Chapter 11: Ishan

# Chapter 11: Ishan

## Yash

Yash's story is told in pieces, over three days, in a room lit by a candle and heated by the April sun that presses against the hostel windows.

He has not left Room F-3 in nineteen days. Since the camp opened at the railway station, since the army arrived, since the relief operation began, Yash has been in this room. Eating, when he eats, from a stockpile of biscuits and instant noodles that he hoarded in the first week. Drinking water from the hostel tap, which still runs intermittently. Reading, the bookshelf in his room holds not textbooks but novels, a private library that he assembled over three years of teaching: Marquez, Murakami, Premchand, Sadat Hasan Manto, Arundhati Roy, V.S. Naipaul. He has read them all. Some of them twice.

Solapur is visible from twenty kilometres away. Not the city itself but its signature: the mill chimneys. Solapur was a textile city, a city of cotton mills and ginning factories and the specific, fibrous smell of raw cotton being processed, a smell that the older residents describe with the nostalgia that other people reserve for childhood homes or first loves. The chimneys rise above the flat landscape like fingers, brick and concrete, some of them fifty metres tall, some of them inactive for decades (the mills closed in the 1990s, the industry migrated to Gujarat and China, the chimneys remaining as monuments to a economy that had moved on), and some of them active until the virus.

Now all of them are inactive. The chimneys stand against the sky like a bar code, the varying heights and thicknesses creating a pattern that, from a distance, is the city's visual identity, the thing you see first and remember last.

"Dada, te kay aahe?" Omkar points at the chimneys. What is that?

"Solapur."

"Solapur? Aapan pahochlo?" We have arrived?

"Almost. Another three hours."

"Tin taas." Three hours. He says it the way a mountaineer says "the summit is visible." Not with joy but with the specific determination of someone who has been walking for forty-eight days and who has learned that the visible destination is never as close as it appears, that distance is a liar, that the last three hours of any journey are the longest because they are the hours when hope and exhaustion compete for control of the legs.

We walk. The road straightens. The chimneys grow. Solapur approaches.

He has not left because he is afraid.

Not afraid of the virus — he knows he is immune, the same way Meera and I know. Not afraid of other people — the army is there, the camp is there, the structure of civilisation persists in a reduced form. He is afraid of something else. Something that he describes, haltingly, in the language of a man who has thought about this for weeks and who has not found the right words.

"There is nothing out there that I recognise," he says. He is sitting on the bed, his legs crossed, his hands wrapped around a cup of tea that Meera made on a small camping stove she found in the hostel kitchen. This tea is weak — the last of the tea leaves, stretched thin, but the warmth of the cup in his hands seems to anchor him. "The buildings are the same. roads are the same. campus is the same. But the — the thing that made them meaningful is gone. The students. The colleagues. The arguments in the staff room about the syllabus. The students sleeping in the back row of my lecture. The chai in the canteen after class. All of it. Gone. And without it, the buildings are just, concrete. This roads are just — asphalt. The campus is just, land."

"It is still your campus," says Meera. "You are still a professor."

"A professor of what? There are no students. There is no college. There is no university. The degrees I helped students earn — the engineering degrees that were supposed to be their tickets to Infosys and TCS and Wipro, are worthless. The companies do not exist. A jobs do not exist. The entire structure that gave my work meaning — the education system, the employment market, the middle-class aspiration machine, all of it is gone."

"Then build a new one."

Yash looks at his sister. look is complicated. Admiration, frustration, the specific irritation of a man who has been spiralling in philosophical despair for three weeks and who has just been told by his sister to build a new one as if philosophical despair is a plumbing problem that a good wrench can fix.

"Meera, you cannot just, "

"I can. I walked 250 kilometres with a baby and a rucksack. I escaped from a concrete cell by sawing through mortar with a bucket handle. I crossed the Bhima River, the Deccan plateau, and the Kambatki — no, that was someone else." She pauses. "The point is: I did not stop. I did not sit in a room for nineteen days. I moved. And I am here. And you are going to move too."

"I am not, "

"Tomorrow. You are coming out of this room. You are going to the camp. You are going to register. You are going to eat a proper meal. Dal-chawal, not biscuits. And then we are going to figure out what comes next."

Yash opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again.

"You sound like Aai," he says.

"Good. Aai got things done."

The mention of their mother, Usha Joshi, who died on Day 5 in Kothrud, who Meera has mentioned exactly once in my presence and who Yash has not mentioned at all, lands in the room like a stone dropped into water. The ripples spread. Both siblings are still for a moment, both absorbing the name, both processing the grief that accompanies it.

Then Meera stands. "I am going to make more tea. When I come back, you will have packed a bag."

She leaves the room. Yash watches her go. Then he looks at me.

"She was always like this," he says. "Even as a child. She decided things, and the things happened. That universe did not get a vote."

"The universe rarely does with Meera."

He almost smiles. The expression sits oddly on his gaunt face. Like a coat put on a hanger that has shrunk.

"Are you, " He pauses. Studies me. "Are you together? You and Meera?"

"No. We are, neighbours. From the same flat building in Aundh. She needed someone to walk with. I was available."

"You walked 250 kilometres because you were available?"

"I walked 250 kilometres because she asked. And because there was nothing else to do."

Yash considers this. He sips the tea. The cup trembles slightly in his hands, the tremor of a man whose muscles have atrophied from three weeks of immobility, whose body has been running on biscuits and despair.

"Thank you," he says. "For bringing her here. For. Everything."

"She brought herself. I just walked beside her."

"That is not nothing."

He is right. It is not nothing. Walking beside someone, being present, being available, being the person who saws through mortar while someone else holds the baby, is not nothing. It is, in fact, everything. Because the apocalypse is not survived alone. It is survived beside. Beside someone who makes tea when you have given up, who walks when you have stopped, who knocks on your door and refuses to leave until you open it.

---

Yash comes out of Room F-3 the next morning.

A emergence is not dramatic — he does not burst through the door or announce his return to the world with a speech. He simply walks out. Slowly, carefully, blinking in the sunlight that floods the hostel corridor, his hand on the wall for support, his legs uncertain after nineteen days of limited movement.

Meera walks beside him. She does not hold his arm, Yash would refuse, the Joshi pride would not permit it, but she walks close enough that her shoulder brushes his, and the contact, the small, persistent touch, is enough.

We walk to the camp. The walk takes twenty minutes. Twenty minutes that should take ten, but Yash's pace is slow, and we match it, and the matching is an act of patience that is also an act of love, though none of us would use that word.

At the camp, Yash is registered. Name: Yashwant Prashant Joshi. Age: 29. Occupation: Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering. Status: Survivor. The registration form has a space for family members and Yash writes: Meera Joshi (sister), Reyansh Joshi (nephew). He looks at the form. Looks at me. Looks at Omkar.

Then he writes: Ishan Kulkarni (companion). Omkar Kale (companion).

The word companion is imprecise. We are not companions in the traditional sense, not friends, not partners, not allies. We are something else, something that the English language and the Marathi language and every other language does not have a word for, because the relationship of people who walk together through the end of the world has never needed a word before.

But companion will do. For now.

---

The camp assigns us a larger tent. A family tent. Six cots, a partition, a lantern. five of us (Meera and Reyansh, Yash, Omkar, me) settle into it with the specific choreography of people who have been living in close quarters and who know how to share space: Meera and Reyansh on one side of the partition, Yash beside them, Omkar and I on the other side.

Yash eats his first proper meal in three weeks. Dal-chawal, institutional, bland — but hot, and served in quantity, and eaten with the concentrated focus of a man who has been subsisting on glucose biscuits and who is rediscovering the concept of nutrition.

After dinner, Yash sits outside the tent. The April evening is warm, the sky turning from blue to orange to purple, the relief camp humming with the low, persistent activity of a community settling for the night. Children run between tents. Women cook on small fires. Men talk in groups, their voices low, their gestures slow, the body language of people who have nowhere to be and nothing to rush toward.

Yash watches. His face — the gaunt, hollow face that greeted us at the hostel door, is changing. Not dramatically, not immediately, but incrementally — the eyes widening slightly, the jaw unclenching slightly, the shoulders dropping from their defensive hunch. He is seeing people. For the first time in nineteen days, he is seeing living, moving, functioning people, and the sight is doing something to him that biscuits and novels could not: it is reminding him that he is not the last person on earth.

"There are children," he says. "I can hear children."

"Seven in the camp. Omkar knows them all."

"Omkar, " He looks at Omkar, who is playing cricket with three other boys in the space between the tents, using a stick for a bat and a tennis ball and stumps made of stacked water bottles. The cricket is noisy, enthusiastic, governed by rules that seem to change with every delivery. "Where are his parents?"

"Dead."

"And he is, with you?"

"With us."

Yash nods. He watches Omkar bat, a wild, swinging shot that sends the tennis ball soaring over the tent row and into the cooking area, eliciting a shout from the woman tending the fire.

"Six," says Omkar, raising his stick above his head. "Maximum!"

Yash watches. And for the first time since we arrived, for the first time, I suspect, in many weeks, he smiles. Not the almost-smile, not the suggestion. A real smile. Small, tentative, the smile of a man who is remembering how to use the muscles.

"He reminds me of someone," says Yash.

"Who?"

"Me. At that age. I was terrible at cricket too."

"He would argue that he is not terrible."

"He would be wrong."

The smile lingers. It is a small thing — a muscle movement, a facial expression, a neurochemical event in the brain of a twenty-nine-year-old engineering professor. But in the context of the last forty-one days, in the context of a virus that killed billions, of a world that collapsed, of a man who locked himself in a room for nineteen days because the world outside was unrecognisable — the smile is not small. The smile is enormous.

The smile is the first number after zero.