Chapter 2: Ishan

# Chapter 2: Ishan

## Raat

Time loses meaning in the dark.

I measure it by sounds. Suraj's footsteps in the hallway — heavy, deliberate, the footsteps of a man who wants you to know he is there. The clatter of pots in the kitchen, someone cooking, the hiss of oil, the smell of frying onions seeping under the door. Dhanraj's cough — wet, persistent, the cough of a man who smokes beedis and has smoked them for decades. creak of the cot in the main room. The wind outside, pushing against the tin roof, making it groan.

And Reyansh's breathing. Small, rhythmic, the breathing of a child who has fallen asleep in his mother's arms despite everything. Despite the concrete floor and the darkness and the bloodstain in the corner and the men with the shotgun. Children sleep because their bodies demand it. Adults stay awake because their minds refuse to let them.

Meera has not moved. She sits against the wall, Reyansh in her lap, her spine straight, her breathing controlled. In the darkness, she is a silhouette, the outline of a woman who has been running for three weeks and has just been caught, and who is now calculating, with the cold precision of a mechanical engineer (which is what she was, before the virus, a mechanical engineer at Thermax in Pune, specialising in heat exchangers, a woman who thinks in systems and tolerances and failure points), how to uncatch herself.

"The walls," she whispers. "Concrete block. Standard 6-inch hollow blocks. The mortar between them is the weak point. If we had something hard and pointed, a nail, a bolt, even a stone, we could work at the mortar. Over time, we could loosen a block."

"Over how much time?"

"Hours. Maybe a full day. The mortar in these farmhouses is usually sand-heavy — they cut costs by using more sand and less cement. It crumbles."

"We don't have a day. And we don't have a tool."

"The bucket." She nods toward the corner. In the darkness, the bucket is a vague shape, a plastic bucket, the kind used for construction, for carrying water, for a dozen rural purposes. "The handle. It's steel wire, looped through the bucket rim. If we can detach it and straighten it, "

"A wire. Against concrete."

"Against mortar. Not concrete. Mortar is softer. And the wire would act as a saw, not a chisel. We work it back and forth, grinding the mortar. It will be slow. But it is possible."

I think about this. physics is sound. Meera's physics is always sound. The problem is the variables she cannot control: time, noise, the men on the other side of the door.

"The noise," I say. "If we start scraping; "

"We wait until they sleep. The cot creaked twenty minutes ago — Suraj is lying down. Dhanraj has been coughing for ten minutes, he is settling. If we start at midnight and work until four AM, we have four hours. In four hours, working continuously, we could loosen two blocks. Two blocks removed creates a gap approximately thirty centimetres wide and forty centimetres tall. I can fit through that. Reyansh can fit through that. You — " She pauses. "You might need a third block."

"Let me worry about fitting. You worry about the wire."

---

We wait. The sounds of the farmhouse diminish. Suraj's footsteps stop, the kitchen falls silent, Dhanraj's coughing subsides into the wet, rattling snore of a man sleeping with congested lungs. The wind picks up outside, pushing against the tin roof, creating a continuous low moan that will mask the sound of our work.

Meera detaches the bucket handle. A wire is heavy-gauge. Maybe 4mm steel, bent into a U-shape, the ends looped through holes in the bucket rim. She works one end free by bending it back and forth, the wire fatiguing at the bend point, weakening, until it snaps with a soft tik that sounds like a gunshot in the silence. We freeze. Listen. Dhanraj snores. Nobody comes.

She straightens the wire against the floor, rolling it under her palm, pressing out the curves. A result is a length of steel approximately forty centimetres long, slightly bent, but straight enough to use as a tool.

"Which wall?" she whispers.

I think about the layout. That door is on the north wall. The main room is beyond the north wall. The east and west walls are internal, they adjoin other rooms, which may or may not be occupied. The south wall is the exterior wall, beyond it is the outside, the dirt yard, the thorn fence, the open scrubland.

"South," I say. "The exterior wall. If we go through an interior wall, we end up in another room, possibly occupied. If we go through the exterior wall, we are outside."

"And the thorn fence?"

"One problem at a time."

---

We start at what I estimate is midnight. The farmhouse is silent except for the wind and Dhanraj's snoring.

I work the wire. Meera holds Reyansh, sitting in the opposite corner, ready to cover any sound he makes if he wakes. I kneel at the south wall, my face close to the concrete blocks, my fingers finding the mortar lines in the darkness — the thin seams of grey between the blocks, the lines where the builder's laziness is our salvation.

This mortar is exactly as Meera predicted: sand-heavy, crumbly, the kind that flakes when you press a fingernail into it. I position the wire against the mortar line, the vertical seam between two blocks, at about waist height, and begin sawing. Back and forth. Small movements. The wire bites into the mortar, and a fine dust falls onto my fingers, gritty, tasting of sand and lime when it reaches my lips.

A work is slow. Agonisingly slow. Each pass of the wire removes maybe a millimetre of mortar. The mortar line is approximately ten centimetres deep. The full depth of the block. To cut through one vertical seam, I need a thousand passes. To cut the horizontal seams above and below the block, another two thousand.

I count. One hundred passes. My wrist aches. Two hundred. My fingers cramp around the wire. Three hundred. The dust accumulates, a small pile on the floor. Four hundred. The groove in the mortar is now visible. A dark line in the lighter surface, maybe five millimetres deep.

Five hundred. My hand is shaking. The muscles of my forearm are on fire. The specific, burning fatigue of repetitive motion, the same fatigue I used to feel during exams at Fergusson College, writing for three hours straight, the pen cramping in my fingers. But exam fatigue was an inconvenience. This fatigue is the difference between freedom and captivity.

I switch hands. left is weaker, clumsier, the wire slipping in my sweat-slick grip. But it works. Slowly. Grinding.

At what I estimate is 2 AM, the first vertical seam is cut. The wire slides through the full depth of the mortar, emerging on the other side. I feel the night air on my fingertip. Cool, carrying the scent of dust and dry grass. The outside. Ten centimetres away. Separated by a concrete block that is now detached on one side.

I move to the horizontal seam above the block. This is harder — the weight of the blocks above presses down on the mortar, compressing it, making it denser. The wire grinds more slowly. My hands are raw — the wire has cut into my palms, the steel edge slicing through the calluses I developed during three weeks of walking, and blood mixes with the mortar dust, turning the grey powder pink.

Meera whispers from across the room: "Time?"

"Maybe three. I have one vertical and half a horizontal."

"Can you finish by four?"

"I will finish by four."

I do not know if this is true. But the alternative, not finishing, being discovered with a half-cut wall and a bloody wire, is unthinkable. So I cut. I saw. I grind. My hands bleed and my wrist screams and the wire slips and catches and slips again, and the mortar falls in a fine grey rain, and the groove deepens, millimetre by millimetre, the patience of erosion compressed into hours.

A top horizontal is done at 3:15. I move to the bottom. Faster now. the technique is established, the rhythm locked in, the muscles protesting but compliant. The wire moves back and forth, back and forth, the sound masked by the wind and Dhanraj's snoring.

At 3:50, the bottom horizontal is done. One block, fully detached on three sides. The fourth side — the second vertical seam — is the last barrier.

I cut. The wire moves. The mortar falls.

At 4:10, ten minutes past my deadline, the wire pushes through the final seam. The block shifts. I press it gently, and it slides outward, pivoting on its own weight, tipping into the night air.

The sound it makes when it hits the ground outside is a soft, heavy thump. I freeze. My heart hammers.

Dhanraj snores.

Nobody comes.

I peer through the gap. The night outside is clear — stars, moon, the silhouette of the thorn fence thirty metres away. The air that flows through the hole is cool, carrying the scent of dry grass and freedom.

"One block," I whisper to Meera. "Thirty by twenty centimetres. Not enough."

"Do the next one."

I pull a second block. This one is easier. The surrounding mortar has been weakened by the removal of the first, and two of its seams are already exposed. I work the wire into the remaining mortar. Twenty minutes. The block slides out, joins its companion on the ground outside.

The gap is now sixty centimetres wide and twenty centimetres tall. Wide enough for Reyansh. Not wide enough for us.

I remove a third block. The one directly above the first two. This takes longer. The mortar above is load-bearing, and I have to be careful not to dislodge the entire section of wall. But the wire finds the seams, and the mortar yields, and at 4:45 AM, the third block slides free.

Gap is now sixty centimetres wide and forty centimetres tall. A window. A portal. An exit.

Meera crawls to me, Reyansh in her arms. She peers through the gap.

"I can fit," she says.

"Go. Reyansh first. Then you. I will follow."

She feeds Reyansh through the gap. He passes through easily. His small body sliding between the rough concrete edges, his eyes open, his mouth closed. Meera catches him on the outside, her arms reaching through from the other side.

Then Meera. She turns sideways, her shoulders angling, her body compressing. She is thin, three weeks of walking on reduced rations has stripped any excess from her frame, and she slides through with only a scrape across her upper back, the concrete edge dragging against her skin.

I follow. I am broader — broader shoulders, broader chest, and the gap that accepted Meera with a scrape accepts me with a squeeze. The concrete edges press against my ribs, my shoulders, my back. I exhale completely, flattening my chest, and push. The concrete scrapes skin from my sides — I feel it, the raw, burning sensation of abrasion, and for a moment I am stuck, wedged, the gap too small, the concrete unyielding.

Then Meera grabs my wrists. She pulls. I push. The concrete gives a millimetre, not the concrete itself, but my body, compressing, adapting, the bones and muscles reshaping under pressure, and I slide through, tumbling onto the dirt outside, landing on my hands and knees, the wire still clutched in my bleeding fist.

We are outside. The farmhouse behind us. The thorn fence ahead. The stars above.

"The fence," Meera whispers. "How do we get through?"

I look at the thorn fence. Dense, three metres high, the branches interlocked, the thorns gleaming in the moonlight. Impenetrable. Suraj was right about that.

But I remember something. The track. The gap in the fence where the truck drove in. The only break in the perimeter.

"The entrance. The truck track. We go around the building, through the entrance, and onto the road."

"That passes the front of the house."

"There is no other way."

Meera looks at me. At the farmhouse. At the gap in the wall, dark and obvious, a signal that we have escaped. When Suraj and Dhanraj wake, when they open the door and find the room empty, the blocks on the ground, the mortar dust on the floor, they will come after us. They have the truck. We have our feet.

"Then we run," she says.

We run.

Around the building, along the thorn fence, through the entrance gap. The dirt track stretches before us, descending the hill toward the highway. That truck is parked near the entrance. I see its shape in the moonlight, the Tata 407, bulky and silent.

"Wait," I say. I stop at the truck. The driver's door is unlocked — of course it is, who would steal a truck in the middle of nowhere? I open it. That keys are not in the ignition. I check the sun visor, the glovebox, the cup holder. No keys.

"Ishan," Meera hisses. "Leave it. We run."

She is right. keys are probably in Suraj's pocket, in the main room, in the farmhouse where two men sleep with a shotgun.

I close the door. Quietly. And we run.

Down the dirt track. That soil is hard-packed, the surface uneven, and in the darkness I stumble twice, catching myself before I fall. Meera runs beside me, Reyansh pressed against her chest, her breathing controlled, her stride steady. She runs the way she does everything: efficiently, without waste, every motion serving the purpose.

The track meets the highway. This tarmac is smooth, solid, blessedly flat after the rutted dirt. We turn east. Toward Baramati. Toward the road to Solapur. Away from the farmhouse, away from the hill, away from the men and the shotgun and the room with the bloodstain.

We run until my lungs burn and my legs give out and the farmhouse is a dark shape on the hilltop behind us, small and distant, no lights, no sounds, no pursuit.

We stop. We bend over. We gasp.

Reyansh, through all of it, has not made a sound.

Meera holds him up. In the moonlight, his face is calm, his eyes wide, his small fist still wrapped around her dupatta. He looks at me. He looks at the stars. He looks at the road stretching east into the darkness.

"Good boy," I whisper. "Good, good boy."

Meera straightens. She adjusts Reyansh. She looks east.

"Solapur," she says. "One hundred and forty kilometres."

"Then we walk."

"We walk."

We walk. The road stretches ahead, pale in the moonlight, leading east, leading toward the brother who may or may not be alive, the city that may or may not be standing, the future that may or may not exist.

But we are free. And the road is open. And the stars are bright.

One step at a time.