Chapter 17: Ishan

# Chapter 17: Ishan

## Ghaat

Day 62 of the virus. Day 9 of the return.

The Western Ghats rise before us like a wall.

From the Deccan plateau, they appear suddenly. One moment you are walking through flat farmland, the jowar fields stretching to the horizon, and the next moment the earth tilts upward, the vegetation thickens, and the hills appear, ridge after ridge, layered like the folds of a green saree, each fold darker than the last, the furthest ridges dissolving into the haze of distance.

We are approaching from the east, following the old road from Jejuri toward Saswad, the road that climbs through the ghat section. The mountain passes that connect the Deccan plateau to the coastal strip, the passes that have been trade routes and military corridors for a thousand years, the passes through which Shivaji's Maratha cavalry rode to establish an empire and through which we are now walking to rebuild a network.

The climbing changes everything. For nine days, we have walked on flat ground. The monotony of the plateau, where the body settles into a rhythm and the rhythm becomes automatic. The ghats demand attention. The road steepens. The switchbacks multiply. The muscles of the calves and thighs, which have been cruising on flat terrain, are now being asked to work against gravity, and they protest with the specific, burning fatigue of inclines.

Omkar does not slow down. The twelve-year-old's body, light and efficient, handles the gradient with the ease of a goat. He moves ahead of me, his chappals slapping the road, his body leaning into the slope, his breath barely quickening.

"Dada, chala na! Halwa aahat!" Come on, dada! You are slow!

"I am carrying thirty kilos on my back."

"Mi carry karto thoda." I will carry some.

"You weigh thirty kilos. You cannot carry thirty kilos."

"Try karu dya na."

I shift four kilos from my rucksack to his cloth bag. The rice and the dal, the heaviest items. He slings the bag over his shoulder. The weight settles. He does not complain. He climbs.

I watch his back as he climbs, the shoulder blades visible through the thin cotton of his t-shirt, the spine a visible ridge, the body of a child who has been eating survival rations for two months. Before the virus, Omkar was stocky. I have seen the photograph he carries in his cloth bag, creased and sweat-stained: a family portrait, Omkar flanked by his parents, taken at a studio in Kolhapur, the backdrop a painted scene of mountains and waterfalls that exists nowhere in Maharashtra. In the photograph, his cheeks are round. His arms are solid. He is grinning with the unforced joy of a boy whose primary concerns are cricket and Maggi and whether his mother will let him watch the IPL past bedtime.

That boy is gone. This boy, the one climbing the ghat with four kilos of rice on his shoulder, is leaner, harder, the puppy fat burned away by sixty-two days of walking and rationing and the specific metabolic efficiency that the human body develops when calories become scarce. His face is sharper. His eyes are older. He is twelve going on forty, a child who has crossed the Deccan plateau on foot and who has learned things about the world that no twelve-year-old should know and that every twelve-year-old in this new world will have to.

Ghat road narrows as we climb. Vegetation closes in. Teak trees on both sides, their trunks grey and massive, the bark rough and fissured, the canopy forming a tunnel over the road. Light filters through in shafts, catching the dust motes and the insects and the occasional butterfly that drifts across the road with the aimless elegance of a creature that has no destination and no deadline.

Sound changes in the ghats. On the plateau, sound travels flat and far, the bark of a dog audible from two kilometres, the rumble of a distant truck carrying across empty fields. In the ghats, sound is contained. The hills absorb it, the trees muffle it, the valleys channel it. Everything is closer, more intimate. I can hear Omkar's breathing, the slap-slap of his chappals, the creak of the cloth bag on his shoulder, the small grunt he makes at each switchback when the gradient steepens and his calves protest.

"Dada, ghat var kay aahe?" What is at the top of the ghat?

"The other side."

"Dusri side la kay aahe?" What is on the other side?

"The Konkan. The coast. Pune is north from there."

"Samudra disel ka?" Will we see the ocean?

"Maybe. From the top, on a clear day, you can sometimes see the coast."

"Mala samudra kadhi baghitla nahi." I have never seen the ocean.

This stops me. Not physically, the walking continues, but something inside pauses. A twelve-year-old boy from Kolhapur, a city seventy kilometres from the Arabian Sea, who has never seen the ocean. In the pre-virus world, this would have been a matter of a Sunday drive, a family outing, two hours on the NH-66 to Ratnagiri or Ganpatipule. In this world, the ocean is a rumour, a geography lesson, a thing that exists on maps and in stories and that Omkar has imagined but never witnessed.

"When we reach the top," I say, "if the sky is clear, I will show you the ocean."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

---

The ghat section is ten kilometres long. It takes us four hours — four hours of climbing, switchback after switchback, the road carved into the hillside, the valley falling away on one side, the forest pressing close on the other. The forest is dense — teak, ain, hirda, the mixed deciduous forest of the Western Ghats, the forest that shelters leopards and sambar deer and giant squirrels and a thousand species of insect that sing in overlapping frequencies, creating a wall of sound that is both beautiful and overwhelming.

We stop at the top of the ghat. A dhabaa. The standard highway dhabaa, perched on the ridge, the tin roof catching the wind, the view stretching east across the plateau we have crossed and west toward the coastal valleys we are descending into. The dhabaa is abandoned, but the view is free.

I sit on the dhabaa's bench. The sweat cools on my skin. The wind, the ghat wind, warm from the plateau, cooling as it rises, dries the moisture and raises goosebumps. Below us, the valley: green, deep, the terraced fields of the ghat slopes visible in the afternoon light, the rice paddies (dry now, waiting for monsoon) arranged like staircases for giants.

"Dada." Omkar sits beside me. He is eating a raw mango. We picked several at the base of the ghat, the trees heavy with the small, green, violently sour kairi that grows wild in the ghat forests.

"Ho."

"Amhi Pune la pohochlo ki kay honar?" When we reach Pune, what will happen?

"We will find the communities there. The relief camps. The shelters. We will connect them to the network."

"Aani mag?"

"Then we keep walking. Pune to Jejuri. Jejuri to Vairag. Vairag to Solapur. Back and forth. Carrying information. Connecting people."

"Sarkhya?" Always?

"For as long as it takes."

"Kithi laagnar?"

"I do not know. Months. Maybe years."

Omkar bites the mango. The sourness makes him squint. He chews. Swallows. Bites again.

"Mi barobar asen," he says. I will be with you. That statement is not a question. It is a declaration — the declaration of a twelve-year-old who has decided his future with the same speed and certainty with which he decides everything: instantly, completely, without negotiation.

"Okay," I say.

"Promise?"

"Promise."

He extends his right hand. The little finger. The pinky promise. The universal contract of Indian childhood, binding and unbreakable, the agreement that carries more weight than any adult signature on any adult document.

I hook my little finger around his.

"Done," he says.

"Done."

He finishes the mango. He throws the seed over the railing of the dhabaa, into the valley. The seed arcs through the air, a small, pale arc against the green, and disappears into the forest below.

Somewhere, in the leaf litter of the Western Ghats, the seed will land. And if the monsoon comes, and the soil is right, and the conditions are favourable. A mango tree will grow. A tree planted by accident, by a twelve-year-old boy eating a stolen mango on a mountaintop in the middle of the apocalypse.

This is how forests grow. This is how networks grow. One seed at a time. One node at a time. One pinky promise at a time.

---

The descent from the ghat is faster than the ascent — gravity assists, the road tilting downward, the switchbacks now carrying us instead of fighting us. The landscape changes as we descend — the dry deciduous forest giving way to moist deciduous, the teak replaced by jambhul and karanj and the wild mogra that fills the air with its sweet, heavy scent.

By evening, we are in the foothills, the transitional zone between the ghats and the Pune plateau, the landscape softening into rolling hills and wide valleys, the roads straighter, the villages closer together.

And the signs of Pune begin. The signboards first — the blue highway signs, rusted but legible, announcing distances: Pune, 45 km. Then the buildings — the outskirts of the metropolitan area, the sprawl that has crept southward and eastward from the city, consuming villages and farmland and turning them into housing complexes and IT parks and shopping malls.

That sprawl is silent. The housing complexes are dark, their gates locked, their swimming pools green with algae. The IT parks are monuments to a dead industry. Glass and steel, designed to impress, now reflecting nothing but empty skies. The shopping malls are frozen in mid-transaction, the mannequins in the windows still wearing the spring collection, the promotional banners still advertising sales that will never happen.

But amidst the silence, there is life. A light in a window. A clothesline on a balcony, laundry drying in the evening breeze. sound of a radio — faint, distorted, the Akashvani frequency, someone broadcasting, someone listening. smell of cooking — onion and garlic, the base of every Maharashtrian meal, the smell that means someone is alive and cooking dinner.

Pune is not dead. Pune is diminished. But Pune is not dead.

"Dada," says Omkar. He has stopped. He is standing on the road, his chappals planted, his body still. He is looking at the city. The dark towers, the silent roads, the scattered lights.

"Ho?"

"He mhanje, Pune?" This is, Pune?

"This is the edge of Pune. That city is further north."

"Mala vatla hota Pune mhanje, building building building. People people people. Noise noise noise."

"It was. Before."

"Aata?"

"Now it is this."

He looks at the city. The scattered lights, the silence, the dark buildings against the darkening sky. He has never been to Pune — he is a village boy from Nannaj, Solapur district, and the largest settlement he visited before the virus was Solapur city, which has (had) a population of nine lakh. Pune had (has?) fifty lakh. The scale is different. The emptiness, therefore, is also different — larger, deeper, the emptiness of a city that contained millions and now contains thousands.

"Lok aahey na?" There are people, right?

"There are people. The lights tell us there are people."

He studies the lights. Counts them, maybe. Assesses the distance. Makes his calculation.

"Chalaa," he says. Let's go. "Lok aahey tar kaam aahe." If there are people, there is work.

We walk into Pune.