Chapter 6: Ishan

# Chapter 6: Ishan

## Gaon

A village roads teach me things that the highway never could.

The highway taught me distance — the monotony of tarmac, the repetition of kilometre markers, the linear arithmetic of here to there. The village roads teach me India. That India that exists between the highways, beneath the cell towers, beyond the reach of Swiggy and Amazon and the aspirational machinery of middle-class urban life. A india that my father left when he moved to Pune for a job at Bajaj, the India that he returned to once a year during Diwali, the India that I knew only as a backdrop for boredom — no Wi-Fi, no AC, no Netflix, just the drone of cicadas and the smell of cow dung and the interminable conversations of uncles about crop prices and rainfall.

That India is still here. Diminished, yes — the virus has taken its toll, and the villages we pass through are half-empty, quarter-empty, sometimes completely empty. But the structures persist. The wells still draw water. The chulhas still burn. The jowar still grows. The cows still produce milk. rhythms of rural life, planting, harvesting, cooking, sleeping — continue with a stubbornness that makes the apocalypse seem temporary, a bad season that will pass, like drought, like flood, like the Emergency of 1975 that Dagadu Kaka mentioned with the casual dismissal of a man who has lived through worse.

Jejuri appeared at the base of the hills like an afterthought. A small town built around the temple of Khandoba, the deity of the Dhangar shepherds, the god who was part Shiva and part folk hero and whose temple sat on a hill above the town like a crown on a head that was mostly forehead. The palkhi steps leading up to the temple were visible from the road, a staircase of stone climbing the hillside, the steps worn smooth by centuries of bare feet, the stone carrying the polish of devotion.

We did not climb the temple. We were not pilgrims. We were survivors, and the gods of survival were not in temples but in the practical kindnesses of strangers: a glass of water, a bed for the night, information about the road ahead.

The water tank at the base of the steps was full. Temple tanks in India are repositories not just of water but of engineering, the ancient pushkarini system of rainwater harvesting that collected monsoon rain in stone-lined tanks and held it through the dry months, the water clean and cool even in April because the tank was deep and shaded and fed by an underground channel that connected it to the springs higher on the hill.

I filled our bottles. Water was cold against my hands, the chill startling after a day of walking in heat, the temperature difference between air and water a shock that the skin registered with a tingle that spread from the fingertips up through the wrists and into the forearms. I splashed water on my face. Droplets ran down my neck, under my collar, tracing paths along the skin of my chest, each droplet a line of coolness, a thread of relief, the body's gratitude expressed through goosebumps.

Omkar did not splash. Omkar submerged. He plunged both arms into the tank up to the elbows, his face close to the surface, his eyes closed, and held the position for ten seconds, the water darkening the cotton of his sleeves, the cold penetrating through the fabric to the skin beneath. Then he pulled his arms out and pressed his wet hands to his face and stood there, dripping, grinning, renewed.

"Pani." Water. He said it the way someone lost in a desert says it. With reverence. With need. With the understanding that this substance, this simple molecular combination of hydrogen and oxygen, was the difference between walking and stopping, between arriving and not arriving, between life and its absence.

---

Day 27 of the walk. Day 34 of the virus.

We pass through three villages in a single day. The route that Meera has plotted on the paper map takes us southeast from Pangri, through the farmland that lies between the Karmala and Madha talukas, following roads that are sometimes paved, sometimes gravel, sometimes nothing more than a track through a sugarcane field.

The first village — Bhose, has two survivors. An old woman named Hirabai, who lives alone in a house with six cats, and her nephew Balasaheb, a twenty-year-old who was studying at the ITI in Solapur and who returned to the village when the virus hit because where else would I go? Balasaheb gives us water and information: the road east is clear, no gangs, no trouble. Army passed through ten days ago — a convoy of trucks heading toward Solapur, soldiers in fatigues, the Indian flag on the vehicles. They did not stop. They waved. They kept driving.

The second village — Nimgaon, is empty. Completely empty. houses are locked, the temple is silent, the school (a single room, the blackboard still displaying the last lesson — multiplication tables, the chalk fading) is closed. The well works. We fill our bottles and move on.

The third village, Vairag, is alive.

Vairag is bigger than the others — a proper town, almost, with a main road and a market and a government hospital (closed, but the building is intact) and the specific infrastructure density that separates a village from a settlement. Vairag also has the thing that no other village on our route has had: a functioning community.

We see them from the hill above the town, maybe fifty people, moving through the streets, working in fields, standing in groups. A sight is startling. After days of empty villages and silent highways, the presence of fifty living, moving, working human beings hits me with the force of a hallucination. I stop on the road. I stare.

"People," says Meera. That word is not a statement. It is a prayer.

---

The Vairag community is run by a man named Appasaheb Deshmukh. I learn this within five minutes of entering the town, because Appasaheb is the kind of man whose name is spoken with such frequency and reverence that it functions as a gravitational constant. Everything in Vairag orbits around him.

Appasaheb is sixty-two. He was the sarpanch of Vairag before the virus — the elected head of the village council, the gram panchayat, and he has continued to be the sarpanch after the virus, because the virus may have killed ninety percent of the population but it did not kill the Indian bureaucratic instinct to have someone in charge. He is short, stout, with a white feta on his head and a white dhoti-kurta on his body and the specific bearing of a rural Maharashtrian leader — the bearing that says I am the authority here, and the authority is comfortable.

He meets us at the town entrance, the old highway gate, a concrete archway painted in faded tricolour, and regards us with the appraising look of a man who has been assessing strangers his entire life.

"Kuthun aalat?" Where did you come from?

"Pune. Walking. Twenty-seven days."

"Kuthla jaaycha aahe?" Where are you going?

"Solapur."

"Ka?" Why?

"My brother," says Meera. "He is in Solapur. He sent a message."

Appasaheb studies her. Studies Reyansh. Studies me. The appraisal takes approximately ten seconds and covers everything. Our clothes (worn, dirty, the specific deterioration of fabric that has been walked in for a month), our bodies (thin, tanned, the specific leanness of sustained exertion), our faces (tired, wary, the specific expression of people who have been kidnapped and escaped and are now walking through rural Maharashtra with a baby and a paper map).

"Come," he says. "Eat first. Talk after."

---

The meal is served in the community hall — a large room in the gram panchayat building, the walls decorated with faded portraits of Mahatma Gandhi, Babasaheb Ambedkar, and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. The food is pithlaa-bhakri, the Deccan staple again, the chickpea flour curry and jowar flatbread — served with koshimbir (a salad of cucumber and peanuts dressed with lemon and coriander) and, remarkably, buttermilk. Fresh buttermilk, taak, made from the milk of the community's cow herd, twelve cows, maintained collectively, milked twice daily, the milk distributed according to a system that Appasaheb has devised and that he describes with the pride of a man who has solved a problem that lesser men would have botched.

"Milk goes first to children," he says. "Then to the sick. Then to the elderly. What remains is churned for butter and buttermilk. buttermilk is shared equally."

"How many children?" asks Meera.

"Seven. Aged two to twelve. They are in the school." He points out the window, toward a building across the road. Through the window, I can see children. Actual children, in actual seats, listening to an actual teacher. The sight is so normal, so mundanely civilian, that it feels surreal.

"You have a school," I say.

"Of course we have a school. Children must learn. The virus killed people. It did not kill knowledge. If the children stop learning, the virus wins twice."

The logic is irrefutable. Appasaheb delivers it with the flat certainty of a man who has been making decisions for a village for twenty years and who has never encountered a problem that could not be solved by a combination of common sense, stubbornness, and a sufficiently loud voice in the gram sabha.

---

We stay in Vairag for three days.

The decision to stay is Meera's. She makes it on the first evening, after we have eaten, after Reyansh has been examined by the community's medical attendant (not a doctor, a retired ANM, an Auxiliary Nurse Midwife named Savitri, who has been delivering babies and treating fevers in Vairag for thirty years and who diagnoses Reyansh's fading rash as heat prickly, nothing serious, give him buttermilk and shade), after we have been assigned a room in the gram panchayat guest quarters (a small room with a cot and a ceiling fan that runs on the community's solar panel system, twelve panels, installed by the government two years ago, the best investment Vairag ever received).

"Three days," Meera says. "Reyansh needs rest. Real rest. Not highway rest."

"Three days puts us at Day 30 of the walk. That is longer than, "

"Than what? Than our schedule? Ishan, we do not have a schedule. We have a direction and a hope. Three days will not change the direction. And the hope, " She pauses. "The hope will be stronger if Reyansh is healthy when we arrive."

She is right. She is almost always right. The engineer's mind, calibrating variables, optimising outcomes, running the simulation and returning the answer that the emotions have already decided.

Three days in Vairag.

---

I spend the three days learning.

From Appasaheb, I learn governance. This Vairag community has fifty-three members — survivors from Vairag itself and from surrounding villages who migrated here in the first two weeks, drawn by the same gravitational pull that draws people to leaders in crisis. A community is structured around the gram panchayat system, the ancient Indian village council, now repurposed for the apocalypse. Appasaheb is the sarpanch. Below him: a council of five, representing different aspects of community life — food (managed by a farmer named Tukaram Bhosle), water (managed by Savitri), security (managed by a retired police constable named Pandharinath Jagtap), education (managed by the teacher, a young woman named Sunanda Pawar), and health (also Savitri, who holds two portfolios because nobody else is qualified).

The council meets daily. Decisions are made by consensus. When consensus fails, Appasaheb decides, and his decision is final, not because he is a dictator but because everyone agrees that someone must decide and he is the best someone available.

"Democracy requires infrastructure," Appasaheb tells me, sitting on the gram panchayat veranda, drinking chai (the community grows its own tea. A small plot, experimental, the bushes struggling in the Deccan heat but producing enough for two cups per person per day). "Roads, communication, courts. When the infrastructure fails, democracy becomes impossible. What replaces it is not dictatorship. It is panchayat. The oldest system. Five wise people, one leader, decisions made for the common good."

"What if the leader is not wise?"

Appasaheb smiles. "Then the people replace the leader. That is also panchayat."

From Tukaram, I learn agriculture. The community farms collectively, fifty acres of jowar, twenty acres of bajra, five acres of sugarcane, two acres of vegetables (tomatoes, onions, brinjal, the staples of Maharashtrian cooking). The farming is traditional, no tractors (the diesel is reserved for the generator), no fertiliser (the community uses cow dung and compost), no pesticides. yields are lower than modern farming. But the yields are reliable, because traditional farming has been feeding people in this region for three thousand years and does not require a supply chain that no longer exists.

"The city people always laughed at us," Tukaram says, pulling weeds from the jowar field, his hands moving with the speed and precision of forty years of practice. "They said we were backward. Old-fashioned. They said the future was IT, software, call centres. They said nobody needs to know how to grow jowar anymore." He pulls another weed. Tosses it aside. "And now? Now the IT people are dead, the call centres are silent, the software does not run. But the jowar grows. The bajra grows. The bhakri is on the plate. Who is backward now?"

The question is not rhetorical. It is the question that rural India has been asking urban India for seventy years, and that the virus has answered in the most brutal way imaginable.

From Pandharinath — Pandya, as everyone calls him, I learn security. That community has no weapons except lathis and agricultural tools (sickles, axes, the heavy iron koyata that farmers use to cut sugarcane). But Pandya, who spent thirty years in the Maharashtra Police before retiring to his village, has organised a watch system: four shifts, six hours each, two guards per shift, covering the four approaches to the town. The guards carry lathis and whistles (police whistles, from Pandya's personal collection — he kept them all, every whistle from every posting, thirty years of shrill summoning).

"Trouble comes from the highway," Pandya tells me, sitting at the guard post — a chair under a tree at the eastern entrance to the town. "We have seen vehicles. Trucks, mostly. They do not stop here, the road is too narrow, too rough. But they pass on the highway, and I see them through the binoculars." He holds up the binoculars — standard-issue police binoculars, battered and scratched, the rubber eyecups cracked. "I see them, and I record them in the register."

"The register?"

He shows me. A school notebook, the pages filled with neat handwriting; dates, times, vehicle types, registration numbers, directions of travel. A police constable's habit, maintained through the apocalypse, the bureaucratic instinct of the Indian police force surviving where the force itself has not.

"Knowledge is protection," Pandya says. "If I know who passes, I know who might return."

I think of Suraj. Of Dhanraj. Of the white Tata 407, MH-12-BS-4771.

"Have you seen a white Tata 407?" I ask. "Two men. One with a shotgun."

Pandya flips through the register. Finds the page. "Day 22. White 407. MH-12. Two occupants. Heading east on NH-65 at 14:30 hours. Then again, Day 26, heading west at 09:15 hours. And again, Day 26, heading east at 16:45 hours."

Day 26. The day they passed us on the highway. The day we hid in the drainage ditch.

"They are searching," says Pandya. "East, west, east again. Looking for someone."

"Looking for us."

He studies me. The policeman's study, assessing, categorising, filing. "Tell me everything."

I tell him everything. The farmhouse. The cage. The bloodstain. The escape. The wire. The walk. He listens without interrupting, his pen moving in the register, recording my account with the same methodical precision that he records vehicle movements.

When I finish, he closes the register. "They will not come here," he says. "The road does not permit the truck. And if they come on foot —" He taps the lathi leaning against his chair. "Pandharinath Jagtap has never lost a lathi fight. Not in thirty years."

I believe him.

---

On the morning of Day 30, we leave Vairag. The rucksack is full — Appasaheb insisted on provisions. Bhakri, thecha, jowar flour, oil, Lactogen for Reyansh (found in the community's medical supplies — a small stockpile maintained by Savitri). weight is good weight. weight of generosity.

Appasaheb walks us to the town gate. He shakes my hand. He touches Reyansh's head. The blessing of an elder, the palm resting briefly on the baby's crown, the gesture that carries the weight of every Maharashtrian grandfather's benediction.

"Solapur la pohochaal," he says. You will reach Solapur. "Aani pohotlyavar, radio kara. Amhala kalva." And when you reach, send word on the radio. Let us know.

"I will."

"Aani sangatyaa — tumcha bhau jivant asel tar, sangaychya ki ithe ek gaon aahe, Vairag, jithe lok rahtat, jithe shala aahe, jithe bhakri milte. Sangaychya ki — amhi aahot." And tell him, if your brother is alive — tell him that there is a village here, Vairag, where people live, where there is a school, where there is food. Tell him, we are here.

"I will tell him."

We walk east. This morning is cool, the sun low, the fields golden with unharvested jowar. Behind us, Vairag shrinks. The concrete archway, the gram panchayat building, the school where children learn multiplication tables in a world that has been divided by a virus.

Ahead of us: fifty kilometres. Three days. Solapur.

Meera walks beside me. Reyansh is in the sling, his eyes open, watching the fields pass by. He reaches for a jowar stalk as we pass. His small hand stretching, grasping, missing. He tries again. Misses again. Tries a third time.

On the third try, his fingers close around the stalk. He holds it. He pulls. The stalk bends, but does not break.

Reyansh laughs. The sound — bright, unexpected, the pure, unselfconscious laughter of a fourteen-month-old who has just accomplished the monumental task of grabbing a plant — fills the empty road. Meera looks at him. I look at him.

We keep walking.