Chapter 4: Vihan

# Chapter 4: Vihan

## Antim

Friday morning. No electricity. No running water. The taps produce nothing now — not even a trickle. The bathtub is three-quarters full. The buckets are untouched. We have water for maybe ten days if we drink sparingly and stop washing.

Baba's breathing has changed.

I do not know the medical term for what is happening. Aai might. But I hear it through the wall — the rattling has been replaced by something slower, thicker, a sound that belongs in a machine room, not in a human body. Each breath is an event. A project. The inhale takes three, four, five seconds of visible effort, the ribs expanding against the skin, the chest straining upward as if trying to reach air that is just out of reach. The exhale is a wet, shuddering release, followed by a pause — a gap where there should be another breath and there is only silence, a silence that lasts one second, two seconds, three, before the next awful inhale begins.

Aai has not left his side since four AM.

I sit in the living room. The TV is dead, no electricity, no signal, no point. My phone shows 34% battery and no network. The Jio tower that serves our area must have gone down overnight. WhatsApp is frozen on the last messages I received yesterday: a voice note from Shlok that I cannot play because it did not finish downloading, and a text from Omi that says simply, Yaar, Tejas ki tabiyat kharab hai.

Tejas is sick.

I stare at the message. The single grey tick beside my reply, Kitna kharab?, confirms it was never delivered. I do not know if Tejas is coughing, or collapsed, or worse. I do not know if Omi is okay. I do not know if Shlok's voice note was a goodbye.

I do not know anything.

---

At nine AM, I knock on the bedroom door.

"Aai?"

"Come in."

I push the door open. The smell hits me first — the smell I have been trying to ignore for three days, the smell that has been seeping under the door and into the hallway, the smell of a body in crisis. Sweat. Urine — the bedsheets are damp, stained. And underneath those, something else. Something sweet and wrong, the smell that bodies produce when they are fighting a war they are losing.

Aai is sitting on the edge of the bed, holding Baba's hand. She has removed her mask. I notice this immediately.

"Aai, your mask, "

"It does not matter anymore."

"What do you mean, it does not, "

"Vihan." She looks at me. Her eyes are calm. Too calm. The calmness of a person who has already arrived at a conclusion and is now waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. "Come sit with us."

I walk to the bed. I kneel beside it, on the floor, the cold tile pressing through my pyjama bottoms. Baba is on his back now. Aai has propped him with three pillows. His eyes are closed. His face is the newspaper-yellow that I saw two days ago, but darker now, as if the yellow is being swallowed by grey. His lips are slightly blue. Blue like the Deccan sky that he will never see again.

I do not think that thought. I refuse it. I shove it out of my mind the way you shove a stray dog away from your food.

"Baba?"

No response. Just the breathing. In. Out. The gap. In. Out. The gap.

"He has not opened his eyes since three AM," says Aai. "I have been giving him water with a spoon. He swallows some of it. Most of it comes back."

"Should we try to get him to the hospital?"

"There are no hospitals anymore, Vihan. I called Sassoon's landline an hour ago — the landline, because mobiles are not working. Someone picked up. A nurse. She was crying. She said there are bodies in the corridors. Bodies in the parking lot. There are no doctors left, most of the doctors are sick too. She said — " Aai pauses. Swallows. "She said to keep him comfortable."

Keep him comfortable. The phrase is a coffin disguised as a sentence.

"No." I shake my head. "No. He is forty-seven. He is strong. He runs, he used to run on Baner Hills every Sunday morning. He carried a twenty-kilo suitcase up three flights of stairs when we moved in. He, "

"Vihan."

"He is not going to die, Aai."

She says nothing. She squeezes Baba's hand. His fingers do not squeeze back.

---

I spend the morning filling time. Filling time because the alternative is sitting beside a deathbed, and I am sixteen and I am not ready for that, not ready for the weight of it, not ready for the specific horror of watching your parent's chest rise and fall and wondering each time if the fall will be the last one.

I take inventory of our food. Rice: 5 kg. Dal: 2 kg. Atta: 3 kg. Oil: 1.5 litres. Sugar: 1 kg. Salt: plenty. Spices: enough. Maggi packets: 12. Biscuits: 3 packs of Parle-G, 1 pack of Marie Gold. One tin of Amul butter. Half a jar of mango pickle. A bag of onions, some going soft. Four potatoes, one sprouting.

No vegetables. No fruit. No milk. No eggs. The fridge is warm. Without electricity, everything inside has started to turn. The curd smells sour. The paneer is slimy. The leftover mutton rassa from Aai's birthday dinner has a green film on top.

I throw the spoiled food into the dustbin. The dustbin has not been emptied in three days. The society's garbage collector has not come. Nobody has come. The society, the building complex with its four wings and its compound wall and its security guard's booth, has become a sealed container, each flat a separate chamber, each family dealing with its own version of the same catastrophe.

From the balcony, I count the darkened windows. Of the forty flats visible from our courtyard, maybe fifteen have lights on. people running on inverters or generators. The rest are dark. Whether that darkness means the people inside are dead or just sitting in the dark like us, I cannot tell.

I see one woman on the third floor of A-wing, hanging clothes on her balcony. She moves slowly, mechanically, as if the act of laundry is the only normal thing left to hold onto. When she sees me looking, she raises her hand. I raise mine. It is the most human connection I have had with anyone outside my family in three days.

---

At noon, I cook. I make dal and rice. The dal is simple — yellow toor dal boiled with turmeric and salt. No tadka, no tempering, because I do not know how to heat oil and mustard seeds and hing without burning the flat down, and Aai is not available to guide me. The rice is overcooked, the grains mushy, clumping together. But it is food. It is warm. And the act of standing over the gas stove — the gas still works, the cylinder still has fuel, feels like an act of defiance, a statement that says: we are still here. We are still eating. We are still alive.

I take a plate to Aai. She is still beside Baba. She eats three spoonfuls, then puts the plate down.

"Eat more," I say.

"I am not hungry."

"Aai, you need to eat."

She looks at me with something between exhaustion and love. "When did you become the parent, ha?"

I do not answer. I leave the plate and go back to the kitchen. I eat my portion standing at the counter, shovelling dal-rice into my mouth with my fingers, the warm, bland comfort of it filling a hole that is not really about hunger.

---

At three PM, Baba opens his eyes.

I am in the living room, lying on the sofa, staring at the ceiling, when I hear Aai's voice — sharp, urgent — calling me. "Vihan! Vihan, come here!"

I run.

He is looking at us. His eyes are open, fully open for the first time in twenty-four hours. They are glassy, fevered, the pupils dilated, but there is him behind them. My father. Manohar Deshpande. The man who carried me on his shoulders through the Ganesh Visarjan crowd when I was five. The man who taught me to bat with a tennis ball in the Kolhapur house compound. The man who cooked terrible biryani and excellent mutton rassa and who argued with auto-rickshaw drivers about the meter and who snored so loud that the neighbours complained and who loved his wife with a clumsy, unspoken devotion that I only understood when I got old enough to see it.

"Kavita," he says to Aai. His voice is a whisper, barely there, but the word is clear.

"I am here," she says. She is holding his hand with both of hers, pressing it to her chest.

"Vihan."

"I am here too, Baba."

He tries to smile. The smile cracks his dry lips. A bead of blood appears on the lower lip, sits there, glistening.

"You two," he says. "My two."

Aai is crying. Silently. The tears run down her face and drip onto their clasped hands.

"Listen," Baba says. Every word is a mountain he is climbing. "The, the drawer. Bedside. Brown envelope."

I look at the bedside table. The drawer. I open it. Inside, among the miscellaneous clutter, a half-empty strip of Crocin, a phone charger, a ball-point pen from SBI, there is a brown envelope.

"Open it," he says.

I open it. Inside: papers. His Persistent Systems appointment letter. His life insurance policy, LIC Jeevan Anand, policy number starting with 482. Aai's name as nominee. My name as secondary. And a handwritten note on the back of a torn notebook page.

I read it.

Kavita, the FD maturity is in August. ₹8,40,000 in SBI Aundh branch. Account number below. Password for net banking is your mother's name + our wedding date. The mutual fund is in Groww app, my phone pin is 1947. Sell the Tata equity fund if you need cash. Do not touch the PPF until Vihan turns 18.

Vihan. I am proud of you. I was always proud of you. I was just too scared to show it because showing it meant admitting that you did not need me to push you, and if you did not need me to push you, then what was I for?

Go to Kolhapur. Be happy. And if you can, forgive me for Pinnacle.

Baba

I cannot read anymore. The letters blur. The paper trembles in my hands because my hands are trembling. I hear a sound that I do not recognize and then I realize it is coming from me. A high, keening sound, the sound of a boy who is watching his father die and who is holding a letter that was written for exactly this moment.

Aai takes the paper from me. She reads it. She does not make a sound, but her body shakes, a single, violent tremor that passes through her like a current.

"Manohar," she whispers. "You, "

"Wrote it, Tuesday night," he says. "When I, knew."

He knew. On Tuesday, when I was still hoping, still planning, still calling hospitals. He knew.

"I love you," Aai says. "Tula khup prem karte mi."

"I know," he says. "I have, always, known."

He looks at me. "Vihan."

"Yes, Baba."

"Come closer."

I lean in. Close enough to feel the heat radiating off him, close enough to smell the sickness, close enough that his breath, what is left of it, touches my face.

"You are, going to survive this. Do you hear me? You are, Deshpande. We, do not, quit."

"I will not quit, Baba."

"Good." His eyes close. His hand, which had been reaching for mine, falls back onto the sheet. The fingers curl, relax.

His breathing changes. The gaps between breaths grow longer. Three seconds. Five. Eight. Aai and I sit there, frozen, counting the gaps, willing the next breath to come, and it does, it does, until the gap stretches to ten seconds, fifteen, and Aai's grip on his hand tightens, and my nails dig into my palms, and the next breath does not come.

Twelve seconds.

Fifteen.

Twenty.

The room is silent. The mogra scent drifts through the open window. A crow caws outside. The world continues.

But in this room, in this bed, in this flat in Aundh where we moved eight months ago because a man wanted a better life for his family. The world has stopped.

Aai places her head on Baba's chest. She lies there, holding him, for a long time. I do not know how long. Time has stopped making sense. The shadows in the room shift and lengthen and eventually the room is dark and still Aai lies there, and still I kneel on the cold tile floor, and still the mogra blooms on the balcony, and still the crow caws, and still the world turns without us.

---

When Aai finally lifts her head, night has fallen.

"Help me," she says. Her voice is flat. Emptied. A container that has been poured out and not refilled.

"Help you what?"

"We need to, we need to cover him. We need to," She stops. Breathes. "We cannot leave him like this."

I nod. I fetch the white bedsheet from the linen cupboard. The good cotton sheet, the one Aai keeps for guests who never come. I help her pull it over Baba's body. Over his face. The fabric settles over his features, clinging to the shape of his nose, his forehead, the jaw that I inherited.

Aai lights a diya. The small brass lamp from the dining table. She pours oil into it, twists the cotton wick, strikes a match. The flame catches. The small, golden light fills the room with shadows.

She places the diya beside the bed. She folds her hands. She closes her eyes.

I stand beside her. I do not know the prayers. Baba was not religious — he went to the Dagdusheth temple once a year, on Ganesh Chaturthi, because it was tradition, not devotion. But Aai prays now, her lips moving, the words too soft for me to hear, and I stand there and let her pray, and I think not of God but of my father — of the mutton rassa and the Fortuner arguments and the terrible biryani and the Sunday morning runs and the letter in the brown envelope and the words I am proud of you and the words Go to Kolhapur and the words Be happy.

After, we sit in the kitchen. The diya in the bedroom casts a faint glow through the open door. Aai drinks water. I drink water. Neither of us speaks.

Then Aai says: "We cannot stay here."

"What?"

"We cannot stay in this flat with, with his body. Not for long. In this heat, without electricity, " She does not finish. The biology teacher in her knows what happens to a body in a Pune summer without refrigeration.

"Where will we go?"

"I do not know yet. But we need to think. Tomorrow. Tonight, we rest."

She goes to the sofa. She lies down. She does not go to the bedroom. She will never sleep in that bedroom again.

I go to my room. I lie on my Spiderman bed. I look at the ceiling fan that does not spin. I think about calling Shlok, but the phone is at 19% and there is no network and there is nothing Shlok can say that will fix this.

I think about Baba. I think about the word fatal that the newsreader used and that I heard three days ago and that now lives inside my body like a stone lodged in my throat.

I think about tomorrow. About what we will do with Baba's body. About where we will go. About how a sixteen-year-old boy and a forty-four-year-old biology teacher survive in a city that is dying.

I do not cry. I have used up all the tears. What is left is something harder, something that settles in the chest like concrete drying. Neither sadness nor anger Something else. Something that does not have a name yet.

I sleep.

When I wake, the first thing I hear is coughing.

Not from the bedroom. Not Baba. Baba is beyond coughing now.

From Aai.

From the sofa in the living room, through my closed door, through the wall; I hear my mother cough.