Chapter 5: Ishan

# Chapter 5: Ishan

## Pichha

Day 26 of the walk. Day 33 of the virus.

The truck finds us on the highway outside Karmala.

I hear it before I see it, the diesel rattle of a Tata 407, the specific mechanical complaint of an engine that has been running for hours, the sound that has been burned into my memory the way a branding iron burns into flesh. The sound that means Suraj. The sound that means Dhanraj. The sound that means the shotgun.

"Off the road," I say. "Now."

Meera does not question. She moves, sideways, toward the drainage ditch that runs along the highway, a shallow concrete channel designed to carry monsoon runoff and currently dry, dusty, lined with dead leaves and plastic wrappers. She slides into the ditch, Reyansh against her chest, her body flat against the concrete, her head below the level of the road.

I follow. The ditch is deeper than it looks. maybe sixty centimetres, enough to conceal a prone body from a vehicle on the road, not enough to conceal a standing one. I flatten myself beside Meera. Concrete is hot against my face, the afternoon sun having baked it for hours.

The truck approaches. The sound grows. I press my cheek against the concrete and watch through the gap between the road edge and the ditch wall. A narrow slot, maybe ten centimetres, through which I can see the highway surface and the lower half of passing vehicles.

The white Tata 407. The same truck. Same dented bumper, the same cracked headlight, the same Maharashtra registration plate that I memorised in the farmhouse. MH-12-BS-4771. It passes our position at maybe forty kilometres per hour, not fast, not slow, the speed of a vehicle that is searching, not travelling.

Through the slot, I see the front wheel, the chassis, the rear wheel. The truck passes. The sound recedes. Fades. Disappears.

I wait. Count to sixty. Wait longer. Count to sixty again.

"They are looking for us," Meera whispers.

"Yes."

"They drove the highway. They know our direction."

"Yes."

"They will come back."

"Yes."

She is silent for a moment. Reyansh stirs against her chest, the disturbance of being horizontal in a drainage ditch registering as a novelty rather than a crisis.

"We need to leave the highway," she says.

---

The decision to leave NH-65 is not a decision. It is a calculation. highway is the most direct route to Solapur, but it is also the most exposed. Suraj knows we are heading east. This highway is the only major road heading east. Therefore, the highway is a trap.

The alternative: village roads. The network of narrow, unpaved roads that connect the villages of rural Maharashtra — the roads that the MSRTC buses never serve, that Google Maps barely acknowledges, that exist because farmers need to get their produce from field to market and have been getting it there for centuries, by bullock cart and tractor and foot, along roads that are more suggestion than infrastructure.

Meera has the map, a paper map, a tourist road atlas of Maharashtra that she took from a bookshop in Pune on Day 8, the kind of map that nobody uses anymore because everyone has phones, but that now, in a world without network coverage, is the most valuable object we own. She unfolds it on the floor of the drainage ditch, pressing the creases flat with her palms.

"Here," she says, pointing. "We are on NH-65, between Karmala and Madha. Solapur is approximately eighty kilometres east. The highway goes straight east, through Madha, through Barshi, into Solapur." Her finger traces the route. "But there are village roads. Here, a road south from Karmala to Vairag, then east to Barshi through the villages. It adds maybe thirty kilometres, but it avoids the highway entirely."

"Thirty extra kilometres. Two extra days."

"Two extra days alive."

This calculation is clear.

"We go south," I say.

---

The village roads are a different country.

A highway was modern India — tarmac, lane markings, reflectors, the infrastructure of aspiration. The village roads are eternal India, packed earth, occasionally gravel, sometimes just parallel ruts worn into the soil by decades of bullock cart wheels. The roads wind through fields — sugarcane (unharvested, the stalks brown and dry), jowar (unharvested, the grain heads heavy and bowing), bajra, cotton. fields are empty. The birds have not noticed, koels sing in the trees, bulbuls flit between the stalks, a flock of green parrots erupts from a tamarind tree as we pass, their screeching a brief, bright explosion of sound in the silence.

We walk south from Karmala. afternoon is hot, thirty-nine degrees, the Deccan plateau at its worst, the sun a physical weight on my shoulders. I have rigged a shade for Reyansh, a scarf stretched between two sticks, held above the sling, creating a small tent of shadow that moves with Meera. It is crude but effective. Reyansh sleeps underneath it, his face shaded, his small body damp with sweat.

The first village we pass through — a cluster of maybe twenty houses, a temple, a well, is empty. The standard emptiness. But the well works — a hand pump, the kind installed by the Maharashtra Jeevan Pradhikaran, the blue-painted metal still functional, the water cold and clean when I pump it. We fill our bottles. We pump water over our heads, over Reyansh (gently, carefully, the cold water making him gasp and then gurgle with something that sounds like delight).

Second village has people.

I see them from two hundred metres — figures in a field, moving, the movement unmistakable because it is purposeful. Not the random movement of animals, not the wind-driven movement of crops. Human movement. Someone is working in a field.

We approach cautiously. The figures become clearer: three people, two men and a woman, working in a jowar field. They are harvesting. Cutting the jowar stalks with sickles, binding them into sheaves, stacking the sheaves into the conical rasse that jowar farmers have built for centuries. They work steadily, rhythmically, their bodies bent in the ancient posture of Indian agriculture, the sickles flashing in the sun.

One of the men sees us. He straightens. He is old — sixty, maybe older, his body thin and leathered by decades of sun, his dhoti hitched above his knees, his turban (a white feta, the Deccan style) sitting squarely on his head. He holds the sickle at his side. His eyes, narrow, suspicious, the eyes of a farmer assessing a stranger — study us from across the field.

"Kon aahat?" he calls. Who are you?

"Amhi Pune hun yeto," I call back. We are coming from Pune. "Solapur la jaato." Going to Solapur.

"Pune?" The surprise in his voice is genuine. "Pune hun? Chalat?" From Pune? Walking?

"Ho." Yes.

He studies us for a moment longer. Then he turns to the woman beside him, his wife, I assume, a woman of similar age, her saree faded, her silver anklets catching the light, and says something I cannot hear.

The woman puts down her sickle. She walks toward us. When she is close, she looks at Reyansh, at his small face, at the makeshift sun-shade, at the sweat on his forehead, and her expression changes. The suspicion dissolves. What replaces it is older than suspicion, older than caution, older than the virus and the apocalypse and the collapse of everything: it is the instinct of a grandmother seeing a baby in distress.

"Ya. Ghari ya," she says. Come. Come to the house. "Poraala paani dya." Give the child water.

---

Their names are Dagadu and Laxmi Gaikwad. They have lived in this village, Pangri, population (before the virus) 340, for their entire lives. They have farmed jowar and bajra and a small sugarcane plot for forty years. They lost two sons to the virus, a daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren. They survived because they are old and tough and because the virus, for reasons that neither science nor fate has explained, spared a small percentage of every demographic.

They feed us. Bhakri and thecha, the Deccan staple, the coarse jowar flatbread served with the fiery green chilli condiment that is the signature taste of rural Maharashtra. The bhakri is thick, heavy, the texture of something made from stone-ground flour on a wood-fired tawa, and the thecha is lethal, raw green chillies pounded with garlic and groundnut oil, the heat building in my mouth and spreading to my sinuses and making my eyes water.

Reyansh gets special treatment. Laxmi feeds him a paste of mashed bhakri and milk — she has a cow, a skinny, patient animal tethered behind the house, the only cow in the village still alive and producing. The fresh milk, warm from the cow, mixed with crumbled bhakri into a thick paste that Reyansh eats from Laxmi's finger with the avidity of a gourmet.

"Kithi lok aahey ithe?" I ask. How many people are here?

"Saha," says Dagadu. Six. "Amhi doghi, Ramu vaani, tyachi baayko, aani don mulga Shirke yanchi." Us two, Ramu the shopkeeper and his wife, and two boys from the Shirke family.

Six people. Out of 340. A survival rate of less than two percent.

"Baher kaay aahe?" I ask. What is happening outside?

Dagadu shrugs. The shrug of a man who has spent his entire life in a village and for whom outside has always been an abstraction. "The radio says the army is in the cities. Relief camps. But nobody has come here. Nobody comes to Pangri."

"There are men on the highway," I say. "In a white truck. They have a gun. They kidnapped us."

Dagadu's eyes narrow. "Goonda?"

"Worse. Organised. Two of them, maybe more. They are looking for people — survivors. They take them to a farmhouse on a hill, maybe forty kilometres west. They call it a system."

Laxmi's hand goes to the mangalsutra at her throat. gesture is automatic — the gesture of a Maharashtrian woman confronted with bad news, the fingers finding the beads, the gold pendant, the talisman of marriage that is also a talisman of security.

"Ithe yenar nahit," says Dagadu. They will not come here. "Rasta kharab aahe." The road is bad. "Truck janar nahi." The truck cannot pass.

He is right, the road into Pangri is barely a track, rutted and narrow, the kind of road that would ground the Tata 407 within a hundred metres. The isolation that has always been Pangri's disadvantage is now its protection.

"Stay tonight," says Laxmi. "Rest. Your child needs rest."

We stay. In Dagadu and Laxmi's house, a two-room structure of stone and mud, the walls whitewashed, the floor packed earth covered with a woven mat. The house smells of wood smoke and jowar flour and cow dung (used as fuel for the chulha), and the smells are the smells of every rural Maharashtrian house I have ever visited, the ancestral house in the village near Satara where my father grew up, the house I visited once a year during Diwali, the house that I associated with boredom and mosquitoes and the absence of Wi-Fi and that I now associate with safety.

Reyansh sleeps on the mat, his body relaxed, his breathing even, the fever gone, the rash fading. Meera sleeps beside him, her arm across his chest, the posture of protection that she maintains even in sleep.

I sit outside, on the stone step, watching the stars. The Milky Way is a river of light, the dead stars still shining, their photons traveling across the void to land on my retinas in a village called Pangri in the middle of Maharashtra in the middle of the apocalypse.

Tomorrow we walk east. Through the villages, through the fields, through the India that the highway bypasses and that the virus has reduced but not destroyed.

Eighty kilometres to Solapur.

Yash is waiting. Or he is not. But the road continues either way, and we are on it, and the stars are above us, and the bhakri is in our stomachs, and the cow's milk is in Reyansh's blood, and the world, the small, rural, stubborn world of Dagadu and Laxmi Gaikwad, is still turning.