Chapter 8: Ishan

# Chapter 8: Ishan

## Saathi

Day 32 of the walk. Day 39 of the virus.

We find the boy on the road outside Barshi.

He is sitting on the highway median, the concrete divider that separates the lanes, cracked and weed-grown, the paint faded from white to grey. He sits cross-legged, like a yogi in meditation, except that he is not meditating. He is eating. Specifically, he is eating raw sugarcane, biting into the stalk with his teeth, tearing the fibrous outer layer, chewing the sweet pulp, spitting the fibre onto the road beside him in a neat pile that suggests he has been here for some time.

He is maybe twelve. Thin, not starving-thin, but the lean thinness of a boy who has been feeding himself from fields and abandoned shops for weeks. His hair is long, unwashed, matted in places. He wears shorts and a t-shirt that was once yellow and is now the colour of road dust. His feet are bare, the soles thick with calluses, the nails cracked and dirty.

He sees us before we see him. By the time I register his presence, a small figure on the median, silhouetted against the afternoon sun, he has already assessed us and decided that we are not a threat. His body language is relaxed, unbothered, the posture of a boy who has been alone long enough to develop his own threat-assessment protocols and who has classified us as not dangerous.

"Kuthla jaata?" he calls as we approach. Where are you going? His Marathi is rural; the accent of Solapur district, the vowels flat, the consonants soft.

"Solapur," I say.

"Solapur? Aahe ki tithhe. Mi tikunach aaloy." Solapur? It's there. I came from there.

"You came from Solapur? When?"

"Teen divas." Three days. He bites into the sugarcane. Chews. Spits. "Tithhe kahi nahi. Army aahe. Camp aahe. Pan kahi nahi." There is nothing there. The army is there. The camp is there. But there is nothing.

"What do you mean, nothing?"

He looks at me with the flat, assessing eyes of a child who has learned to evaluate adults and found most of them disappointing. "Lok mele. Ghar band. Bazaar band. Paani yete, jaate. Veej nahi. Kahi nahi." People died. Houses closed. Market closed. Water comes and goes. No electricity. Nothing.

"But there is a relief camp?"

"Ho. Railway station javal. Army aahe. Jevan deytat. Pan — bahut lok nahi. Shunyat sarkhya." Yes. Near the railway station. The army is there. They give food. But — not many people. Like emptiness.

Meera kneels beside the median. She is at his eye level now, her face close to his, her voice gentle. The voice she uses with Reyansh, the voice that carries safety in its frequency.

"Tuzha naav kay?" What is your name?

"Omkar."

"Omkar, tu ekta aahes?" Omkar, are you alone?

He nods. This nod is small, matter-of-fact, the nod of a boy who has been alone for long enough that the word alone has lost its sting and become a description, like tall or left-handed.

"Aai-Baba?" Mother-Father?

"Mele." Dead.

"Bhai-bahin?" Siblings?

"Nahi. Mi ekta." No. I am alone.

The word ekta, alone, only, singular, sits in the air between us. Meera's hand moves to Omkar's shoulder. She does not squeeze. She just rests her hand there, the contact light, the weight of a palm that says I see you.

"Amchya barobar ye," she says. Come with us. "Amhi Solapur la jato. Tithhe amcha bhai aahe." We are going to Solapur. My brother is there.

Omkar looks at her hand on his shoulder. He looks at Reyansh, who is watching him from the sling with the wide-eyed curiosity of a baby encountering a new human. He looks at me.

"Jevan aahe?" he asks. Is there food?

"Ho." Yes.

"Theek aahe." Okay.

He stands. He picks up a cloth bag that was beside him on the median. A small bag, containing (I will learn later) three sugarcane stalks, a bottle of water, and a cricket ball. He slings the bag over his shoulder.

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

---

The kerosene lamp threw shadows against the temple wall, each shadow a distorted version of the person casting it. Omkar's shadow was twice his height, elongated, a stick figure with oversized hands that moved when he gestured. My shadow merged with the pillar behind me, becoming part of the architecture, a human column. The flame guttered when the wind found gaps in the stone, and the shadows shifted, rearranged, became different people for an instant before settling back into their original shapes. Outside, the Deccan plateau stretched flat and dark in every direction, the horizon invisible, the sky and the earth merging into a single plane of black that was interrupted only by the faint orange glow of Solapur's emergency generators to the southeast. Omkar traced patterns in the dust with his finger. Concentric circles, spirals, the kind of absent geometry that a restless mind produces when the hands need occupation. His breathing had slowed since the temple. The stone walls held the day's heat, radiating it back in gentle waves that pressed against exposed skin like a warm compress, and the incense that someone had burned hours ago still lingered, sandalwood and camphor, the smell of every Hindu temple I had ever entered, the smell of prayer and patience and the accumulated faith of generations who had sat on this same stone floor and asked the same unanswerable questions.

Omkar's story, told in fragments over the next two days of walking, is the story of a million Indian children.

He is from a village called Nannaj, twenty kilometres north of Solapur. His father, Dnyaneshwar, was a farmer, five acres of jowar and cotton, the standard Solapur smallholding. His mother, Parvati, was a schoolteacher at the zilla parishad school. He has no siblings, Parvati had a difficult pregnancy and the doctors told her no more.

The virus took his father on Day 4. His mother lasted until Day 7. She spent her last three days teaching Omkar. Not school lessons, but survival lessons: how to boil water, how to cook rice, how to find food in the fields, how to start a fire. She taught him with the feverish urgency of a woman who knows she is dying and who has exactly one responsibility left: to give her child enough knowledge to outlast her.

"Aai mhanalya — tu zara halka aahes, pan tu Maratha aahes. Maratha lok jinktat." Aai said, you are small, but you are Maratha. Maratha people win. He says this without bravado, without pride. He says it the way he says everything — flatly, factually, as if reporting the weather.

After Parvati died, Omkar stayed in the village for a week. Then he walked to Solapur. Alone, twelve years old, carrying nothing but the cloth bag and the cricket ball that his father gave him for his birthday. He reached the relief camp. He stayed for two weeks. Then he left.

"Ka?" Why? Meera asks.

"Kahi kaam nahi. Khaycha, zhopaycha, uthaycha, khaycha. Rojch taich. Mi halat nahi raahnar." Nothing to do. Eat, sleep, wake up, eat. Same every day. I cannot stay still.

Restlessness of a twelve-year-old. The specific, vibrating energy of a boy who has been told to sit and who cannot sit, who needs movement, action, purpose. Camp gave him food and shelter. It did not give him a reason to be there.

"Mag kuthla jaatos?" Then where are you going?

He shrugs. The shrug of a boy who does not have a destination. "Ithe-tithhe. Phirto. Kon bhetla tar bolto. Nahi bhetla tar chalto." Here and there. Wandering. If I meet someone, I talk. If I don't, I walk.

He has been walking for three days; west from Solapur, along the highway, eating sugarcane from the fields and drinking water from hand pumps. He has no plan. He has no fear. He has the specific, terrifying fearlessness of a child who has lost everything that could be threatened and who therefore has nothing left to protect.

---

Omkar changes the dynamics of our group immediately.

For twenty-five days, we have been a unit of two-and-a-half: me, Meera, and Reyansh. The rhythms of walking, eating, sleeping have been calibrated for this number. Rucksack packed for two adults and one infant, the water rationed for two, the sleeping arrangements designed for two bodies side by side.

Omkar adds a variable. He eats — not a lot, but steadily, the appetite of a growing boy who has been feeding himself inadequately for weeks. He walks fast, faster than us, his bare feet on the road like a goat's on a mountain trail, his body light and efficient. He talks — not constantly, but enough to change the silence, to fill the gaps that Meera and I have left unfilled, the gaps that are comfortable between two adults but that a twelve-year-old finds intolerable.

He talks about cricket. Specifically, about Virat Kohli, who he regards as the greatest human being to have ever lived, a position he defends with the ferocity of religious conviction.

"Kohli average kithi aahe mahiti aahe?" Do you know what Kohli's average is? He asks this on the second morning, as we walk through a flat stretch of road between two villages, the sun rising behind us, the shadows long.

"Fifty-something," I say.

"Fifty-three point five. ODI madhye. Test madhye fifty. T20 madhye bhi fifty plus. Teen formats madhye fifty plus, kon kela aahe? Koni nahi." Fifty-three point five. In ODIs. In Tests fifty. In T20 also fifty plus. Three formats, fifty plus, who has done it? Nobody.

"Sachin?" I venture.

"Sachin great hota. Pan Kohli cha fitness, cha aggression, cha chase — Sachin javal nahi." Sachin was great. But Kohli's fitness, aggression, his chasing — Sachin doesn't compare.

Meera, who has been silent during this exchange, makes a sound that might be a suppressed laugh. Omkar notices.

"Tai, tumhala cricket aavadto?" Tai, do you like cricket?

"Nahi," says Meera. No.

"Ka? Cricket mhanaje life aahe." Why? Cricket is life.

"Cricket is twenty-two men chasing a ball on a field."

"Nahi nahi nahi." No no no. Omkar shakes his head vigorously, the way twelve-year-olds do when confronted with opinions they find criminally wrong. "Cricket mhanaje — strategy aahe. Patience aahe. Pressure aahe. Kohli cha chase bagh, 2016, Australia viruddha, Mohali madhye. Chase kela — target 324. Kohli ne 82 ball madhye 82 maarla. Te bagh, mg sangaa." Cricket is strategy. Patience. Pressure. Watch Kohli's chase, 2016, against Australia, in Mohali. He chased — target 324. Kohli scored 82 off 82 balls. Watch that, then tell me.

"I cannot watch anything. There is no electricity."

"Aalyavar baghaa." Watch it when it comes back.

A assumption is breathtaking — when it comes back. Not if. When. As if the return of electricity, of television, of normal life, is as certain as the next sunrise. The optimism of a twelve-year-old who has survived the unsurvivable and who therefore considers everything that follows to be merely a matter of time.

---

On the second evening with Omkar, we camp in a mango grove outside a village called Pandharpur Road (not Pandharpur itself, the junction village, where the road to the temple town branches off the highway). The mango trees are heavy with fruit, raw mangoes, green and hard, the kairi that Maharashtra's mothers pickle and that Maharashtra's children eat with salt and chilli powder, their faces puckering at the sourness.

Omkar climbs a tree. He climbs it the way village boys climb trees. Fast, confident, his bare feet gripping the bark, his body swinging upward with the ease of a primate. He shakes the branches. Mangoes fall, thumping onto the grass.

We eat raw mangoes with salt. This sourness is intense — the kind of sourness that makes your jaw clench and your eyes water and your salivary glands erupt in protest. Reyansh gets a small piece, the flesh mashed into a paste, and his face, the expression of a fourteen-month-old encountering extreme sourness for the first time — is a masterpiece of confusion and betrayal.

Omkar laughs at Reyansh's face. The laugh is full, loud, the uninhibited laughter of a child who has found something genuinely funny and who has not yet learned to moderate his reactions. The laugh rings through the mango grove, bouncing off the trees, disturbing a family of crows in the upper branches.

Meera watches Omkar laugh. She watches with an expression I have not seen on her face. Tender, protective, the expression of a woman who has a child and who has just encountered another child, alone, parentless, surviving on sugarcane and cricket facts, and who has been seized by the specific, overwhelming instinct to gather this child into the circle of protection that she has drawn around Reyansh.

"Omkar," she says.

"Ho, tai?"

"Aamchya barobar Solapur la ye. Mag tithe raha. Amhi baghun gheu." Come to Solapur with us. Then stay there. We will look after you.

He looks at her. The flat, assessing eyes soften. For a moment, the twelve-year-old who has been an adult for five weeks allows himself to be a child again — a child who has been offered the thing that every child needs and that the virus took away: someone who will look after him.

"Theek aahe, tai," he says. Okay, tai.

He bites into a raw mango. The sourness hits. He squints. But he does not spit it out. He chews, and swallows, and reaches for another.

Three-and-a-half, now. Me, Meera, Reyansh, and Omkar. A unit that has grown by one, that has been reshaped by the addition of a twelve-year-old boy with bare feet and a cricket ball and the unshakeable conviction that Virat Kohli is the greatest human being to have ever lived.

Forty kilometres to Solapur.

Two days.