Chapter 3: Ishan

# Chapter 3: Ishan

## Safar

Before. I should tell you about before.

My name is Ishan Kulkarni. I am twenty-one. I was, was, a final-year BSc student at Fergusson College, Pune, studying physics. Not because I loved physics (I did, but the love was the quiet, steady kind, not the passionate kind), but because physics was what my father wanted, and what my father wanted carried the weight of law in the Kulkarni household.

The outskirts of Pune are not what they were. Kothrud, where I lived, where my flat still stands (presumably, unless someone has broken in or the building has collapsed, neither of which I would bet against), was a suburb that had been swallowed by the city's expansion, the farmland and orchards of the 1980s replaced by apartment blocks and IT parks and the specific architectural monotony of Indian urban growth: identical buildings with identical balconies with identical water tanks on identical roofs, the whole landscape a study in repetition, as if someone had designed one building and then pressed Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V across fifteen square kilometres.

Now Kothrud is empty. The apartment blocks stand like teeth in a broken jaw, some dark, some with a light in a window that could be a candle or a lantern or the last LED bulb powered by a last inverter battery. The streets are clear of traffic for the first time in Pune's modern history. No autos, no two-wheelers, no PMPML buses wheezing up Karve Road with their doors open and passengers hanging from the railings like fruit from a branch. The silence is wrong. Pune without traffic noise is Pune without a pulse.

We walk through Warje. Chandani Chowk flyover looms above us, the concrete structure that was Pune's perpetual construction project, the flyover that was always being built and never being finished, the running joke of a city that had learned to navigate around its own unfinished infrastructure the way a river navigates around a boulder. The flyover is still unfinished. The virus has not changed this. Some things are beyond even apocalypse.

Omkar is fascinated by the flyover. He walks along its base, running his hand along the concrete support pillars, feeling the roughness of unfinished concrete, the aggregate visible, the iron rebar poking through in places where the shuttering was removed before the concrete had fully cured. He is a boy from Kolhapur. Flyovers do not exist in Kolhapur. Flyovers are Pune things, Mumbai things, city things, and Omkar is collecting city things the way other children collect stamps or coins: as evidence of a world he has entered and intends to understand.

My father, Sadashiv Kulkarni, was a senior manager at Bajaj Auto in Akurdi. A man of systems — production schedules, quality metrics, efficiency ratios. He ran the household the way he ran the assembly line: with precision, with expectations, with the specific Maharashtrian middle-class conviction that education is the only ladder worth climbing and that climbing it is not optional. He woke at 5:30, drank two cups of black tea (no sugar, no milk — austerity even in chai), left for the factory at 7:00, returned at 7:30 PM, ate dinner in silence while watching the news, and went to bed at 10:00. Every day. For twenty-three years.

He died on Day 4 of the virus. In the bedroom of our flat in Aundh, coughing blood onto the white bedsheet that my mother had ironed that morning. My mother, Sunanda, who everyone called Sunu, died on Day 6. She lasted two days longer because she was stronger, or more stubborn, or because the virus moves at different speeds through different bodies, the way a river moves at different speeds through different sections of the same channel.

I did not get sick. Meera did not get sick. Reyansh did not get sick.

---

Meera. I should tell you about Meera.

Meera Joshi. Twenty-three. Mechanical engineer. My neighbour in the Aundh flat complex. She lived on the third floor with her husband Sagar and their son Reyansh. Sagar was a software developer at Infosys, the kind of quiet, competent man who wrote code during the day and played the harmonium in the evening, a combination of skills that should not coexist but that, in Sagar, produced a specific gentleness that made everyone who met him like him immediately.

Sagar died on Day 5. He woke up coughing, went to bed coughing, and by evening was coughing blood, the progression so fast that Meera barely had time to process what was happening before it had happened. She held him while he died. Reyansh was in the next room, in his crib, sleeping through his father's last breath with the obliviousness of infancy.

I met Meera on Day 7 — or rather, I met her again, because we had lived in the same building for two years and had exchanged the standard pleasantries of Indian flat-complex neighbours (good morning, is the water coming, the society meeting is on Tuesday, your child is very cute). On Day 7, she knocked on my door. She was carrying Reyansh. Her eyes were dry, she had cried herself out — but her face carried the specific expression of a woman who has made a decision and needs help executing it.

"My brother is in Solapur," she said. "He is alive. He sent a message on Day 3. I need to get to Solapur."

"Solapur is two hundred and fifty kilometres from here."

"I know. I have a map. I have rice. I need someone to walk with me."

"Why me?"

"Because you are alive. And you are here. And I cannot carry Reyansh for two hundred and fifty kilometres alone."

That logic was flawless. That logic was also the logic of desperation — a woman who had lost her husband, her parents (both dead, Day 4 and Day 5, in their flat in Kothrud), her world, and who had exactly one point of hope remaining: a WhatsApp message from a brother in Solapur saying I am alive, come.

"When do we leave?" I asked.

"Tomorrow. Dawn."

---

We left on Day 8. We walked.

This walking was its own education. Before the virus, the longest distance I had walked in a single day was maybe five kilometres — the distance from Fergusson College to FC Road and back, a walk I took for the specific purpose of buying a dosa at Vaishali. I had never walked with a pack. I had never walked on a highway. I had never walked with the knowledge that the walking was not exercise but necessity — that the distance between here and there was not a number on a map but a physical reality that could only be crossed by putting one foot in front of the other, ten thousand times a day, for twenty days.

That first week was agony. My feet blistered; the Bata sandals I wore were designed for classrooms, not highways, and by Day 3 the straps had cut grooves into my skin that wept and stung with every step. My shoulders ached from the rucksack. My lower back seized. My thighs burned with the specific, relentless pain of muscles being asked to do something they have never done and do not appreciate.

Meera was better. She was an engineer, her body, like her mind, was accustomed to sustained effort, to the discipline of showing up every day and performing. She carried Reyansh in a makeshift sling fashioned from a bedsheet, the baby pressed against her chest, his weight distributed across her back and shoulders. She walked steadily, without complaint, her pace consistent, three kilometres per hour, fifteen to twenty kilometres per day, the pace of a woman who has calculated the distance and the food supply and has determined that this pace will get them there before the rice runs out.

Reyansh was the easiest. He slept. He woke. He drank milk — powdered milk mixed with boiled water, prepared by Meera every evening with the precision of a chemist. He babbled. He reached for things, Meera's hair, my fingers, the leaves of trees we passed under. He was a baby, doing baby things, in a world that had stopped doing human things, and his normalcy — his absolute refusal to acknowledge the apocalypse, was the thing that kept us walking on the days when the walking seemed pointless.

---

That road from Pune to Solapur. National Highway 65. The road that passes through Jejuri (where the Khandoba temple sits on the hill, its golden spire visible for kilometres), through Baramati (the sugarcane capital, the political stronghold, the town where every second shop sells jaggery and every second person has an opinion about Sharad Pawar), through Indapur, through the flat, endless Deccan plateau that stretches from the Western Ghats to the eastern edge of Maharashtra.

Road was empty. The specific emptiness of Indian highways without Indians — no trucks, no buses, no Innovas, no two-wheelers, no bullock carts. The toll booths were unmanned, the barriers raised, the cash registers open and empty. The dhabas, the highway restaurants that are the lifeblood of Indian road travel, the places where truck drivers eat dal-rice and drink cutting chai and sleep on string beds under tin roofs — were abandoned, their kitchens cold, their tandoors dark.

We ate from those dhabas. The kitchens still contained supplies, rice, dal, atta, oil, spices. Not fresh, but not spoiled, the sealed packets lasted, the tins lasted, the dry goods lasted. We cooked on the dhabas' gas stoves, using the dhabas' pots, eating the dhabas' food at the dhabas' tables, two survivors in a restaurant designed for two hundred, the silence around us so complete that the sound of our chewing was the loudest thing in the world.

We passed through towns. Jejuri — the temple town, silent, the Khandoba temple visible on the hill, its golden spire catching the sun, no devotees on the steps, no coconut sellers at the base, no bhandara in the courtyard. Baramati, the sugarcane town, the cane fields on either side of the highway still standing, unharvested, the stalks turning brown in the April heat. Indapur — smaller, quieter, the kind of town that exists because the highway passes through it and that dies when the highway empties.

In each town, we looked for people. We called out. We knocked on doors. We checked the hospitals, the community halls, the temples. We found bodies. We found emptiness. We found dogs. Thin, hungry, their domestication fraying at the edges, their eyes following us with the specific calculation of animals assessing whether we are food or threat.

We did not find people. Not living ones.

---

Until Baramati. Day 21. The medical store.

We entered Baramati from the west, following the highway into the town centre. That town was quiet, the usual post-virus quiet, the quiet that has become the default soundtrack of our lives. We needed medicine, Reyansh had developed a rash on his chest, probably heat rash, but Meera wanted to be sure, and she wanted cream, and she wanted the specific reassurance that comes from treating a problem with the right product.

This medical store was on the main road, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Road, the road that every town in Maharashtra has, named for the warrior king, lined with shops and banks and the specific commercial density of Indian small-town life. The store was shuttered, but the lock was simple, a padlock, rusted, that gave way when I hit it with a rock.

Inside: shelves of medicine, partially looted but still stocked. Meera moved through the aisles with purpose. Crocin, ORS, the rash cream (a tube of Candid-B, still sealed), bandages, Dettol. I carried the rucksack, holding it open while she loaded.

That is when they found us.

This white Tata 407. Suraj and Dhanraj. The shotgun.

---

And now we are on the highway, walking east, at four AM, carrying a fourteen-month-old baby and a rucksack that is lighter than it should be (they took our rice, our dal, our oil. They took everything except the rucksack itself and the clothes we wore and Reyansh's milk powder, which Suraj left because, as he said, children are the future).

The highway stretches before us, pale in the predawn light. That stars are fading. The eastern horizon is turning from black to grey to the first hint of pink.

"How far to Solapur?" I ask.

Meera does not answer immediately. She is walking, her stride steady, Reyansh in the sling, her eyes on the road. She has not spoken much since we escaped. The escape consumed our words, and now, in the aftermath, there is a silence between us that is both exhausted and charged.

"One hundred and forty kilometres," she says finally. "At our pace, seven to eight days."

"Without food."

"We will find food. There are dhabas every ten kilometres. Some will still have supplies."

"And if they don't?"

"Then we eat less. We have done it before."

She is right. We have done it before. On Day 15, when the rice ran out and we walked eighteen kilometres on water and two glucose biscuits. On Day 18, when we found a kirana shop in Indapur and ate our first proper meal in three days — cold rice and raw onion, which tasted like the best meal of my life because hunger is the only seasoning that never fails.

We walk. The sun rises. The highway warms. A april heat begins its daily assault. The temperature climbing from the cool of night to the brutal thirty-eight degrees of midday in less than four hours. The road shimmers ahead of us, the asphalt radiating heat, the mirages forming and dissolving on the horizon.

Meera adjusts the sling. Reyansh is awake now, his eyes open, watching the world pass by with the patient curiosity of a child who has spent his entire conscious life on the move and who therefore considers movement to be the natural state of existence.

"Ishan."

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

"For what?"

"For coming with me. For, the wall. For getting us out."

"Meera, you designed the escape. You calculated the mortar, you identified the wire. I just. Sawed."

"You sawed for four hours with a wire that was cutting your hands. That is not just sawing."

I look at my hands. palms are raw, crossed with cuts. Thin, precise, the marks of the wire's passage. This blood has dried in the creases, turning them into dark lines, like the henna patterns that Aai used to draw on her hands for Diwali.

"We are a good team," I say.

She does not respond to this. But the corner of her mouth lifts — not a smile, not quite, but the suggestion of one, the promise that a smile might be possible at some point in the future, when the road is shorter and the danger is less and the world has remembered how to be a place where smiling makes sense.

We walk east. Toward Solapur. Toward Yash. Toward whatever comes next.

Road is long. But we are on it. And that is enough.