Chapter 4: Ishan

# Chapter 4: Ishan

## Bhook

Day 23 of the walk. Day 30 of the virus.

Hunger has a geography. It starts in the stomach — the obvious place, the pit, the hollow that growls and contracts and sends its complaints upward through the vagus nerve like a union representative filing grievances. But it does not stay in the stomach. It migrates. By Day 2 without proper food, it reaches the head, a dull, persistent ache behind the eyes, the brain protesting the reduction in glucose, the cognitive machinery slowing like an engine running on fumes. By Day 3, it reaches the limbs — the muscles weakening, the joints stiffening, the legs that have carried us hundreds of kilometres now trembling on flat ground as if the ground itself has become a mountain.

We have not eaten properly in two days. The dhaba at the 180-kilometre marker was empty. stripped bare, every tin opened, every sack cut, the kitchen ransacked by someone who arrived before us. The kirana shop in the village of Mhaswad yielded only a single packet of poha flakes and a tin of groundnut oil, which Meera cooked into a paste that tasted of nothing and sustained us for exactly one meal.

Walking through the Deccan in April is an education in heat. Not the humid heat of the coast, where the air wraps around you like a wet towel and the sweat has nowhere to go. Deccan heat is dry, direct, the sun striking the basalt earth and the earth throwing it back, so that you are heated from above and below simultaneously, sandwiched between two sources of thermal radiation, the air itself a medium of transfer, carrying heat into lungs that are designed for twenty-five degrees and are receiving forty-two.

The body adapts. Not quickly, not comfortably, but it adapts. By the fourth day of walking, I had learned the rhythms: walk from first light until 10 AM (six hours of tolerable heat, the morning cool enough for pace and distance). Rest from 10 AM until 3 PM (five hours of shelter, shade, sleep, the middle of the day surrendered to the sun because the sun was winning and would always win). Walk from 3 PM until dark (four more hours, the heat diminishing, the shadows lengthening, the earth beginning to release the day's stored warmth in a slow exhale that continued through the night).

Omkar did not adapt. Omkar was immune. He walked in the noon sun with the indifference of a child whose body had not yet learned to register discomfort as a signal to stop. He walked barefoot on basalt that would blister adult feet. He drank water from streams without checking, ate mangoes without washing, slept on ground that was probably home to scorpions and centipedes and the various other Deccan arthropods whose evolutionary strategy involved venom and darkness.

"Dada, tumhala garmi laglay ka?" Are you feeling hot?

I was lying under a babool tree, my shirt plastered to my back, my face the colour of a tomato, my breathing the shallow, rapid breathing of a mammal whose thermoregulation system was approaching its design limits.

"No," I lied.

"Kharach? Tumcha tond laal aahe." Really? Your face is red.

"It is always red."

"Nahi. Mumbai madhye te nahi hota." No. It wasn't in Mumbai.

The child remembers everything. Every detail, every change, every discrepancy between the Ishan of Mumbai and the Ishan of the road. He is a walking database of observation, a surveillance system disguised as a twelve-year-old.

Reyansh is the priority. He gets the milk powder. The last tin, shaken out twice daily into boiled water, the thin, pale liquid that is all that stands between a fourteen-month-old and dehydration. Meera watches him drink with the fierce concentration of a woman who is counting millilitres, calculating days, running the arithmetic of survival in her head and not liking the numbers.

"Three days of milk powder," she says. "At current ratios."

"We will find more."

"Where? Every shop between here and Solapur has been emptied."

"Then we find a house. A flat. Someone's kitchen. There will be milk powder somewhere. Every household with a child has milk powder."

"Every household with a child also has a dead child."

Words land like stones dropped into still water. The ripples spread outward. The implication, the image, the specific horror of searching through a dead family's kitchen for the milk that their dead child no longer needs. Meera's face does not change. She has passed through horror and emerged on the other side, where the calculus is simple: her child needs milk, milk exists in dead people's houses, therefore she will enter dead people's houses and take their milk.

"Then we enter dead people's houses," I say.

She nods. A matter is settled.

---

This village of Akluj. Day 23. Approximately ninety kilometres from Solapur.

Akluj is a taluka town; one of those mid-sized settlements that dot the Deccan plateau, big enough to have a hospital and a bus stand and a branch of the State Bank of India, small enough that everyone knows everyone else's business and the arrival of a stranger is noted, discussed, and assigned a caste within thirty minutes.

The town is silent. The standard post-virus silence. The silence of buildings without inhabitants, streets without traffic, temples without devotees. But Akluj has something that the highway dhabas did not: residential buildings. Flats. Houses. Kitchens stocked for families.

We enter the town from the west, following the main road past the bus stand (empty, the MSRTC buses parked in a row, their red bodies fading in the sun, their destinations — PUNE, SOLAPUR, PANDHARPUR, still displayed on the boards) and the market (shuttered, the vegetable stalls bare, the flower sellers' buckets dry). We head for the residential area — the lanes behind the main road, where the concrete flats rise two and three storeys, their stairwells dark, their balconies draped with laundry that has been drying for a month.

The first flat we enter is on the ground floor of a three-storey building. The door is unlocked — a wooden door, painted brown, the nameplate reading PATIL in Marathi script. flat is small, two rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom — and it is occupied. Not by the living.

Patils are in the bedroom. A man and a woman, on the bed, covered by a sheet that someone (the man? the woman? a neighbour?) pulled over them before the last person in the flat lost the strength to do anything else. The sheet has settled over their forms, outlining the shapes of two bodies that have been still for weeks.

I do not enter the bedroom. I do not need to. This kitchen is my target.

A kitchen is small, clean — Patil-aai was a tidy woman, the shelves organised, the steel containers labelled in Marathi (Sakhar, Mith, Haldi). I open cupboards. Rice, a ten-kilo bag, half full. Dal — toor dal, two kilos. Oil, a bottle of Sundrop, three-quarters full. Salt, sugar, spices, all present. And, in the top shelf, behind a tin of Bournvita, a sealed can of Nestlé Lactogen infant formula.

I hold the can. weight of it — 400 grams, the standard size, is the weight of relief. Meera, standing behind me, makes a sound that is not a word — a sharp intake of breath, the sound of a woman who has been calculating the hours remaining in her child's milk supply and has just been given a reprieve.

"There is more," I say. I scan the shelves. Two more cans of formula, behind the Bournvita. A packet of Cerelac, the infant cereal that Indian mothers feed their babies from six months, the beige powder that mixes with milk to create a sweet, grainy paste that babies eat with the enthusiasm of gourmets. And glucose biscuits, three packets of Parle-G, the biscuits that are India's answer to every crisis, from tea-time to typhoon.

"Enough for two weeks," says Meera, calculating. "If we ration the formula and supplement with Cerelac and biscuit paste."

I load the rucksack. Rice, dal, oil, salt, sugar, formula, Cerelac, biscuits. The rucksack, which has been light for two days, becomes heavy again. The weight sits on my shoulders like a benediction.

We eat in the Patils' kitchen. I cook khichdi on their gas stove — the cylinder still has pressure, the blue flame catching on the first click. The khichdi is simple, rice, dal, salt, a pinch of turmeric — but it is hot and it is food and it fills the hollow geography of hunger that has occupied my body for two days.

Meera feeds Reyansh. The formula, mixed fresh, warm from the stove. His first proper feed in a day and a half. He drinks with a ferocity that is both heartbreaking and reassuring, his small mouth working the bottle (a Patil baby's bottle, washed and sterilised with boiling water), his eyes closed, his body relaxing into the specific contentment of a hunger being satisfied.

"Thank you," Meera says. Not to me. To the flat. To the Patils. To the dead couple in the bedroom who stored food that they will never eat and milk that their baby — there must have been a baby, the formula and the Cerelac and the bottle confirm it — will never drink. "Thank you for this."

I echo the thanks silently. Patils cannot hear us. But the gratitude is real, and expressing it — even to empty rooms — is a way of acknowledging that what we are doing is not looting. It is inheritance. The dead pass their resources to the living, not by will or intent but by the simple fact of departure. We are the inheritors of a world that nobody wanted to bequeath.

---

We stay in Akluj for two days. Not by choice — by necessity. On the afternoon of Day 23, Reyansh develops a fever.

The fever is not the virus. We know this because the virus kills in three to five days, and Reyansh has been exposed to the virus for thirty days without symptoms. This fever is something else. An infection, probably, secondary to the heat rash that has spread from his chest to his arms, the rash that we treated with Candid-B cream but that has worsened in the unwashed, unsanitary conditions of highway travel.

Meera's response is controlled panic. The words she uses are measured, technical, temperature elevation, secondary infection, broad-spectrum antibiotic, but her hands, checking Reyansh's forehead, adjusting his clothes, holding the thermometer (found in the Patils' medicine cabinet), are trembling.

"38.4," she says, reading the thermometer. "Not critical. But not good."

"The antibiotics from the medical store, "

"Amoxicillin. Paediatric dose is, " She closes her eyes. Opens them. "25 milligrams per kilo. Reyansh weighs approximately nine kilos. That is 225 milligrams per dose, three times daily." She breaks a capsule, measures the powder against a mark she makes on the spoon with a marker, the precision of an engineer, applied to the dosage of an antibiotic for her infant son.

Reyansh takes the medicine mixed in formula. He makes a face, the bitterness of the antibiotic cutting through the sweetness of the milk, but he swallows. Because he is fourteen months old and he has been on the road for twenty-three days and he has learned, in the way that babies learn, by absorbing the world through their skin, that when the adults around you give you something, you take it, even if it tastes wrong.

The fever breaks on Day 25. Thirty-six hours of watching, measuring, dosing, cooling — Meera pressing wet cloths to Reyansh's forehead, to his wrists, to his feet, the water evaporating in the April heat, drawing the temperature down degree by fraction of a degree. I cook. I carry water. I stand guard at the door, the lathi (which I fashioned from a broken broom handle on Day 14 of the walk) across my knees, watching the street for movement.

On the morning of Day 25, Reyansh wakes with clear eyes and a normal temperature and the specific babbling energy of a baby who has been sick and is now better and who wants the world to know it. He reaches for Meera's hair. She lets him grab it. He pulls. She winces. And then she laughs — a sound I have not heard from her since Day 7, since the morning she knocked on my door and asked me to walk to Solapur.

Laugh is short, surprised, almost involuntary — the sound of a woman whose defences have cracked for a moment, letting joy leak through the fracture. It fills the Patils' kitchen like sunlight filling a dark room. Brief. Warm. Gone.

But it happened. And the happening is enough.

---

We leave Akluj on the morning of Day 25. The rucksack is full. Food, formula, medicine. Reyansh is well. The road stretches east, through the flat, brown Deccan plateau, toward Solapur, now approximately ninety kilometres away.

Four to five days. If nothing goes wrong.

If.