Chapter 3: Vihan

# Chapter 3: Vihan

## Dusri Duniya

Three days pass. Three days that feel like three months, or three years, or three lifetimes stacked on top of each other and compressed into the space between Tuesday and Friday.

Baba does not get better.

He gets worse. The cough deepens into something that no longer sounds like a cough — it sounds like drowning, like a man trying to breathe through a sponge soaked in water. Aai checks on him every hour, wearing the N95 mask and the rubber gloves she found in the kitchen drawer, the gloves she normally uses when handling raw chicken. She takes him water. She takes him kaadha — the Ayurvedic concoction of tulsi, ginger, black pepper, turmeric, and honey that every Maharashtrian grandmother swears by and that every Maharashtrian grandson knows is useless against anything worse than a mild cold but drinks anyway because refusing it would break the grandmother's heart.

That kaadha does nothing.

By Wednesday evening, Baba can no longer sit up. Aai props him against pillows and tries to keep his airway open. She has read about pneumonia management on her phone, she is a biology teacher, after all, and she knows the theory. Keep the patient upright. Monitor breathing. Push fluids. Watch for blue lips. Watch for the chest moving but no air coming in, which means the lungs are full.

She knows the theory. The theory does not account for the reality of watching your husband suffocate in your bedroom while the ambulance line plays hold music for forty-seven minutes before disconnecting.

I know because I tried calling too. 108. Sahyadri Hospital. Ruby Hall. Deenanath Mangeshkar. KEM. Sassoon. Every number I could find on Google Maps. Some rang and rang. Some played automated messages, Due to unprecedented demand, all lines are currently busy. Some connected to voices that sounded as frightened as mine and said the same thing: We have no beds. We have no ventilators. We cannot take any more patients. Please try another facility.

There are no other facilities. Every hospital in Pune is drowning in the same thing that is drowning my father's lungs.

---

On Wednesday night, Aai sits me down in the kitchen. The fluorescent tube flickers. It has been flickering for a week and Baba kept saying he would fix it and now he cannot fix anything, not even himself. The tick-tick-tick of the tube sounds like a clock counting something down.

"I need to tell you something," she says. Her face is drawn. The dark circles under her eyes have deepened in three days from shadows to bruises. She has not slept since Monday.

"Is it about Baba?"

"It is about everything." She pulls out her phone and shows me the screen. WhatsApp is open. The messages are from her school group, her colony group, her college friends group, her family group. I scroll. The messages are all the same, in different words:

Suresh uncle passed away this morning.

Meena aunty is in ICU. They say there are no ventilators left.

Three families in B-wing have it. The Kulkarnis, the Deshmukhs, the Joshis.

My mother-in-law died at 4 AM. We cannot even take the body to the crematorium because the crematorium is full.

Is anyone else's electricity flickering? The MSEB helpline is not picking up.

The D-Mart on Baner Road has been looted. No supplies left.

Do not go outside. The roads are dangerous. People are desperate.

I stop scrolling. I look at Aai.

"How many?" I ask.

"Nobody knows the exact number. The government stopped giving updates yesterday. But from what I can see, from the messages, from the news before the news stopped making sense, it is millions. Across India. Across the world."

"Millions?" The word is too large for my mouth. It sits there, shapeless, absurd.

"Vihan, listen to me carefully." She takes my hands in hers. Her hands are dry and rough. The hands of a woman who washes dishes without gloves, who scrubs floors on Sundays, who handles specimens in the biology lab. Her grip is firm, but I can feel the tremor underneath, the way you can feel an earthquake through a building even when you are on the top floor. "This is not going to pass quickly. This is not like COVID. This is different."

"How is it different?"

"COVID took days to kill. Sometimes weeks. This virus — people are going from first cough to dead in three to four days. Some in two. The mortality rate, Vihan, I have been reading every paper I can find, every thread, every doctor's post — the mortality rate is somewhere between forty and sixty percent."

I blink. I was never good at maths but even I understand what that means. "Half?"

"Give or take. It is higher in people over fifty. It is lower in young people, in teenagers. You and I. We have a better chance. But your father..." She does not finish.

"Baba is only forty-seven."

"I know."

"That is not over fifty."

"I know, bala. But he started showing symptoms before most people. He was one of the first. And the early cases seem to be. Seem to be worse."

I stand up. The chair scrapes against the tile floor with a sound that makes both of us wince. "I need air."

"You cannot go outside."

"I know. The balcony."

I walk to the small balcony — the balcony that faces the internal courtyard of the society, the courtyard where children used to play cricket in the evenings and aunties used to walk in circles after dinner and the watchman's dog used to bark at pigeons. The courtyard is empty. The lights in the buildings across from ours — some are on, some are off, some flicker. A window on the third floor of B-wing is open, and I can hear coughing. Someone in C-wing is crying. A baby, maybe. Or an adult who sounds like a baby.

The mogra on the balcony is blooming. Three white flowers, their petals tight and perfect, their scent threading through the night air with the sweetness that Aai loves and that right now feels offensive. How dare anything be sweet when the world is rotting?

I stand there for ten minutes. The night air is warm. March in Pune, the transition season, the air caught between the cool of February and the furnace of April. I can hear sirens in the distance. I have been hearing sirens for three days, but tonight they sound different. Fewer. As if the ambulances themselves are giving up.

When I go back inside, Aai is still at the kitchen table. She has her head in her hands.

"Aai?"

She looks up. Her eyes are red. "Sorry. I was just — thinking."

"About what?"

"About what we do if, " She stops. Swallows. "About what we do when the electricity goes. When the water stops. When the food runs out."

I sit down across from her. "Has the electricity gone anywhere?"

"Parts of Hadapsar have been without power since yesterday. Pimpri-Chinchwad had outages this morning. It is only a matter of time before it reaches Aundh."

"And water?"

"The municipal supply depends on people operating the pumping stations. If those people are dead, or too sick to work, "

She does not finish. She does not need to.

"I will fill every vessel we have," I say.

"Good boy. Start now. Every bucket, every handi, every pot. Fill the bathtub too."

I spend the next hour filling containers. The flat becomes a warehouse of water — buckets in the bathroom, pots in the kitchen, the bathtub full to the brim, even the steel matka that Aai keeps on the balcony for drinking water. As I fill the last pot, the tap coughs — an air bubble, then a sputter, then a thin stream that gradually weakens to a trickle.

"Aai. The water pressure is dropping."

She appears at the bathroom door. Watches the trickle. Nods. "It has started."

---

Thursday. Baba's breathing is now audible from the living room. A harsh, rattling sound that rises and falls like the rhythm of a broken machine. Aai has been with him since dawn. She comes out at noon, her mask damp, her eyes hollow.

"He is stable," she says. The word stable carries no comfort. Stable means not worse. Not worse is not better.

I try to eat. We have food. Aai, the planner, the biology teacher who saw this coming before the news channels did, had stocked the kitchen. Rice, dal, atta, oil, salt, sugar, spices. Enough for maybe two weeks if we are careful. Three if we ration strictly.

But eating feels wrong when Baba cannot swallow water without choking.

I force down two rotis with dal. The dal is unseasoned. Aai has not had time to temper it with tadka, and I have never learned how. The roti is slightly burnt. I made it myself, following Aai's shouted instructions from the bedroom. "Vihan, flip it! The bottom is burning! Use the chimta, not your fingers, you fool!"

roti is ugly. Misshapen. One side charred, the other underdone. It is the most important roti I have ever made in my life.

---

Thursday evening. The electricity goes.

It does not go with a bang or a spark. It goes the way things end, quietly, without announcement, the way a candle flame shrinks and then is not there anymore. One moment the fan is spinning, the tube light is flickering, the refrigerator is humming its constant, comforting drone. The next moment, silence. Darkness. The sudden, absolute absence of everything we took for granted.

"Aai?"

"I know." Her voice comes from the bedroom. Calm. Too calm. The calmness of a person who expected this and has already grieved for it.

I find the emergency torch that Baba keeps in the drawer beside the front door. The heavy, plastic Eveready torch with the cracked handle that Baba has been meaning to replace since 2019. The beam is weak and yellow but it is light, and light is something.

I walk to the bedroom. In the torchlight, Baba looks worse than he did this morning. His face is not grey anymore; it is the colour of old newspaper, a yellowish tinge that I will later learn is the A-Virus's signature, the colour it paints on its victims before it finishes them. His chest rises and falls in short, desperate gasps, each inhale a fight, each exhale a surrender.

Aai is sitting beside him, holding his hand. Without the fan, the room is already warm. The Pune March heat, which the fan had been keeping at bay, now presses in from all sides. The walls, the ceiling, the closed windows.

"We need to open the windows," I say.

"If we open the windows, we let in whatever is out there."

"Aai, he cannot breathe in a closed room with no fan."

She considers this. Then nods. "Open them. But only the ones facing the courtyard, not the street."

I open the windows. The night air enters, warm, but moving, carrying the faint smell of mogra and something else, something new that has been building for three days, a smell that I cannot identify but that makes my stomach clench. The smell of a city in crisis. The smell of unwashed streets and uncollected garbage and something underneath that is organic, biological, the smell of living things becoming something else.

Baba stirs. Opens his eyes. Looks at me.

"Vihan."

"Yes, Baba?"

"Come here."

I look at Aai. She nods. I walk to his bedside. I kneel.

He reaches out and places his hand on my head. His palm is hot, not warm, hot, the fever burning through him like a furnace behind a thin wall. His fingers tremble against my scalp.

"I am sorry," he says. Each word costs him a breath. "About the school. About, everything."

"Baba, do not, "

"Listen. I pushed you because, because my father never pushed me. And I ended up, I ended up as a clerk in a taluka office for twenty years. I did not want that for you. I wanted — more."

"Baba, "

"But I pushed too hard. I know that now." A cough interrupts him — a single, wet bark that he suppresses with visible effort. "You are a good boy, Vihan. Better than I deserve."

I cannot speak. My throat has closed. I place my hand on top of his. The hand that is too hot, that trembles, that belongs to a man who might not be here tomorrow.

"Go back to Kolhapur," he whispers. "When this is over. Go back to your friends. Be happy."

"Baba, stop talking like; "

"Promise me."

"I promise."

He closes his eyes. His hand slides off my head. For a terrible moment, I think. But no, his chest still moves. Rising. Falling. The rattling continues.

Aai's hand finds my shoulder. She squeezes. I stand. I walk out of the room. I close the door softly.

In the hallway, in the darkness, with only the weak torchlight and the sounds of my father's lungs and the distant sirens and the baby (or adult) still crying in C-wing, I slide down the wall and sit on the floor.

I think about Shlok. I have not been able to reach him since Wednesday morning. The network has been dropping in and out — calls fail, texts hang in limbo, WhatsApp shows single grey ticks that never turn blue. The last message I sent, Bhai, sab theek hai na? — sits there, undelivered, a question thrown into a void.

I think about Omi and Tejas. About Kolhapur. About the misal at Padma Guest House. About the cricket on the Rankala maidan. About the life I was planning to go back to, the life that Baba just gave me permission to return to, the life that may not exist anymore because if Pune looks like this, what does Kolhapur look like?

I think about tomorrow. About what tomorrow even means in a world where the electricity is gone and the water is trickling and the hospitals are full and half the people you know are coughing and the other half are praying.

I think about the doodle I drew in Shirke Sir's class on Monday. The one where a disease shut the school down. The one I drew as a joke, as a fantasy, as the idle wish of a bored sixteen-year-old who hated his life.

Be careful what you wish for.

The thought hits me like a slap. I draw my knees to my chest. I press my forehead against them. I breathe.

Tomorrow. One day at a time. That is all I can do.

Tomorrow.