Chapter 2: Vihan

# Chapter 2: Vihan

## Khaansi

When I wake, my eyes feel like someone has rubbed sand into them. The ceiling fan wobbles. Wobble, wobble, creak. Wobble, wobble, creak. Third rotation, every time.

I stayed up until one playing BGMI with Shlok. We had been on a streak, three chicken dinners in a row, Shlok sniping from rooftops while I flanked through compounds with a shotgun. Before that, I watched Aai unwrap her presents. She had squealed when she saw the Arijit tickets, actually squealed, like a teenager, and then hugged Baba so hard that his glasses went crooked. Meanwhile, Baba had been stoic, as if he was trying to pretend that the dinner table eruption never happened.

I pour Chocos into a bowl at the kitchen counter when Aai walks into the room.

"Morning," she says. "Thank you for last night. See, it ended happily, didn't it?"

"Morning. And I guess so." I check the clock on the microwave. Seven. Normally Baba is rushing around at this hour. Ironing his shirt, polishing his shoes, shouting about where his laptop charger has gone. The flat is quiet. "Where is Baba?"

Aai frowns. "He is not good. You know that cough he had?"

I picture Baba spluttering at the dinner table. The napkin pressed to his mouth. The red spray on the white tablecloth. Then, while Aai opened her presents, he had been hacking into his fist. A deep, rattling sound that came from somewhere below his ribs.

"Yeah?"

"Well, it seems to have gotten worse overnight. He is going to work from home."

"Fair enough." I chew a spoonful of Chocos, the chocolate milk pooling at the bottom of the bowl. "Did he say anything more about, you know..."

Aai grimaces. "Yes. He is going to speak to you at some point today."

Bhagwan, help me. Great.

Getting ready for school, I walk past my parents' bedroom. The door is closed, but I can still hear Baba's hoarse barks through the cheap plywood. The kind of cough that sounds like it is tearing something loose inside his chest, each hack followed by a wet, gurgling intake of breath.

"Are you sure he is okay?" I ask Aai as I sling my Wildcraft bag over my shoulders.

"He will be fine. He works too hard. I am constantly telling him that if he does not take any leave, his body will pay the price." She kisses me on the cheek before I can dodge. "Have a good day at school, bala."

Walking into the morning sun, I can tell it is going to be a Pune scorcher. The kind of March day where the heat is already building at seven-thirty, where the concrete radiates warmth upward through your chappals, where by noon the tar on the road will be soft enough to leave footprints. I zip up my jacket anyway. The morning still carries a whisper of February chill, and after all, I do not want to catch whatever Baba has.

When I see the queue already forming at the Medipoint clinic near our building, I repeat the thought. The queue snakes past the pharmacy next door, past the paan shop, almost to the corner where the Amul parlour sits. I count. twelve, fifteen, maybe twenty people, all standing in the specific way that Indians stand in medical queues: resigned, patient, holding their Aadhaar cards and old prescriptions in plastic folders. Two men in the middle of the queue are coughing.

I remind myself to have an amla juice later.

My normal routine is to walk so slowly that I arrive just as the period-one bell rings. To listen to my music, AP Dhillon, Diljit, sometimes old Eminem when I am feeling particularly angry, and think about little else.

This morning, though, as I am meandering through Aundh, I am distracted. Because even with my earbuds in, I can hear it.

People walk past me, hacking and choking. Hands at their mouths, covering the spray. I see uncles in formal shirts heading toward the Hinjewadi bus stop, their skin ashen, eyes swollen and purplish, not taking a well-needed sick day unlike Baba. A woman in a salwar kameez leans against the compound wall of a housing society, her body folded at the waist, coughing so hard that her dupatta has fallen off her shoulder and she has not bothered to fix it. I even see a man bent over near the chai stall at the Aundh-Baner junction, coughing toward the pavement. I think about stopping to ask if he is okay, but he soon stands upright. Spittle lines the corners of his mouth. Repulsed, I walk on.

The chai-wallah himself is coughing, into his hand, the same hand that moments ago was pouring tea from the saucepan into those tiny cutting glasses. Three auto-rickshaw drivers parked nearby are coughing too. Their autos sit idle, meters unstarted, as if the morning commute has been suspended by some invisible decree.

When I think I am through the worst of it, I reach school. And there, too, I hear wheezing and groaning. I see pale, blotchy skin and crumpled tissues lifted to mouths. Boys who normally strut through the gates as if Pinnacle were their ancestral property are shuffling in, shoulders hunched, faces grey.

Seated in period one, which happens to be Shirke Sir's lesson, I fail to daydream or doodle. I am met with a constant chorus of coughing that disrupts me from my thoughts. Even Shirke Sir is struggling to be heard over the percussion.

"You see, the thing with circle theorems is, arre, can everyone stop with the coughing! This is a classroom, not a TB ward!"

This coughing stops for a moment. A few boys swallow, clear their throats, attempt to hold it in. But then a boy in the corner, Sahil Patwardhan, the quiet one who always sits alone, lets one out. And then one turns to two. Two turns to three. Three becomes a cascade, a chain reaction of hacking and spluttering that ripples through the classroom like a wave through a cricket stadium.

We are all staring as Sahil hacks and wheezes, his face turning red and then purple, the colour deepening like a jamun fruit left in the sun. His hands grip the edge of his desk. His knuckles go white.

"Oh my god," someone says. "Is he, "

The rest of the sentence is not needed. Sahil sways for a moment, then topples from his chair, sprawling onto the floor like a fish pulled from Mula River and thrown onto the bank.

Even the normally cold Shirke Sir reacts. "Bhagwan! Quick, boys, help him up! One of you go and get help!"

The boy closest to the door charges from the room. The rest of us clamber from our desks and crowd around Sahil. Somehow, despite the shoving and pushing — Tanay Kirtane elbowing me in the ribs as he barges past, I manage to get to the front of the group. Sahil is lying on his back on the classroom floor, his face still dark purple. However, when the other boys finally hush, I hear him breathing — though it is nothing more than a grating wheeze, the sound of air being forced through a passage that is rapidly closing.

"We need to call an ambulance," I say.

"Yes, yes. I can see that, Deshpande," says Shirke Sir. I glare at him. Now is hardly the time for petty classroom politics. "Why don't you be so kind as to call said ambulance, while I get the young man into the recovery position?"

I pull my phone from my pocket, dial 108, and step away from the group. Meanwhile, I watch Shirke Sir moving Sahil's limp arms and legs. for all his cruelty, the man at least knows basic first aid.

"Hello... Yes, I need an ambulance please... We are at Pinnacle International School, Aundh... A boy can hardly breathe... He was coughing and choking beforehand... What do you mean there is a wait?" I squeeze my eyes shut. "Okay. What do we do in the meantime?... We have already put him in the recovery position... Okay, we will not move him. Thank you."

"Well?" says Shirke Sir.

"They are on their way. It might be a while, though."

Shirke Sir looks at Sahil again, as do I. The other boys are looking at each other, many with eyes wide, mouths tight. Tanay Kirtane, for once, is not smirking. His face is the colour of idli batter.

"What is wrong with him?" one boy asks.

"How should we know?" another replies. "It must be an asthma attack. Or maybe he has a nut allergy."

"This is not a nut allergy," says Shirke Sir. "He must have the flu or something. Silly boy should have stayed at home." He kneels closer to Sahil's head. "Give me a small nod if you can hear me, Sahil."

Sahil nods. Barely. His dark eyes are a little open, but glazed, as if he is somewhere else entirely; somewhere far from this classroom with its fluorescent lights and circle theorem diagrams and the specific smell of Pinnacle that is chalk dust and floor cleaner and the faint aura of competitive desperation. One of the boys puts a hand on Sahil's arm.

The ambulance comes twenty-three minutes later. The paramedics have to walk through the entire school, up to the second floor, get Sahil onto a stretcher, and rush him the whole way back. Meanwhile, his breathing has only worsened. Each inhale now a thin, reedy whistle, each exhale a shudder.

At the end of period one, we have had about five minutes of maths teaching and have learned nothing about what is wrong with Sahil.

Walking to period two, I tune in to the chatter and speculation. Hear students wondering whether Sahil has bad asthma, and if the cough made it worse. Hear one boy, a Class 12 prefect with a stethoscope-shaped keychain on his bag, already rehearsing for AIIMS, announce with confidence that it is obviously a severe respiratory infection.

Whatever the case, there is clearly something nasty going around. I consider it unlikely, however, that anybody else will be as badly affected.

It is not until period three that the second kid collapses. I hear about it in period four, the rumour spreading as rapidly as the cough itself.

Two more collapse during period four. Two more during lunch.

I only witness one: a short kid from Class 7, who topples in the canteen queue and falls into a group of students, spilling their thalis. The crash of steel on tile echoes through the canteen. The didi behind the counter drops a ladle. A prefect shouts for the school nurse.

But from overhearing students' panicked conversations, in corridors, in the washroom, in the stairwell where boys huddle and share information with the urgency of intelligence operatives, I know that each time it is the same. They cough and splutter until they can hardly breathe, then they lose consciousness and collapse.

The panic escalates when the ambulance cannot come for the boy who collapses in my geography lesson.

"What are we going to do?" Meera Miss asks us as she drops her phone to her side. She is young, inexperienced. A B.Ed. graduate from Fergusson, maybe twenty-four. Little did she know she would have to deal with something like this when she started teaching. Meanwhile, the boy is turning deeper shades of purple on the floor.

"What did they say about the ambulance?" I ask her, as her face turns the colour of wet chalk.

"They said they are experiencing a high volume of call-outs. It could be hours."

Exactly what they said on the phone to me earlier, except at least the ambulance had actually come that time.

Everyone in the room glances at the boy, at each other. Some shuffle nervously. Yash Something has his hand over his mouth, as if the act of covering it will keep the virus out. As if a palm is a fortress.

I look away from the students, from Meera Miss. I look to the window. Through the glass, I see the school compound — the parking lot where the Fortuners and Innovas wait in neat rows, the security guard's booth, the neem tree that drops its leaves onto the windshields. Beyond that, Aundh. The city. I think about the people I saw on my walk to school. I wonder how many of them have collapsed at their desks today. I wonder what the hell is going on.

And also, I wonder about Baba. I picture him choking into his napkin, into his hands.

---

We are sent home an hour early. The principal — Dr. Joshi, a woman who normally runs Pinnacle with the calm authority of a naval commander — announces over the PA system that all students are to leave immediately. She uses the word precautionary. She uses the phrase developing situation. She does not use the word pandemic, or emergency, or terrifying, but her voice has a tremor in it that I have never heard before, and that tremor says everything that her words do not.

Walking out the gates, all I hear is the rumble of students talking as they disperse onto the street. When a child coughs, everybody turns to look, fearful that they have whatever it is, too. I swallow. I pray that Baba has something different. Please let it be a common cold, rather than whatever is ploughing through these kids.

As for me, well, I have already been around two of the collapsed boys. I have been around Baba, too. If this virus is as contagious as I think it is, then there is a high chance that I already have it.

Though it is not like anybody has died from it, at least from what I know. Okay, some have collapsed. Some have barely been able to breathe. But what if, in hospital, they all manage to make a full recovery? What then?

I try to relax a little.

Then my phone rings. Shlok? No. Aai.

"Hi, Aai," I say, lifting it to my ear.

"Vihan. You need to come home. Quick."

---

This time, rather than wandering, I race through the streets. But it is difficult not to stop, because everywhere I look there is sickness. People are leaning against compound walls and parked cars, wheezing as they try to catch their breath. I see scarlet faces, wild, panicked eyes. It is as if a giant invisible cloud has descended on Pune; lurking, unseen, choking the city from the inside out.

Cars fly past, engines roaring. Playing the role of ambulances; people taking it upon themselves to ferry their loved ones to medical help. I try to picture the scene at Sahyadri Hospital, or Ruby Hall, or Deenanath Mangeshkar: crawling with people, like a nest of scurrying ants. Every corridor packed, every chair occupied, every stretcher taken. People hacking, wheezing. Collapsing from fatigue. Bleeding tears of desperation.

Whatever this is, it is far worse than I imagined.

What the hell has happened? What is going on?

I try to block out my mind. Just get home. Get to Baba.

But as I run, all I hear are shouts and screams. People crying out for help, for lifts to the hospital. Stumbling around, clutching their throats, as if something is strangling them. I try not to stop. I know there is nothing I can do to help, even as my stomach churns and my chest groans for these poor people. These poor people who hours ago were going about normal lives. Drinking their morning chai, sitting in their offices, checking WhatsApp, complaining about traffic on the Pune-Mumbai Expressway.

I ask myself: am I in the same city, the same streets, that I walked through this morning? Or have I woken into some nightmare?

The queue at the Medipoint clinic, just around the corner from our building, has quadrupled. It now snakes along the pavement, past the medical store, past the kirana shop, all the way to the traffic signal. People young, middle-aged, and old stand in line, mothers carrying children, husbands resting their arms around wives, elderly couples holding each other up. The only thing consistent is that they are all coughing.

And then, at the corner of my street, I see one man; kneeling on the footpath, choking. I freeze when I see the specks of scarlet hit the grey concrete. When he lifts his head, and the trickle of blood spills down his chin, I cannot rip my eyes away. It is only when he rises and starts walking toward me with his arms outstretched, his pleas for help erupting from his blood-stained mouth, that I flee.

Turning into my lane, I have tears in my eyes. What is happening? Am I dreaming? Is this a sick nightmare? The questions spin through my head like clothes in the washing machine — round and round, no resolution.

When I see Aai standing at the building entrance, looking out at me, tears in her eyes too, I feel like vomiting.

"Aai? What is going on?"

"Just come in, Vihan. Just come in."

Once the flat door is closed, the first thing she does is hold me. She rests her head on my shoulder, she is shorter than me now, has been for two years, and sniffles, sobs. Her body shakes against mine.

"Aai? What is wrong?"

"Have you not seen? Don't you know?"

I feel a stabbing sensation in my gut. I pull away, then shake my head. "No. I haven't got a clue. But I have seen the streets. All the people, Aai, wandering around, coughing and choking. But they will all be okay, right? They will get better?"

She turns paler. Even I heard the doubt in my own voice. Now, looking at her only deepens it.

"I just, I don't know how to, No. You need to see. You need to see it for yourself."

She leads me to the living room. The television is playing. On it, an NDTV graphic: a diagram of lungs, red arrows swirling around them, a banner scrolling at the bottom, BREAKING: MYSTERIOUS RESPIRATORY VIRUS SPREADS ACROSS INDIA; HOSPITALS OVERWHELMED.

"What the, " I say.

"Just watch and listen."

It feels as if I am swallowing a ping-pong ball as I listen to the broadcast.

...the infection is spreading quickly, so if you cough or sneeze, do so into your elbow. Wash your hands immediately with soap and water. If you have a mask, wear it. By taking these steps, we can begin to slow the spread of this virus.

But, if you begin to suffer symptoms, please be aware that hospitals across Maharashtra, Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Gujarat are already beyond capacity. Tens of thousands of people have been admitted in the past twelve hours alone. All domestic flights have been suspended. Railways are operating at reduced capacity. Prime Minister is expected to address the nation within the hour.

If you develop symptoms, coughing, sneezing, difficulty breathing, be aware of the risk of severe pneumonia. This virus appears to cause rapid and extremely aggressive pneumonia, blocking the lungs with mucus and, in many cases, blood. If you find it difficult to breathe, try to sit upright and keep your airway open. Be aware that even with treatment, severe pneumonia can be fatal.

The final word scratches into my mind like a nail dragged across a blackboard.

"Fatal?" I say.

"Yes," says Aai. "If you cannot breathe, then, "

She does not need to finish. I throw my hands to my face. "Oh, god. And. Baba?"

She blinks. I wait for the words.

"In bed. But not good, Vihan. Really, not good."

I stare into the distance, not seeing anything. Aai puts her arms around me again, craving comfort. The TV continues to play in the background, its sound now a low, relentless drone of statistics and desperation.

"But I don't understand," I say, once Aai has pulled away. "What is this virus? Where has it come from? How has it affected so many people so quickly?"

"I don't know. Nobody knows. But it is happening." She puts her hands on my shoulders, shakes me slightly. "I need you to think. Have you had any symptoms? Any coughing, sneezing?"

"No. Have you?"

She shakes her head. "Not yet, thankfully." She bites her lip. "You are not going to like what I have to say next. But we need to quarantine ourselves. We need to stay away from your father as much as we can."

"What —"

"Pneumonia can kill. The hospitals are too full. And this virus is spreading so quickly... We cannot take any chances. People have already died. They said so on the news. Okay, most of them were old or had other conditions. But some were not. We must protect ourselves."

My mouth hangs open. "And Baba?"

"Your father still has a chance. We just need to monitor him, and make sure that he does not get any worse. That is it. Now, here comes the next hard bit. I need you to listen to me."

I nod.

"If I get sick, like your father, then you need to leave us. Do you hear? We will either recover, or we will not. There will be nothing you can do for us. And this is so contagious, Vihan. I want to see you safe."

We will either recover, or we will not. The words echo through my mind. It feels like I am in a parallel universe. Like I have stepped through some invisible boundary into a world where the rules have been rewritten.

"But what if I cannot? And what do we do if I get sick?"

"If you get sick, mazha bala, then I will not care about myself anymore. I will be there with you."

I nod, even if it feels like this is not really happening. "Okay," I say eventually. "Can I see him, before we.?"

She waits a moment. "For a minute, yes. But before you go up, I have something for you."

I follow her into the kitchen. On the counter is a box of N95 masks and a bottle of Dettol sanitiser.

"I picked these up from the medical store this morning, before the queues got impossible. Most places are already sold out."

"How did you know to buy these?"

"Because I am a biology teacher, Vihan. And because when the chai-wallah, the security guard, and the auto-rickshaw driver outside are all coughing. You do not need NDTV to tell you what is coming."

She hands me a mask and the sanitiser. "Put the mask on. Rub this on your hands. And do not touch your father. Do not go closer than two metres. You can talk to him from the doorway."

"Aai, he is not going to. "

"Do as I say."

Her voice is steel. The biology teacher voice. The voice that has been running practicals for fifteen years, the voice that explains mitosis to bored fourteen-year-olds and makes them listen, the voice that knows how diseases spread because she has been teaching it since before I was born.

I put the mask on. I rub the sanitiser into my hands until they sting.

Then I walk to their bedroom door. I push it open.

The curtains are drawn. The room is dim, lit only by the glow of Baba's phone screen on the bedside table. The air is thick. the specific thickness of a closed room where someone has been coughing for twelve hours, the air itself feeling infected, heavy with moisture and something else, something wrong.

Baba is lying on his side, facing the door. His face, visible in the phone-light, is grey. Not pale. Grey. The colour of old cement, of unwashed concrete, of something that should be white but has been left in the rain. His eyes are open, but barely. They glitter in the dim light, the whites now shot through with red threads.

"Baba?"

He tries to speak. What comes out is a croak, followed by a cough that doubles him over. His body contracts around the cough like a fist closing. The sound is wet, thick, the sound of liquid being forced through a passage too small for it.

When the coughing stops, he looks at me. Tries to smile. The smile is the worst part. The attempt at reassurance from a face that cannot reassure, the "I'm fine, beta" that his mouth is trying to form and his body is contradicting with every laboured breath.

"I'm sorry," I say. The words come before I can stop them. "About last night. About what I said."

He lifts one hand, trembling, the fingers shaking as if the air itself is too heavy for them, and waves it. Forget it.

"Baba, "

"Go," he whispers. The whisper costs him. Another cough tears through him, and this time, when he brings his hand away from his mouth, I see the spots of red on his palm.

Blood.

"Aai!" I shout.

She is already behind me, pulling me backward, closing the door.

"Did you see, "

"I saw." Her voice is controlled, but her hands are shaking. "Go to your room. Stay there. I will check on him every hour."

"But, "

"Vihan. Go."

I go. I lock myself in my room. I sit on my bed, on the Spiderman sheets, and I stare at the wall, and I listen to the coughing through the wall, and I think about the word fatal, and I think about the blood on my father's palm, and I think about every terrible thing I said to him last night, I wish you were still a good father, and the thought of those being the last words he ever hears from me is the thing that finally breaks me.

The tears come. They come hard, ugly, the kind of crying that twists your face and makes sounds you did not know you could make. I press my face into the pillow, the pillow that smells of Ujala detergent and Pune dust and the faint ghost of the mogra that Aai keeps on the balcony, and I cry for my father who is dying in the next room, and for myself who said the worst possible thing at the worst possible time, and for the world that seems to have gone wrong overnight.

Outside, beyond the window with the view of the water tank, I hear sirens. Neither one nor two A chorus of them, wailing across Aundh, across Pune, across whatever is left of normal life.

That sirens do not stop.