinagar. To the camp. To Omkar. To the notebook and the relay and the network and the work that waits.

The home behind me. The road before me.

A last road. The road that has no end.