Chapter 22: Ishan

# Chapter 22: Ishan

## Akhri Sadak

Day 100 of the virus.

One hundred days.

Human mind does not process large numbers of days. It processes routines, repetitions, the rhythm of one day against the backdrop of one week. Day 100 is not a number I feel in my body. What I feel is this: the morning routine of boiling water, adding tea leaves (the last of the Wagh Bakri, rationed to a pinch per day, the flavour more memory than taste at this concentration), drinking from the steel cup that has become my cup through the simple mechanism of exclusive use. What I feel is the texture of the cup's rim against my lower lip, the warmth of the metal conducting the heat of the tea, the slight metallic taste that I no longer notice because it has become the baseline flavour of every hot drink I have consumed for a hundred days.

Omkar is outside, playing cricket with his gang. Sound of the tennis ball hitting the plank bat carries through the window, the thwack followed by shouts, the shouts followed by argument, the argument followed by resolution, the resolution followed by another thwack. Soundtrack of Indian childhood, unchanged by apocalypse.

I sit at the desk in the communication room. Desk is plywood, scarred with the marks of previous occupants: pen scratches, cup rings, a carved heart with initials that I cannot read, the archaeological record of a desk that has served multiple purposes in multiple lives. On the desk: the notebook that Meera gave me on Day 54, now three-quarters full, the handwriting degrading from careful printed letters (Day 1 of the return) to the compressed scrawl of urgency (the later entries), the pages warped from humidity, the margins crowded with additions and corrections and small drawings (Omkar's contributions: a stick figure playing cricket, a map of the camp with X marking the mango tree, a portrait of me that makes my nose three times its actual size).

Notebook is a record. Not of the network, not exactly, although it contains the network's data: populations, resources, needs, routes. It is a record of something larger. Of the proposition that connection is the fundamental human technology, more fundamental than fire, more fundamental than language, more fundamental than the wheel. Fire keeps you warm. Language lets you describe warmth. Wheel lets you travel toward warmth. But connection, the act of reaching out to another person and receiving a response, the act of saying I am here and hearing so am I, that is the technology that makes all the others worth having.

Meera calls on the radio at noon.

"Solapur to Pune. Meera Kulkarni. Over."

"Pune receiving. Go ahead."

"Status report. Solapur camp population: 487. Health: stable, no new infections. Food: adequate for 30 days. Water: adequate. Morale: improving since radio contact established. Reyansh is walking now, six steps without support. Yash taught him. Yash says to tell Ishan that he is still the worst chess player in Solapur."

I press the transmit button. Button is warm under my thumb, the plastic worn smooth by a hundred presses.

"Tell Yash he is the worst chess player in Pune. Over."

Static. Then laughter, transmitted across 250 kilometres, degraded by atmospheric interference, reduced to a crackling, distorted approximation of the original sound. But recognisably laughter. Recognisably human. Recognisably alive.

I add the entry to the notebook. Last entry on the last page.

Day 100. Network operational: 23 nodes, 14 relay lines, estimated population connected: 4,200. Status: alive.

I close the notebook. I put down the pen. I drink the last sip of tea, the Wagh Bakri that is more memory than taste. I listen to Omkar's cricket match through the window, the thwack and the shouts and the argument and the resolution.

Outside, Pune is healing. Not recovered, not restored, not returned to what it was. Healing. Slow, imperfect, ongoing process of a city learning to be a city again, one connection at a time, one message at a time, one relay runner walking one road to one village to deliver one piece of information that tells one community: you are not alone.

That is enough. For now, for Day 100, for whatever comes after: that is enough.

There is no last road. I know this now.

I am standing on the ridge above Jejuri, at the dhabaa where Omkar and I sat and ate raw mangoes and made a pinky promise. The view stretches east — the Deccan plateau, flat and golden in the October light, the jowar fields ripening for the second harvest, the villages visible as clusters of white and brown in the green-gold expanse. And west, the ghats, the ridges folded like cloth, the forest dark between the folds, Pune somewhere beyond the last ridge, invisible but present, the way the heart is present inside the body — unseen, unfelt, but essential.

Omkar is beside me. He is eating a mango, a ripe one, this time, the orange-yellow flesh of a hapus that someone in Jejuri grew from a grafted sapling and that Omkar considers a personal gift from the universe. The juice runs down his chin. He does not wipe it.

"Dada," he says.

"Ho."

"Aaj sava divas zhaale." Today is one hundred days.

"Yes."

"Ek sava divsat, kithi challaa amhi?" In one hundred days, how far have we walked?

I calculate. Pune to Solapur: 250 kilometres. Solapur to Pune: 250 kilometres. The relay walks since then. Pune to Jejuri and back, four times. Jejuri to Vairag and back, twice. The Baramati trip. The supply runs. The side trips to villages not on the main route.

"Maybe a thousand kilometres," I say. "Give or take."

"Hazaar kilometre. Paayaani." A thousand kilometres. On foot.

"On foot."

He considers this. He bites the mango. The juice runs.

"Kohli ne kithi run maarle career madhye?" How many runs has Kohli scored in his career?

"I do not know. Twenty-five thousand? Something like that."

"Pachhees hazaar runs. Aani amhi hazaar kilometre. Tyaachya proportion madhye, amhi changlech khelto." Twenty-five thousand runs. And we have done a thousand kilometres. In proportion, we are playing well.

That logic is Omkar's logic, the logic that measures everything against cricket, that evaluates all human achievement on a scale that begins with a duck and ends with a double century. By this logic, a thousand kilometres is a respectable innings. Not a record. But respectable.

"We are playing well," I agree.

---

The hundred-day mark is not a celebration. There is nothing to celebrate, the virus killed billions, the world collapsed, the people I loved are dead, and the road I have walked is measured not in progress but in loss. But the hundred-day mark is a marker. A point on the timeline that says: you have been here for a hundred days, and you are still here, and the being-here is not passive. It is active. It is a choice remade every morning, the choice to stand, to walk, to carry the rucksack and the notebook and the radio batteries, to connect one village to the next, to hold the thread that holds the web.

I think about the people on the network.

Appasaheb, in Vairag, who is now managing a community of sixty-two and who has established a weekly gram sabha, the village council meeting, where decisions are made collectively, where every voice is heard, where the democracy that Appasaheb said requires infrastructure is being rebuilt with the simplest infrastructure of all: people sitting in a circle, talking.

Madhukar, in Jejuri, whose school now has forty-one students and who has begun a teacher training programme — teaching the teenagers to teach the younger children, multiplying the educational capacity, creating a system that can survive without him. Pythagorean theorem on the flat stone has been replaced by a proper blackboard, donated by the army, and the neem tree has been replaced by a classroom in the temple's outer hall, and the education that Madhukar called the first brick is becoming a wall.

Dagadu and Laxmi, in Pangri, whose community has grown to fourteen. Small, but stable, the population sustained by the jowar harvest and the cow's milk and the weekly relay visit from Ramu, who walks to Vairag every Monday with the regularity of a postman and who has become, in his quiet way, the most reliable node in the network.

Sunanda, in Baramati, who is managing the grain distribution. The bullock carts now running weekly, carrying quintals of jowar and bajra to communities along the route, the ancient transport system solving the modern logistics problem with the patience and reliability that has characterised bullock carts for five thousand years.

Harsh, in Pune, who has built fourteen radios and who is now working on a solar-powered charging station. A device that uses salvaged solar panels to charge the car batteries that power the radios, eliminating the dependence on the army's solar units and creating an independent power supply for the network.

Meera, in Solapur, who has begun teaching engineering — not the theoretical engineering of university courses, but the practical engineering of survival: how to repair a water pump, how to build a composting toilet, how to rig a solar panel, how to maintain a radio. She teaches with the precision that I have come to associate with her — the precision of a woman who believes that every problem has a solution and that the solution is always, always, always better than the problem.

Yash, in Solapur, whose school — Walchand Vidyapeeth Part Two, has fifty-three students and three teachers and a curriculum that combines engineering, literature, mathematics, and what Yash calls survival studies — a course that teaches students how to purify water, how to dress a wound, how to navigate by stars, how to grow food, how to build shelter. The course that nobody would have taken before the virus. The course that is now the most popular in the school.

Reyansh, in Solapur. Walking. Fourteen steps now, Meera told me on the radio last night. Fourteen steps without holding anything. Walking like a drunk, she said, side to side, arms out, but walking. Walking the way everyone walks. Unsteadily at first, then steadily, then without thinking about it, the walking becoming automatic, becoming natural, becoming the default state of a body that was designed for movement.

Omkar. Beside me. Always beside me. The twelve-year-old who lost everything and who found everything. Not the everything that was lost (that is gone, irrevocably, permanently gone) but a different everything, a smaller everything, an everything that fits inside a cloth bag and a pair of kolhapuri chappals and a cricket ball and a pinky promise.

---

"Dada."

"Ho."

"Pudhe kay?" What's next?

This question. The eternal question. The question that the road asks every day, at every junction, at every turn. What is next? Where do we go? What do we carry? What do we leave behind?

"The monsoon is coming," I say. "In six weeks, the rains will start. The village roads will become mud. The relay will slow down. The river crossings will become dangerous."

"Tar?" So?

"So we prepare. We stockpile food at the relay points. We reinforce the river crossing, the bridge at the Bhima is strong, but the approach roads will wash out. We build shelters for the relay runners, way stations, every twenty kilometres, where a runner can wait out a storm."

"Aani monsoon nanter?"

"After the monsoon, the rabi crop. Winter planting. The seeds from the Krishi Vidyapeeth. The tomato, the onion, the chilli. Every community on the network plants a winter garden. By February, we have fresh vegetables."

"Aani February nanter?"

"February — the holi festival. We celebrate. We connect the communities for a celebration — a shared holi across the network, every village, every town, the colours and the music and the food, the festival that says: we are here, we survived, we celebrate."

"Aani mag?"

"Then — I do not know. Then, whatever comes next."

Omkar finishes the mango. He throws the seed, a practised throw, overarm, the bowling action of a twelve-year-old cricketer, and the seed arcs into the valley, joining the other seed he threw weeks ago, the seed that may or may not have become a tree, the seed that may or may not grow.

"Dada. Ek sanga." Dada. Tell me one thing.

"Kay?"

"Akhri sadak kuthli?" Which is the last road?

I look at the road. The road that stretches east, toward the plateau, toward the villages, toward Solapur. The road that stretches west, toward the ghats, toward Pune, toward the flat in Aundh where the harmonium sits by the window and the masala dabba holds fading spices.

"Akhri sadak nahi," I say. There is no last road. "Pratyek sadak pudchya sadak la jaate. Pratyek gaon pudchya gaon la jaate. Pratyek manus pudchya manasaala bhetato. Akhri kahihi nahi." Every road leads to the next road. Every village leads to the next village. Every person leads to the next person. Nothing is last.

"Mhanje, amhi chalat rahaycha?" So, we keep walking?

"Chalat rahaycha." We keep walking.

Omkar stands. He adjusts the cloth bag on his shoulder. He adjusts the chappals, Laxmi aaji's grandson's chappals, worn now, the leather softened by a thousand kilometres, the soles thinned by a hundred days of road. He picks up the cricket ball from beside him, the red leather ball, scuffed and faded, the seam fraying, the ball that has been his companion since Nannaj, since before the virus, since the birthday when his father gave it to him and told him to bowl like Bumrah.

"Chala, dada," he says. Let's go, dada.

"Kuthla?" Where?

"Pudhe." Forward.

I pick up the rucksack. The weight settles on my shoulders. The familiar weight, the weight of rice and dal and seeds and medicine and a notebook full of data and a spanner keychain and the memories of a thousand kilometres.

I walk.

Road descends from the ridge, switchbacking through the forest, the teak trees rising on either side, the leaves rustling in the October wind. Below, the plain stretches east; golden, wide, dotted with villages, crossed by roads, alive.

Omkar walks beside me. His chappals slap the road. The rhythm is steady. This rhythm is a heartbeat.

The last road. The next road. The same road.

We walk.

---

For Baba. For Aai. For Sagar.

For every road that leads to every other road.

For everyone who walks.