Chapter 20: Vihan

# Chapter 20: Vihan

## Rasta

That road south from Pune is a museum of the world that was.

National Highway 48 — the Pune-Bangalore highway, the arterial route that connects Maharashtra's cultural capital to the south — stretches before us like a grey ribbon through a green and brown landscape. In the before-time, this road carried ten thousand vehicles a day: trucks loaded with sugarcane and onions, buses packed with passengers heading to Satara and Karad and Kolhapur, Innovas carrying IT professionals to weekend getaways in Mahabaleshwar. Now it carries two teenagers with rucksacks and a lathi and the stubborn conviction that walking 230 kilometres is a reasonable response to hearing a voice on the radio.

Day 1 of the walk. Day 68 of the virus.

That first ten kilometres are easy. The road out of Pune, through Katraj, past the tunnel that bores through the Katraj ghat, is flat, wide, and shaded by the dense tree cover of the Katraj hills. The tunnel itself is dark and cold, the concrete walls sweating moisture, our footsteps echoing in the enclosed space. Tanvi flicks on the torch. The beam catches the reflective lane markers, turning them into a dotted line leading into darkness.

"When I was small," I say, my voice bouncing off the walls, "my family used to drive through this tunnel on the way to Kolhapur. I would hold my breath. I thought if I could hold it through the entire tunnel, I would get a wish."

"Did you ever make it?"

"Once. The wish was for an Xbox. I got a cricket bat instead."

"What is it now?"

"What?"

"The wish. If you hold your breath through the tunnel now."

I think about this. The tunnel is 330 metres long. At walking pace, maybe four minutes. I cannot hold my breath for four minutes.

"I do not need a wish," I say. "I need a map, two litres of water, and my calves to stop cramping."

Tanvi does not laugh. But the corner of her mouth twitches. In Tanvi's emotional vocabulary, this is equivalent to a belly laugh.

---

After the tunnel, the landscape opens. The Sahyadri foothills spread before us; rolling, green-brown, the laterite soil red where the earth is exposed, the vegetation a mix of scrub and deciduous forest. The road winds through this landscape like a river, following the contours of the land, rising and falling with the gentle undulations of the Deccan plateau.

We walk in silence for the most part. The silence is not uncomfortable; it is the silence of two people who have spent ten weeks in close proximity and have exhausted the need for small talk. The only sounds are our footsteps on the asphalt, the rustle of our rucksacks, the calls of birds (koels, bulbuls, a brahminy kite circling overhead), and the distant bark of a village dog.

That villages. Every five to ten kilometres, the highway passes through a village or a small town — clusters of concrete and tin-roofed houses, shops with faded signboards, a temple or a mosque, a bus stop with a bench. The villages are empty. Not destroyed, there are no signs of violence or fire — but evacuated, the people either dead or gone, the houses locked or open, the shops shuttered or abandoned, the silence of habitation without inhabitants.

We pass through one such village at noon — a place called Shirval, maybe thirty kilometres south of Pune. The village centre has a chowk with a banyan tree, a Maruti-Udyog service station (closed), a sweet shop called Vaidya Mishtann Bhandar (also closed, but the display case still contains mouldy pedhas and barfi), and a hand pump that, I try it, pulling the iron handle down with all my weight — still produces water.

Cold, clear, sweet water. The hand pump gurgles and coughs, then delivers a stream that splashes onto the concrete platform and runs down the drain in a clean, glittering arc. I fill both water bottles. Then I put my head under the pump and let the water run over my scalp, my face, my neck. The cold is a shock. A sharp, gasping, wake-up-your-entire-nervous-system shock that makes me shout involuntarily.

Tanvi pulls the handle while I stand under the flow. Then we switch. She stands under the pump, the water running through her hair, down her face, dripping off her chin, and for a moment she closes her eyes and tilts her head back and the expression on her face is the closest thing to peace I have ever seen on it.

"We should stop here," she says. "Eat. Rest. Walk again in the evening when it is cooler."

We eat in the shade of the banyan tree. Thaalipeeth (Preeti's, still good, the ghee preserving them), glucose biscuits, and water. The meal is simple and perfect. The shade is cool, the banyan roots spread across the ground like a natural bench, and a pair of parrots screeches in the upper branches, their green feathers bright against the canopy.

I pull out the compass. The needle points north. back toward Pune, back toward the shelter, back toward the life I have left. South is Kolhapur. South is the voice on the radio. South is Shlok and aaji and batata vada and everything that the word home meant before a virus redefined it.

"How far today?" I ask.

"Twenty-two kilometres, by my count." Tanvi has been tracking distance by counting steps, 1,600 steps per kilometre, a calculation she established by walking a measured stretch of road and counting. "We should aim for another eight before dark. Thirty total."

"Thirty kilometres in one day. That is more than Hemant Kaka estimated."

"The road is flat and good. The temperature is manageable. Our packs are not too heavy. We can push." She pauses. "But we cannot push every day. Tomorrow will be the ghats."

The ghats. The mountain passes of the Western Ghats — the spine of Maharashtra, the geological barrier between the Deccan plateau and the Konkan coast. The highway climbs them through a series of switchbacks and tunnels, gaining 400 metres of elevation over fifteen kilometres. The ghats are beautiful, the same ghats where I drove with Baba every monsoon, the waterfalls cascading down the rock faces, the mist wrapping the peaks, the lorries grinding up the inclines in low gear — but they are also exhausting. Walking up a highway designed for vehicles will test everything we have.

We rest until four PM. Then we walk again. The shadows lengthen. The sun drops toward the western hills, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink and purple. The road shimmers in the last heat, and the asphalt under our feet releases the warmth it has stored all day, a gentle radiation that rises through my shoes and into my soles.

At sunset, we find shelter: an abandoned petrol pump on the outskirts of a town called Khandala (not the Khandala near Mumbai, the other one, the less famous one, on the Pune-Satara road). The petrol pump has a covered forecourt, a concrete canopy supported by pillars, with a bench and a small office. The office is locked, but the bench is dry and the canopy provides shelter from dew.

We cook. Tanvi builds a small fire using twigs and cardboard from the petrol pump's rubbish pile. I boil rice in the steel pot, adding dal and salt and a pinch of turmeric. The cooking takes thirty minutes. The rice is mushy, the dal undercooked, the overall flavour somewhere between "institutional canteen" and "survival food." We eat it with our fingers, sitting on the bench, the fire crackling, the stars emerging one by one.

"Day one," I say. "Thirty kilometres."

"Two hundred to go."

"We will make it."

"Of course we will make it." She says this with the flat certainty of a person who has survived the unsurvivable and has no patience for doubt. "The question is not whether we make it. The question is what we find when we get there."

I think about Kolhapur. I think about Shlok. I think about aaji. My grandmother, eighty-two years old, who lives alone in a two-room house in Rajarampuri, who makes misal pav that could make a grown man cry, who has survived Partition stories and drought and floods and the Emergency and demonetisation and who is, by the laws of probability and the stubbornness of Marathi grandmothers, almost certainly still alive.

"We will find them," I say.

Tanvi does not answer. She feeds a twig to the fire. The flame catches, flares, settles.

"We will find them," I say again.

This time, she nods.

---

Day 2. The ghats.

The Kambatki ghat is a fifteen-kilometre climb through some of the most beautiful and brutal terrain in Maharashtra. The road winds up the mountainside in a series of switchbacks, each turn revealing a new vista. Valleys dropping away to the east, ridgelines rising to the west, the vegetation changing from scrub to dense forest as the altitude increases. The trees are thick here: teak, ain, jambhul, the undergrowth a tangle of karvi and wild turmeric.

We start at five AM, before the sun gains strength. The air is cool at the base — maybe twenty degrees, and gets cooler as we climb. The road surface is good — well-maintained before the virus, the National Highway Authority's investment holding up even in the absence of maintenance crews, but the gradient is relentless. Not steep by hiking standards, but steep enough that walking with an eight-kilo pack makes my thighs burn within the first hour.

Tanvi sets the pace. She walks steadily, rhythmically, her breath controlled, her steps even. She does not look at the views, she looks at the road, at the surface, at the potential hazards: loose gravel, a pothole, a fallen branch. She walks the way she does everything: focused, efficient, her body an instrument of survival rather than experience.

I look at the views. I cannot help it. The Sahyadris in April are not the Sahyadris in monsoon — the cascading waterfalls and emerald green are absent, replaced by the dry, golden, austere beauty of pre-monsoon. The valleys are pale, the grass bleached, the trees leafless in places, their branches like charcoal sketches against the sky. But the light, the April light, clear and hard and pitiless — makes everything sharp, every contour visible, the geology of the mountains exposed like the bones of the earth.

"Baba brought me here during monsoon once," I say between breaths. The altitude is getting to me, the air thinner, the oxygen less generous. "He drove the Baleno up the ghats in the rain. The road was a river. The wipers could not keep up. Aai was clutching the dashboard and praying to every god she could remember. Baba was whistling."

"He was not scared?"

"He was terrified. But he whistled when he was terrified. It was his way of pretending that fear was not real."

"Did it work?"

"We made it up the ghat, so, yes. Objectively, it worked."

The climb takes four hours. Four hours of continuous uphill walking, the kind of walking that reduces the world to the next step, the next breath, the next metre of road. My calves are cramping by hour two. My shoulders are raw from the rucksack straps by hour three. By hour four, I am walking in a state that is not quite consciousness and not quite trance. A survival state, the body moving automatically, the mind retreating to a quiet room where it thinks about nothing at all.

At the top, we stop. The summit of the Kambatki ghat is a flat, windy plateau, the road levelling out after the final switchback. There is a chai stall here, a small tin-roofed structure, its shutters closed, its signboard reading Sahyadri Chai Point, Best Cutting Chai. The stall is abandoned, but the bench outside is intact, and we collapse onto it with the specific relief of people who have just climbed eight hundred metres on foot.

View from the top is limitless. To the north, the Pune plateau stretches to the horizon, flat and shimmering. To the south, the land drops away into the Satara valley, green and brown and dappled with the shadows of clouds. The wind is strong up here; cool, clean, carrying the scent of dry grass and rock and the specific mineral smell of altitude.

"I can see Satara," says Tanvi, shielding her eyes. "The city. Maybe twenty kilometres."

"Downhill?"

"Mostly."

This descent is easier on the lungs but harder on the knees. We reach the outskirts of Satara by mid-afternoon. A city of three lakh people, now a city of silence. The buildings stand, the roads are clear, the infrastructure is intact. But the people are gone.

Not entirely gone. As we pass through the eastern suburbs, I hear it; faint, distant, unmistakable. A temple bell. Someone is ringing a temple bell in Satara, the steady, rhythmic ding-ding-ding of the afternoon aarti. The sound travels across the empty city like a heartbeat, evidence that faith survives even when the faithful do not.

We do not investigate. We walk through Satara, heading south, following NH48, our eyes on the road, our feet on the asphalt, our minds on Kolhapur.

---

Day 5. Karad.

We reach Karad at noon, the town where the Krishna and Koyna rivers meet, the town where the sugar factories once hummed and the sugarcane fields stretched to the horizon. The town is quiet, but not dead. On the outskirts, near the river crossing, we see signs of habitation: a plume of smoke, a makeshift barrier across the road, a hand-painted sign reading KARAD SURVIVOR ZONE, WEAPONS PROHIBITED.

We approach the barrier. A woman emerges from behind it. Mid-fifties, stout, wearing a cotton saree that was once white and is now the grey-brown of hard use. She carries no weapon. She carries a clipboard.

"Names?" she says.

"Vihan Deshpande and Tanvi Bhosale. From Pune."

"Pune?" She stares at us. "You walked from Pune?"

"We are walking to Kolhapur."

She stares harder. Then she laughs, a full, rich laugh, the laugh of a woman who has heard many absurd things in ten weeks and has just heard the most absurd of all.

"Come in," she says. "You need to eat. And I need to hear this story."

Karad is alive. Not thriving — the population has collapsed from a lakh to maybe two thousand, but alive. The survivors have organised around the sugar factory compound, which has water, storage, and walls. A committee runs things — the clipboard woman, whose name is Suvarna Jadhav, is the secretary. There is a doctor. There is a school, a small one, three teachers, twenty children, operating out of the factory canteen.

They feed us: pithla-bhakri, the Deccani staple, the chickpea flour cooked to a thick, spicy paste and served with the coarse jowar flatbread that I grew up eating in Kolhapur. The taste hits my mouth and travels directly to my memory, aaji's kitchen, the black stone tawa, the smell of roasting jowar, the sound of the bhakri being slapped between her palms.

I eat three bhakris. Tanvi eats four.

"You are going to Kolhapur?" says Suvarna, watching us eat. "There is a broadcast. Someone at Rajaram College."

"You have heard it too?"

"We hear it every evening. A young man. Speaks Marathi. We have not sent anyone yet. We do not have people to spare."

"What else have you heard? About the road south?"

"The road is clear between here and Kolhapur. About 110 kilometres. Two days for strong walkers. A panhala ghat is the only difficult section — the road is narrow and there have been landslides, but people have gotten through."

"Any trouble? Groups? Raiders?"

Suvarna considers. "There was a group operating near Malkapur, maybe thirty kilometres south. But we heard they disbanded after the army reached Sangli. The army has been expanding outward from the major cities. Pune, Kolhapur, Sangli, Satara, all have relief operations now."

"The army is in Kolhapur?"

"According to the broadcast, yes. A small unit. Enough to keep order."

I feel it again, the crack in the dam, the pressure of normalcy pushing through. The army in Kolhapur. Relief operations. Rajaram College. Shlok's voice on the radio.

We sleep in Karad. In the factory canteen, on bedrolls that Suvarna provides, under the tin roof that rattles gently in the night wind. I sleep better than I have in weeks. The sound of the Krishna River, flowing past the factory, is a lullaby. The sound of water that does not care about viruses or death or the collapse of civilisation, water that just flows, as it has flowed for millennia, toward the sea.

Tomorrow. Kolhapur. Two more days.