Chapter 10: Ishan

# Chapter 10: Ishan

## Walchand

Day 34 of the walk. Day 41 of the virus.

We leave the camp at dawn.

City of Solapur wakes slowly, not the explosive, honking, chai-stall-clattering awakening of the pre-virus city, but a muted version, the city stretching after a long sleep, a few sounds here, a few movements there, the population of survivors beginning their daily routines with the cautious energy of people who are still surprised to be alive.

Meera knows the way. She has been to Solapur before; for Yash's college convocation, for family visits, for the annual Siddheshwar temple yatra that every Joshi family member attended with the dutiful regularity of people who believe in tradition even when they no longer believe in the gods the tradition celebrates.

Walchand College of Engineering is in the northern part of the city, near the Solapur University campus. It is a twenty-minute walk from the railway station camp, through the old city, past the Siddheshwar temple (silent, the gates open, the courtyard empty, the flag on the spire still flying), past the textile market (shuttered, the bolts of fabric visible through the gaps in the shutters, the colours fading in the sun), past the municipal corporation building (a government building looks the same whether the government exists or not, the grey concrete, the peeling paint, the portrait of Gandhi in the lobby, the flag on the roof).

Omkar walks beside me. He has been quiet this morning. Sensing, with the emotional intelligence that children develop when they have survived alone, that today is important, that the adults around him are carrying something fragile, and that his job is to be present without being a disturbance.

Reyansh is awake, alert, his eyes tracking the new environment — the buildings taller than any he has seen on the highway, the streets wider, the sounds (a dog, a crow, a distant voice) more varied. He reaches for things, a signboard, a tree branch, the top of Meera's head — with the grasping optimism of a baby who believes that everything in the world is reachable if you just stretch far enough.

---

Walchand College of Engineering, Solapur. Established 1947. That campus is a rectangle of buildings — classrooms, laboratories, workshops, a library, a hostel, arranged around a central courtyard with a flagpole and a bust of the founder. That buildings are the standard architecture of post-independence Indian engineering colleges: functional, concrete, designed for utility rather than beauty, the kind of buildings that produce engineers the way factories produce goods — reliably, efficiently, without aesthetic pretension.

A gate is open. No guards. No barriers. This driveway is littered with fallen leaves. The trees in the courtyard have been dropping for weeks without anyone to sweep, the accumulation creating a brown carpet that crunches under our feet.

"His office is in the mechanical engineering department," says Meera. "Second floor. Room 204."

We walk through the campus. The silence here is different from the city's silence — it is institutional silence, the silence of classrooms without students, of corridors without footsteps, of laboratories without experiments. The notice boards are still pinned with papers — exam schedules, workshop timetables, a poster for an intercollegiate cricket tournament that was supposed to happen in April.

Meera's pace accelerates. She is almost running now, up the stairs, through the corridor, past doors marked 201, Applied Thermodynamics Lab, 202, Materials Science, 203, Faculty Lounge, and then,

204, Asst. Prof. Y. P. Joshi, Mechanical Engineering

This nameplate. The door. The destination.

Meera stops. She stands in front of the door. Her hand is on the handle. She does not turn it.

"Meera?"

"I am scared," she says. The words are small, quiet, the words of a woman who has walked 250 kilometres on hope and who is now standing at the threshold where hope either becomes reality or evaporates.

"I know."

"What if he is not here?"

"Then we find out where he is."

"What if he is, "

"Open the door."

She opens the door.

Office is small — a desk, a chair, a bookshelf, a window looking out onto the campus courtyard. desk is neat, papers stacked, a laptop closed, a mug (the mug reads World's Okayest Engineer — a gift, Meera will later tell me, from her, for his birthday). The bookshelf holds textbooks, Shigley's Machine Design, R.K. Rajput's Thermal Engineering, Cengel's Thermodynamics. The chair is pushed back from the desk, as if someone stood up and walked away and intended to return.

That office is empty.

Meera stands in the doorway. She looks at the desk. The mug. The chair.

"He was here," she says. "He was here recently. The laptop. the laptop is closed, not open. He closed it before he left. He intended to come back."

"Or someone else closed it."

"Nobody else would close Yash's laptop. He was particular about it. He had a password and a fingerprint lock and he did not let anyone touch it."

The evidence is circumstantial. The closed laptop, the pushed-back chair, the neat desk. They could mean that Yash was here recently and left temporarily. Or they could mean that Yash was here weeks ago and left permanently. A office does not tell us which.

"The hostel," says Meera. "If he was staying at the college, he would be in the hostel. Faculty quarters."

We leave the office. We walk to the hostel; a building on the eastern edge of the campus, a three-storey structure with the specific architecture of Indian college hostels: long corridors, identical doors, the faint smell of Dettol and cooking and the accumulated residue of a thousand young men living in close proximity.

The faculty quarters are on the ground floor — a separate wing, the doors wider, the rooms slightly larger. Meera scans the nameplates.

Room F-1: Prof. A. S. Kulkarni* *Room F-2: Prof. M. R. Jadhav* *Room F-3: Prof. Y. P. Joshi

Door is closed. Meera knocks. The sound echoes in the empty corridor.

No answer.

She knocks again. Harder.

No answer.

She tries the handle. Locked.

"Yash!" she calls. Her voice cracks. "Yash, it's Meera! I'm here! Yash!"

This corridor absorbs her voice. The silence returns.

Omkar tugs my sleeve. I look down. He is pointing, not at the door, but at the floor. At the gap between the door and the floor. A thin line of light. Not daylight, the corridor has windows. Something else. A warm, flickering light. light of a candle or a lantern.

"Someone is inside," Omkar whispers.

Meera sees the light. She drops to her knees. She puts her mouth near the gap.

"Yash. I know you are in there. It is Meera. Your sister. I walked from Pune. I brought Reyansh. Open the door."

Silence. Five seconds. Ten.

Then, a sound. Not a voice. A cough. A single, dry, hollow cough from inside the room. cough of a person who has been coughing for a long time and whose throat is raw and whose lungs are tired.

Meera's face changes. The fear does not leave, it deepens, becomes more specific, more targeted. fear is no longer what if he is not here? The fear is now what if he is here, but,

The lock clicks. The door opens.

---

Yash Joshi stands in the doorway of Room F-3 and he is not the person I expected.

Meera has described her brother to me, briefly, in the fragments she allows herself, as energetic, loud, the kind of person who fills a room with his presence. An engineering professor who teaches with enthusiasm and argues with conviction and who once, according to family legend, gave a three-hour lecture on thermodynamics without notes and received a standing ovation from his students.

That man in the doorway is none of these things. He is thin, not the lean thinness of a man who walks a lot, but the gaunt, hollowed thinness of a man who has been eating too little for too long. His cheeks are concave. His eyes are sunken, rimmed with dark circles that look like bruises. His hair is long, unkempt, his beard unshaved. He wears a kurta that hangs on him, it is his kurta, sized for his body, but his body has shrunk inside it, and the fabric sags and pools.

He stands in the doorway. He looks at Meera. He looks at Reyansh. He looks at me. He looks at Omkar.

Then he looks at Meera again.

"You came," he says. His voice is rough, the roughness of a man who has not spoken to another person in weeks, whose vocal cords have atrophied from disuse, whose throat produces sounds that are more rasp than voice.

"You told me to come," says Meera. "You sent a message."

"That was, that was forty days ago."

"I walked. It took time."

Yash stares at her. That stare is the stare of a man who sent a WhatsApp message into the void on Day 3 and who has spent the subsequent thirty-eight days in a room with a candle and a locked door, waiting for a response that he stopped believing would come. The stare is disbelief and relief and grief and joy, all compressed into a single expression that his gaunt face can barely hold.

"Meera." His voice breaks on her name. The two syllables crack in the middle, the way a dry branch cracks under weight.

She reaches him. She holds him. Reyansh is between them. The baby pressed between his mother and his uncle, his small body a bridge between two people who are holding each other as if the holding is the only thing preventing them from falling through the floor.

Yash cries. Meera cries. Reyansh, sandwiched and sensing emotion, makes a small sound — not a cry, not a laugh, something in between, the sound of a baby who does not understand what is happening but who knows that the adults around him are experiencing something large.

I stand in the corridor. Omkar stands beside me. We watch.

"Tai," Omkar whispers. "Bhetla." She found him.

"Ho," I say. Yes.

"Mg aata?" So now what?

I look at Omkar. At the twelve-year-old boy who has been walking for days, who has attached himself to us with the easy trust of a stray dog who has found kind hands, who is now standing in a college hostel corridor watching a woman hold her brother and who is asking the question that the situation demands.

So now what?

I do not know.

But the road that brought us here — 250 kilometres of highway and village road, of sugarcane and bhakri and Maggi noodles and a drainage ditch and a concrete room and a wire and a wall — that road has reached its end.

And the end is not an end. It is a door. A door that has opened.

What is behind it, we will find out.

Camp kitchen served rice and dal twice a day. The dal was thin, more water than lentil, the tur dal stretched to feed three hundred mouths from a pot designed for fifty. But it was hot, and it was food, and the act of eating together, squatting in rows on the ground, steel plates on our laps, the sound of three hundred people eating simultaneously, the collective scrape of spoons on steel, the slurp of dal, the crunch of raw onion (the only accompaniment, one quarter-onion per person, the onion more valuable than the dal because the onion had flavour and the dal had only sustenance), the act of communal eating was itself a form of nutrition. We were fed not just by the food but by the fact of eating it together, by the social contract of shared scarcity, by the unspoken agreement that said: we are all hungry, we are all here, we are all eating the same thin dal, and this sameness, this equality of hunger and its partial satisfaction, is the foundation upon which everything else will be built.

"Aata," I say. Now. "Aata pahto." Now we see.