Chapter 7: Ishan

# Chapter 7: Ishan

## Nadi

Day 31 of the walk. Day 38 of the virus.

Bhima River is a problem.

It is not a problem the way a locked door is a problem, or a broken bridge, or an armed checkpoint. Those are obstacles with solutions: a key, a detour, a document. A river is a problem the way weather is a problem, the way geography is a problem, the way the fundamental arrangement of the physical world is a problem. You cannot negotiate with a river. You cannot show it Major Bhosale's letter. You cannot explain to fifty metres of moving water that you are a civilian liaison with urgent business on the other side.

Omkar throws a stone into the current. It disappears without a splash, swallowed by the brown water, absorbed into the mass of sediment and flow. He throws another. Same result.

"Dada, paani kiti khaul aahe?" How deep is the water?

"I do not know. Deep enough."

"Mi swim karu shakto." I can swim.

"You cannot swim across this. Nobody can swim across this with a rucksack."

"Rucksack nahi. Fakta mi." Without the rucksack. Just me.

"And then what? You stand on the other side, wet and alone, while I stand on this side with all the supplies?"

He considers this. The flaw in his plan registers. He throws a third stone, harder this time, putting his shoulder into the throw the way a fast bowler puts his shoulder into a delivery. Stone skips once, twice, then sinks.

"Dada, mala ek goshta sangaychi aahe." I need to tell you something.

"What?"

"Mala paanyachi bhiti vatay." I am afraid of water.

"You just offered to swim across."

"Ho. Pan bhiti vatay tarich." Yes. But I am still afraid.

Bravery and fear. Omkar has taught me more about their relationship in thirty-one days than twenty-eight years of living taught me. Bravery is not the absence of fear. Bravery is the twelve-year-old who is terrified of water and offers to swim a river because the man he trusts needs to get to the other side.

It appears on the horizon in the late afternoon — a band of silver in the brown landscape, the water catching the sun and throwing it back in fragments. On the paper map, the Bhima is a blue line crossing our path from north to south, a line that looks thin and manageable, the kind of obstacle that a finger can bridge in a second. In reality, the Bhima is fifty metres wide, and the bridge, the NH-65 bridge, a concrete span that carried ten thousand vehicles a day — is on the highway. The highway that we are avoiding. The highway where Suraj is searching.

"There must be another crossing," says Meera, studying the map. We are sitting under a neem tree on the western bank, the river stretching before us, its current lazy in the April heat, the water brown with silt, the banks muddy and steep.

"The map shows a smaller bridge here, " I point to a thin line crossing the Bhima maybe five kilometres south of our position. "A village road bridge. Between Kurduvadi and Madha."

"Five kilometres south. Then across. Then five kilometres north to rejoin our route. That is ten extra kilometres."

"Alternatively, we swim."

We both look at the river. water is not deep. Maybe waist-height at the centre, based on the rocks visible at the edges. But the current is present, and the bottom is mud, and I am carrying a rucksack, and Meera is carrying Reyansh, and the risk of one of us losing footing and going under is not zero.

"We do not swim," says Meera. "Not with Reyansh."

"Then we walk south."

---

The detour takes us through the Bhima floodplain — flat, alluvial farmland, the soil dark and rich, the fields here different from the dry Deccan plateau behind us. This is irrigated country, the Bhima's water feeds the fields through a network of canals and channels, the same irrigation system that has made this region one of Maharashtra's most productive agricultural zones. The sugarcane here is greener, taller, the stalks thick and juicy. The banana plantations are heavy with fruit — bunches of green bananas hanging from the stems, unharvested, the plants continuing their cycle regardless of who is or is not alive to eat the produce.

We pick bananas. The act feels transgressive — reaching into a plantation, pulling a bunch from the stem, the weight of the bananas in my hands a specific kind of wealth. Meera peels one for Reyansh. He eats it with the methodical seriousness of a baby encountering a new texture — the soft, sweet flesh mashing between his gums, his face cycling through surprise, consideration, and approval.

"He likes it," says Meera.

"Everyone likes bananas."

"Not everyone. Sagar hated them."

A mention of her husband's name is rare. Meera speaks of Sagar the way she speaks of everything lost. Sparingly, precisely, the words rationed the way food is rationed, each one weighed before being released.

"He said they were too sweet," she continues. "He said they tasted like someone had put sugar in a texture. He was an idiot about food."

"He was an idiot about a lot of things." I say this carefully. Meera and I do not have the kind of relationship that permits casual insults about dead spouses. But the tone I use, light, affectionate, the tone of a person speaking about someone they knew and liked, lands correctly. Meera almost smiles.

"He was a wonderful idiot," she says. "He could write code for sixteen hours and then play harmonium for two. He could debug a program that had defeated three senior developers and then burn rice because he forgot to turn the heat down. He was, " She stops. The almost-smile fades. "He was the kind of person who should not have died."

"None of them should have died."

"No. But some of them — some of them were the people who made the world worth living in. And the virus did not care. It took the good and the bad and the mediocre with equal enthusiasm. And here we are — the survivors. The ones who happened to be immune. Neither better nor stronger Just lucky."

"Lucky is enough."

"Is it?" She looks at me. The question is not rhetorical. It is the question that every survivor asks, eventually — the question that arrives in the quiet moments, when the walking stops and the fire is lit and the silence presses in. Is survival enough? Is being alive sufficient justification for the fact of being alive? Or does survival demand something more — a purpose, a contribution, a reason beyond the biological accident of immunity?

"It has to be," I say. "Because the alternative is giving up. And we have walked too far to give up."

She holds the banana peel in her hand. She stares at it; the limp, yellow skin, the mundane refuse of a mundane fruit, the thing that Sagar hated and Reyansh loves. Then she tosses it into the field.

"Compost," she says. "Good for the soil."

The engineer's mind. Finding utility in everything. Even grief.

---

Village road bridge is exactly where the map says it is — a narrow concrete span, maybe four metres wide, crossing the Bhima at a point where the river narrows between rocky banks. A bridge is old, built by the Maharashtra PWD in the 1980s, the concrete stained and cracked, the railings rusted, the surface pitted with age. But it holds. We cross it in two minutes — two minutes of walking above brown water, the current gurgling beneath us, the bridge creaking under our weight with the complaint of an old thing being asked to perform its function one more time.

On the eastern bank, the landscape changes. This Bhima floodplain gives way to drier ground. The transition from irrigated to rain-fed, the soil lighter, the fields smaller, the vegetation scrubby. We are entering the rain shadow of the Western Ghats, the region where rainfall drops from 800mm to 500mm over a distance of fifty kilometres, the line between plenty and scarcity drawn by geography and monsoon.

The road ahead is straight, flat, heading east through open country. On the horizon, heat shimmer. Above, a cloudless sky. This temperature is forty degrees. We walk.

---

At dusk, we find a dhaba.

It is on a village road junction, the kind of place where two tracks cross and someone, decades ago, decided that the crossing deserved a tea stall. The dhaba is simple: a tin-roofed shelter, a counter, a bench, a gas stove. Behind the counter, shelves, empty, mostly, the tins and packets taken by the owner or by looters. But on the top shelf, behind a stack of plastic cups, I find something unexpected: a packet of Maggi noodles.

Maggi. The yellow packet. The two-minute noodles that are India's answer to every culinary emergency, midnight study sessions, hostel hunger, camping trips, the specific cravings that strike at 11 PM and that only Maggi can satisfy. The packet is sealed, undamaged, the tastemaker sachet still inside.

I hold it up. Meera stares at it.

"Maggi," she says.

"Maggi."

For a moment, the apocalypse recedes. We are not survivors on a post-virus highway. We are two people in their twenties, standing in a tea stall, looking at a packet of instant noodles with the reverence that ancient humans must have reserved for fire.

I cook the Maggi on the dhaba's gas stove — the cylinder is nearly empty, the flame low and blue, barely enough to heat the water, but enough. The noodles cook in four minutes (not two, the packaging lies, has always lied, will lie until the heat death of the universe). I add the tastemaker. The smell — that specific, unmistakable, MSG-laden smell that is simultaneously artificial and deeply comforting, fills the tin-roofed shelter.

We eat from the pot, sharing a single fork that I found in the counter drawer. Meera eats one forkful, I eat one forkful, and Reyansh gets the broth, spooned carefully into his mouth, his face registering the salt and the heat and the specific magical chemistry of Maggi seasoning.

"Do you know," says Meera between bites, "that Sagar once ate six packets of Maggi in a single sitting. During a coding hackathon at Infosys. He was awake for thirty-six hours and he ate nothing but Maggi and chai."

"Did he win the hackathon?"

"Second place. The winning team ate biryani. He said the biryani gave them an unfair advantage."

I laugh. The sound surprises me — rough, unused, the sound of a mechanism that has been idle for weeks and is creaking back to life. Meera looks at me. She does not laugh. But the almost-smile returns — the suggestion, the possibility, the crack in the wall through which something warm leaks.

"He would be appalled that we are sharing one packet between three people," she says.

"He would be appalled that we are walking to Solapur instead of taking an Ola."

"He would book the Ola and then complain about the surge pricing."

"He would tip the driver and then regret it."

"He would, " She stops. The almost-smile collapses. Her eyes fill. She puts the fork down. She sits very still for a moment, her hands on her knees, her back straight, the posture of control, of containment, of a woman who is holding the sea behind a wall and who feels the wall cracking.

Then she picks up the fork. She eats another bite. She chews. She swallows.

"He would be proud of us," she says. "He would be terrified, and furious, and he would insist on carrying Reyansh and complain about his back and argue with every decision I made. But he would be proud."

"He would."

We finish the Maggi. We lick the pot. Reyansh falls asleep in Meera's arms, his belly full for the first time in two days, his small body warm and heavy with the specific contentment of a well-fed infant.

We sleep in the dhaba. On the bench, the tin roof above us, the stars visible through the gaps in the corrugated sheets. This night is warm. This sounds are crickets, wind, the distant bark of a village dog.

Tomorrow: fifty kilometres to Solapur. Three days.

Three days to Yash. Three days to the end of the road.