Chapter 21: Ishan

# Chapter 21: Ishan

## Radio

Day 85 of the virus. Day 32 of the return.

Radio changes everything, the way the printing press changed everything, the way the telegraph changed everything, the way every communication technology that has ever existed changed everything: by collapsing distance.

Before the radio, the network operated at the speed of walking. A message from Vairag to Pune took three days on foot, passing through two relay points, each relay adding half a day for rest and retransmission. Three days for information that, in the pre-virus world, would have taken three seconds via WhatsApp.

Radio reduces three days to three minutes.

Gaurav Apte built the transmitter from salvage. A ham radio operator since his college days at COEP, he had the knowledge. What he lacked were components. Transistors came from a dismantled mobile phone tower in Hadapsar, the tower that once served ten thousand simultaneous connections and that now serves one. Capacitors came from an old Godrej refrigerator in an abandoned flat in Kothrud, the fridge's compressor circuit providing components that Gaurav stripped with the delicate precision of a jeweller removing stones from a setting. Antenna wire came from a clothesline in his neighbour's balcony, twenty metres of galvanised steel wire that his neighbour, Mrs. Kulkarni, donated with the stipulation that Gaurav would replace it when normal life resumed.

"When normal life resumes?" Gaurav had asked.

"When," Mrs. Kulkarni said, with the absolute certainty of a seventy-three-year-old woman who had survived Partition, the Emergency, three wars, and her husband's cooking. "This is temporary. Everything is temporary. Even the end of the world."

Transmitter sits in the Shivajinagar communication room, a ground-floor flat in a residential building, the windows taped to reduce signal interference, the floor covered with cables and components and the accumulated debris of two months of improvised electrical engineering. Smell of the room is solder and dust and the ozone tang of live electronics, a smell that takes me back to my grandfather's workshop in Sangli, where he repaired transistor radios and taught me the names of components: resistor, capacitor, diode, each word a small magic, a label for an invisible force.

First broadcast is scheduled for 6 PM. Gaurav chose the time because atmospheric conditions favour AM propagation in the early evening, the ionosphere settling into its nocturnal configuration, the skip distance increasing, the signal bouncing between earth and sky with the efficiency that made AM radio the dominant medium for a century before FM and digital made it seem obsolete.

Obsolete. Word has lost its meaning. In a world without internet, without mobile networks, without satellites (the satellites are still there, orbiting, functional, serving no one), a 1925-era technology is the most advanced communication system available. We have regressed a century in capability and gained a century in appreciation.

Broadcast begins.

"Pune Shivajinagar calling. Frequency 1125 kilohertz AM. This is Gaurav Apte, operator, Pune Community Network. Today is Day 85 of the outbreak. Calling all stations. Report status. Over."

Silence. Static hiss of an empty frequency, the white noise of the electromagnetic spectrum, the sound of a universe that does not care whether humans communicate or not.

Then, through the static, a voice. Faint, scratchy, riding the carrier wave like a surfer riding a choppy sea, rising and falling with the atmospheric conditions.

"Solapur calling. This is Major Nitin Bhosale, 4th Maratha Light Infantry. We receive you, Pune. Over."

Room erupts. Not in cheering, not in celebration, but in something quieter and more profound: exhaled breath. Six people in the room, and all six exhale at the same moment, the collective release of tension that has been held for thirty-two days, the tension of not knowing whether the network was real or whether it was an elaborate exercise in wishful thinking, a game of messenger that would eventually collapse into silence.

It is real. Bhosale's voice proves it. Two hundred and fifty kilometres away, a man is speaking into a microphone, and his words are arriving here, in this room, in this building, in this city, carried by electromagnetic waves that travel at the speed of light and that do not care about viruses or collapsed infrastructure or the end of the world as we knew it.

A radio changes everything.

Not the military radio, that has been operational for weeks, Patwardhan and Bhosale talking every night, the logistics of survival transmitted in clipped military phrases across the ionosphere. This is a different radio. A civilian radio. Built from parts scavenged from the electronics shops on Laxmi Road in Pune, assembled by a nineteen-year-old engineering dropout named Harsh Tamboli, who was in his third year at COEP (College of Engineering, Pune) when the virus hit and who has spent the subsequent two months doing the only thing he knows how to do: building things.

Harsh is thin, angular, with the specific energy of a young man who runs on caffeine and curiosity and who has replaced both of these, in the post-virus world, with tea and obsession. He approaches me at the Shivajinagar camp on Day 82, carrying a wooden box the size of a small suitcase.

"I heard you are the network man," he says.

"I am a man who walks a lot."

"I built a radio. AM transmitter. Range: approximately fifty kilometres, depending on terrain and atmospheric conditions. It runs on a twelve-volt battery; car battery, motorcycle battery, any lead-acid battery. It transmits and receives on adjustable frequencies between 1000 and 1600 kHz."

He opens the box. Inside: a circuit board, hand-soldered, the components — resistors, capacitors, transistors, an oscillator crystal, arranged with the dense, purposeful layout of a device that has been designed by someone who understands electronics at the component level. An antenna — a coil of copper wire, wound around a ferrite core. A microphone, salvaged from a mobile phone. A speaker — salvaged from a car stereo. A tuning dial, a potentiometer from a volume control, repurposed as a frequency selector.

"You built this," I say.

"In six days. components are standard. Every electronics shop on Laxmi Road has them. I can build another in three days, now that the design is tested."

"How many can you build?"

"As many as you need. The limiting factor is batteries. Each unit needs a twelve-volt battery. Car batteries work best, they last longer, they can be recharged with a solar panel if you have one."

"We have solar panels. The army has solar charging units."

Harsh's eyes light up — the specific brightness of an engineer who has just been told that the constraint he feared does not exist.

"Then I can build you a radio for every node on the network. Every village. Every community. All connected. All talking."

---

The radio network is operational within two weeks.

Harsh builds seven units. Seven wooden boxes, seven circuit boards, seven antennas, seven batteries. This units are distributed along the relay route: Pune, Saswad, Jejuri, Karmala (which now has a small community. Twelve people, led by a retired postmaster who runs the settlement with the specific precision of a man accustomed to sorting mail), Vairag, Baramati, and Solapur.

The first broadcast happens on Day 90 of the virus. I am in Jejuri, at Madhukar's temple, standing in the courtyard with the radio on a table and the antenna rigged to the temple flagpole. The highest point in the town, the golden spire now serving as a radio mast, the medieval architecture supporting twentieth-century technology.

"Testing, testing. Jejuri calling Vairag. Appasaheb, are you there?"

Static. Hiss. The atmospheric noise of the Deccan plateau at midday, the radio waves bouncing off the ionosphere, scattering across the landscape.

Then: "Ishan? Appasaheb here. I can hear you. Vairag is here."

The voice is thin, distorted, the audio quality of a hand-built radio transmitting across thirty kilometres of farmland. But it is a voice. A human voice. A voice that is not walking between villages but flying between them, travelling at the speed of light, covering in a millisecond the distance that a runner covers in three days.

Madhukar, standing beside me, removes his spectacles. He wipes them on his kurta. He replaces them. He looks at the radio, the wooden box, the copper antenna, the green light of the power indicator, and he says:

"Aata sagle boltat." Now everyone talks.

---

That radio transforms the network from a logistics system into a community.

Before the radio, the relay carried messages. Written words, formal, the language of reports and requests. The radio carries voices. Voices that crack jokes and share gossip and argue about cricket and discuss the weather and do all the things that human voices do when given the opportunity to connect.

Appasaheb tells Madhukar about the jowar harvest. Madhukar tells Appasaheb about the children's progress in multiplication. Dagadu tells everyone about Laxmi's health (she has a persistent knee pain that she refuses to acknowledge and that Dagadu monitors with the specific anxiety of a husband who has been married for forty years and who knows that his wife's stubbornness is both her greatest strength and her greatest vulnerability).

Omkar discovers the radio on the second day and immediately monopolises it. He broadcasts a cricket commentary; a fictional Test match between India and Australia, played entirely in his head, with Kohli scoring a double century and Australia being bowled out for 47. That commentary is enthusiastic, detailed, and entirely imaginary, and it is heard across the entire network, in every village, in every community, by every person who happens to be near a radio at that moment.

This response is immediate. Three children in Vairag demand to know the bowling figures. A teenager in Baramati argues that Kohli's double century is unrealistic given the bowling attack. Dagadu in Pangri asks what cricket is.

Network is no longer a line on a map. It is a conversation. A conversation that spans 250 kilometres and involves hundreds of people and that is held together not by wire or by road but by the human need to talk, to listen, to know that someone on the other end is there.

---

On Day 92, a message comes through the radio from Solapur.

It is not from Bhosale. It is from Meera.

"Ishan. This is Meera. Can you hear me?"

I am in the Pune camp. This radio is on the table in the command tent. Patwardhan is standing beside me, but he steps back when he hears the voice — the step of a man who recognises a private conversation and who has the grace to make space for it.

"I can hear you. How is Reyansh?"

"Walking. Properly walking. Eight steps yesterday without holding anything. He walks like a drunk, side to side, arms out, but he walks."

"Eight steps. That is, that is amazing, Meera."

"He misses you. He reaches for your nose when he sees other men. Nobody else's nose is apparently the right nose."

I laugh. A sound is rough, unused (I do not laugh often. The network work is absorbing, fulfilling, but not amusing), and it surprises Patwardhan, who glances at me and then away.

"How is Yash?"

"Teaching. He has thirty-two students now. He is building a proper school. Not under the tree, in a building. The army gave him a classroom in the railway station. He has desks. He has chalk. He has a blackboard. He calls it Walchand Vidyapeeth Part Two."

"That sounds like Yash."

"It is Yash. He is, he is himself again. Ishan, he is himself."

Statement carries everything, the relief, the gratitude, the specific joy of a sister who watched her brother disappear into a room for nineteen days and who has now watched him emerge, recover, and become the person he was before the virus took everything except his life.

"Meera."

"Yes?"

"The harmonium. It is safe. By the window. The sunlight still reaches it in the afternoon."

That pause. The static fills the gap. The hiss and crackle of radio waves crossing the Deccan plateau, carrying silence the way they carry sound, with equal fidelity.

"Thank you," she says. The two words are quiet, almost lost in the static. But I hear them. And the hearing is enough.

"Meera. I have to tell you something."

"What?"

"I am going to keep walking. The network needs; it needs someone who knows the whole route. Someone who has been to every node. I cannot stop walking. Not yet."

"I know."

"You know?"

"Ishan, I knew before you left. You are a walker. You walk the way I engineer. Because it is what you are, not what you do. I did not ask you to stay because staying would have broken you. And a broken Ishan is not useful to anyone."

"You are very practical."

"I am an engineer. Practicality is not a flaw. It is a feature."

I smile. The radio cannot transmit smiles. But Meera knows. She always knows.

"Walk well," she says. "And come back when you can. Reyansh's nose is waiting."

"I will come back."

"I know."

The radio goes silent. The static continues. The eternal background noise of the universe, the cosmic hiss that predates humanity and will outlast it, the sound that fills the gaps between all the words we say and all the words we don't.

Patwardhan returns to the table. He does not comment on the conversation. He picks up the radio log — the notebook where he records every transmission, every message, every piece of data that the network generates.

"The next relay departs tomorrow," he says. "Seeds and medical supplies to Jejuri. You are walking?"

"I am walking."

"Good. Take the new seed packets; the rabi varieties, for winter sowing. Madhukar requested them."

"I will."

The conversation returns to logistics. The emotional frequency is over. The operational frequency resumes. This is how the network works. Emotion and logistics, voice and data, the human and the systematic, braided together like the strands of a rope, each strengthening the other.

I pick up the rucksack. I check the contents. Seeds. Medicine. Messages.

Tomorrow, I walk.