Chapter 2: Janhavi

# Chapter 2: Janhavi

## The School

Rajaram Vidyalaya was not my school. This was the fact that my body understood before my brain articulated it — the body's instinctive recognition that the building, the corridor, the faces, the specific acoustic signature of a school's morning (the bell, the chatter, the scrape of benches, the particular volume of two hundred teenagers whose energy had not yet been consumed by the day's first lesson) were wrong. Not wrong in the moral sense. Wrong in the navigational sense — the sense that a migrating bird felt when blown off course, the sense that the body had a destination and the destination was not this.

The building was old — the old of Maharashtra's government-aided schools, the old that was not heritage but persistence, the building having persisted through the decades with the specific endurance of structures that were built by the PWD in the 1970s and that were maintained by budgets that the government allocated with the enthusiasm of a body that considered education important enough to fund but not important enough to fund adequately. The walls were the walls — the standard government cream, the paint peeling at the corners where the monsoon's moisture entered and where the maintenance budget did not reach, the peeling being not neglect but economics.

The corridor was long. The corridor was lined with notice boards — the notice boards that were the school's communication infrastructure, the boards that displayed exam schedules and sports results and the headmaster's motivational quotes (today's quote: "Swarajya he mazhe janmasiddha hakk aahe, aani te mee milvanarach" — Lokmanya Tilak, the quote that every Maharashtrian school displayed and that every Maharashtrian student could recite and that the reciting was not education but identity, the identity being Maharashtrian, the identity being the specific, historically conscious, Tilak-quoting identity of a state that understood its past as the foundation of its present).

I walked the corridor with Maushi's daughter, Vaidehi. Vaidehi was fourteen — two years younger than me, Standard 9 to my Standard 11, the age gap being the gap that separated a girl who was still figuring out the school from a girl who was being introduced to it. Vaidehi was Maushi's product — the same volume, the same energy, the same specific Kolhapuri confidence that came from growing up in a city that was small enough to know and large enough to matter.

"The running track is behind the building," Vaidehi said, pointing through a window. "The athletics ground. Mane madam runs the programme."

"Mane madam?"

"Shubhangi Mane. She was state-level. 800 metres. She has the record — Kolhapur district, women's 800, from 2009. Nobody's broken it. She coaches the distance runners."

Distance runners. The phrase was a phrase I had not heard in Mumbai — in Mumbai, runners were joggers, and joggers were the people in Marine Drive at 6 AM, the people who ran along the sea wall with earphones and expensive shoes and the specific self-satisfaction of a city that had decided that fitness was a lifestyle and that lifestyle was a brand. In Kolhapur, runners were athletes. The distinction was the distinction between running as activity and running as identity, between the jog and the race, between the Marine Drive jogger who ran for health and the Kolhapur athlete who ran for the district.

The classroom was Standard 11, Science stream. The classroom was thirty students — twenty-eight familiar to each other, two who were not. The two were me and a boy named Tejas Shinde who had transferred from Sangli and who was sitting in the last row with the specific posture of a transfer student, which was the posture of a person trying to occupy minimum space, the posture of a person who understood that the classroom's social geography had been mapped before they arrived and that their arrival was an intrusion on a map that did not include them.

I sat in the second row. The second row was the row of strategic visibility — not the first row (too eager, too exposed) and not the last row (too distant, too disengaged) but the second row, the row that said I am present and I am paying attention but I am not trying to be noticed. The second row was the transfer student's row. The second row was the row I had chosen in every classroom since Baba left, the row that was close enough to participate and far enough to retreat.

The teacher was a woman named Kulkarni ma'am — physics, the first period, the specific cruelty of a timetable that placed physics at 8:30 AM when the brain was still processing the transition from sleep to school and when the concepts of velocity and acceleration were not abstractions but descriptions of the student's own body, which was accelerating toward wakefulness with a velocity that was insufficient for the demands of the lesson.

Kulkarni ma'am noticed me. Kulkarni ma'am noticed me the way teachers noticed transfer students — with the combination of professional interest and administrative burden, the new student being both a person and a file, both a face and a set of documents that the office had processed.

"New student?" Kulkarni ma'am asked. The question was not really a question. The question was the cue — the cue for me to stand and introduce myself and perform the transfer-student ritual that every school in India required, the ritual being: name, previous school, city of origin, subjects, and the optional detail that the student chose to share as a marker of identity.

"Janhavi Bhosale," I said. I stood. The standing was the exposure — the standing in a room of seated people, the vertical interruption in a horizontal landscape. "From Borivali, Mumbai. IES Vidyalaya. Science stream."

Thirty faces looked at me. Twenty-eight faces assessed me. Two faces — mine and Tejas Shinde's — understood the assessment from inside.

"Welcome to Rajaram," Kulkarni ma'am said. "Sit."

I sat. The assessment continued — not from Kulkarni ma'am, whose assessment was complete, but from the twenty-eight, whose assessment was the longer, slower, more thorough assessment of teenagers evaluating a new arrival, the evaluation that measured not subjects and cities but clothes and posture and the specific signal that the new student's presence transmitted, the signal that said I am from somewhere else and that the twenty-eight received as either interesting or irrelevant.

The day unfolded with the specific rhythm of an Indian school day — the forty-five-minute periods, the bells, the standing when the teacher entered, the sitting when the teacher permitted, the notes copied from the blackboard with the mechanical urgency of students who had learned that the blackboard's content was temporary and the notebook's content was permanent and that the gap between the two was the gap that the student's hand was required to bridge.

Lunch was at 12:30. Lunch was the dabba — the steel tiffin box, the three-tier compartment, the container that Aai had packed at 6:30 AM with the specific contents of a Maharashtrian school lunch: bhakri, sabzi (batata bhaji today, the potatoes cut into the precise cubes that Aai's knife produced, the cubes being a marker of Aai's presence in the food the way a signature was a marker of a person's presence in a document), pickle (Maushi's amba, the raw mango pickle that Maushi made in May and that lasted until November, the pickle being the time capsule of a previous season's mangoes preserved in oil and mirchi and the specific patience of a woman who understood that good pickle required not just ingredients but months), and a laddoo (Maushi's besan laddoo, the laddoo being the bribe, the sweet that Aai had requested from Maushi specifically because a good dabba on the first day was the nutritional equivalent of a good first impression, the laddoo saying you are cared for, you are fed, you are not alone).

I ate alone. The eating alone was not dramatic — the eating alone was the default of the transfer student, the default that would change with time or would not change with time and that I did not yet know which. The eating alone was also the preference — the preference of a girl who had spent three years learning that alone was the state that did not disappoint, that alone was the relationship that did not leave, that alone was the Borivali flat after Baba but before Kolhapur, the state that was painful and familiar and that the familiarity had converted from painful to merely sad.

"You're the new girl." The voice came from my left. The voice was attached to a girl — a girl who was sitting two benches away and who had migrated to my bench with the specific motion of a teenager crossing social space, which was the cautious, sideways, plausible-deniability motion of a person who was approaching but who wanted the approach to look incidental rather than intentional.

"Janhavi," I said.

"Rukmini. Rukmini Jadhav. Standard 11. Same section."

Rukmini Jadhav was — I assessed in the three seconds that the introduction permitted — a girl built for energy. Not tall, not short, the height that Maharashtra produced in quantities, the standard-issue Maharashtrian girl's height that was the genetic average of a population that had been farming and walking and carrying water for centuries and that had developed, over those centuries, a body type that was compact and efficient and that wasted nothing, not height, not weight, not motion.

Her hair was in a braid — the thick braid, the school-regulation braid, the braid that every girl in Rajaram wore because the school's hair policy was the braid and the braid was the policy and deviations from the braid were deviations from the policy. The braid was decorated at the end with a rubber band — not a hairband, a rubber band, the stationery-shop rubber band that Indian schoolgirls used because rubber bands were cheaper than hairbands and because rubber bands worked and working was sufficient.

"You run?" Rukmini asked. The question was not casual. The question was diagnostic — the question of a girl who ran and who was assessing whether the new girl ran, the way a musician assessed whether a new person played, by asking the question and reading the answer not in the words but in the body's response to the question.

"I used to. In Mumbai."

"Used to." Rukmini's eyebrow went up. The eyebrow was the punctuation — the raised eyebrow that said used to is past tense and past tense is interesting but not useful, present tense is what I'm asking about.

"I ran around my building. Four kilometres."

"Four kilometres around a building. How many laps?"

"Twenty."

"Twenty laps of 200 metres." She calculated. The calculation was the runner's calculation — the automatic conversion of distance into components, the breaking of the whole into parts, the parts being the unit of measurement that runners used because runners understood that a race was not a distance but a collection of distances, each distance a decision, each decision a step.

"You should come to the track. After school. Mane madam runs the programme from 4:00 to 6:00."

"I'm not sure I'm —"

"Come. Just watch. You don't have to run."

The invitation. The invitation that was not pressure but proximity — the invitation that said the door is there and the door is open and the opening is for you if you want it. The invitation that Rukmini delivered with the casual confidence of a girl who belonged to the running programme and who understood that belonging was contagious, that the offer of belonging was the thing that produced belonging, that the first step was not the running but the showing up.

"Maybe," I said.

"Maybe is fine. 4:00. Behind the building. The red track."

The red track. I would learn, later, that the red track was the centre of Rajaram Vidyalaya's athletic identity — the 400-metre laterite track that the school had built in 2014 with funds from the district sports department and from the school alumni association and from the specific fundraising efforts of Shubhangi Mane, who had written eleven grant applications and been rejected nine times and had succeeded twice and had used the ₹12 lakhs to build the track that was now the training ground for the school's distance runners, the track that was red because laterite was red and laterite was what Kolhapur's soil provided and the soil's provision was the track's identity — a red oval in a green landscape, the track being the wound and the scar and the promise, the surface on which girls and boys ran and discovered what running meant when running was not exercise but expression.

The red track. 4:00 PM. Maybe.

I ate the laddoo. The laddoo was good — Maushi's besan, the cardamom strong, the jaggery dark. The laddoo was the thing that connected the morning to the afternoon, the Borivali flat to the Kolhapur lane, the past to the present, the known to the unknown. The laddoo was the constant. The laddoo was the thing that did not change when the city changed, the sweet that Maharashtra produced regardless of the address.

The afternoon arrived. The school day ended. The bell rang its final ring — 3:30 PM, the bell that released two hundred students into the afternoon with the specific energy of bodies that had been contained for seven hours and that were now free, the freedom being temporary (homework, tuitions, the domestic obligations that Indian school days did not end but merely paused for) but real, the freedom of legs that had been under desks and that were now under the sky.

I stood at the school gate. The gate was the decision point — left was Tarabai Road, the rented house, the yellow room, the bed. Right was the building's back, the athletics ground, the red track, the programme that Aai believed was the medicine and that Rukmini had invited me to watch.

Left was easy. Left was the retreat, the withdrawal, the volume turned down. Left was the Borivali compound without the compound, the lapping without the laps, the running away from the thing that the running was supposed to be running toward.

Right was hard. Right was new. Right was the thing I did not know and the people I did not know and the surface I had not run on and the coach I had not met and the specific, terrifying possibility that the running might work, that the running might be the thing that Aai believed it was, that the running might turn the volume back up, and the volume being turned back up was the thing I feared more than the silence because the silence was known and the sound was not.

I turned right.

The red track was behind the building, exactly where Vaidehi had pointed. The track was an oval — 400 metres, the standard distance, the distance that the body learned to measure not in metres but in effort, each lap a unit of exertion. The laterite surface was the surface — red, compacted, the surface that was not the synthetic tartan of the Olympic tracks and not the grass of the cross-country fields but the specific Indian surface, the surface that the soil provided, the surface that the budget permitted, the surface on which generations of Indian athletes had trained and from which generations of Indian athletes had risen.

Girls were running. Twelve, fourteen girls — the number was approximate because the girls were in motion and counting moving things was like counting stars, the number changing with each blink. The girls were in school uniform — the salwar kameez that Rajaram required, the kameez tucked into the salwar for running, the dupatta tied at the waist or discarded entirely, the uniform being adapted for the activity the way all Indian school activities adapted the uniform because the uniform was designed for sitting and standing and not for the specific demands of running, which were demands that the uniform's designer had not considered.

At the edge of the track was a woman. The woman was Shubhangi Mane — I knew this the way you knew coaches, by the posture, by the position, by the specific spatial relationship between a coach and a group, the coach being the centre that the group orbited, the gravitational body around which the athletes moved.

Mane madam was not tall. Mane madam was the height of a woman who had run 800 metres at the state level, which was the height that 800-metre runners were — not the height of sprinters (tall, long-legged, the height that physics selected for the 100 metres) and not the height of marathon runners (lean, minimal, the height that endurance selected for the 42 kilometres) but the intermediate height, the height that combined the sprinter's speed with the distance runner's efficiency, the height that was built for the specific cruelty of the 800 metres, the distance that was neither sprint nor endurance but the gap between the two, the gap where the body was required to run fast for long enough that the fast became painful and the pain became the race.

Mane madam was watching the girls. The watching was the coaching — the watching that saw not the group but the individual, not the motion but the mechanics, the specific analysis that a coach performed when watching runners, the analysis that broke the running into components (foot strike, knee drive, arm swing, head position, breathing pattern) and that assessed each component against the ideal and identified the gap between the actual and the ideal and that the coaching was designed to close.

Rukmini was on the track. Rukmini was running the way Rukmini did everything — with energy, with the full-volume commitment that was Rukmini's default setting, the running being not economical but enthusiastic, the legs turning over with the specific cadence of a girl who had more energy than technique and who compensated for the technique's absence with the energy's abundance.

And beside Rukmini — not beside, ahead. Well ahead. A full curve of the track ahead — was another girl.

The other girl was running differently. The other girl was running the way water ran — fluid, continuous, the motion having no visible effort, the legs and arms and torso working in a coordination that was not learned but native, the coordination that some bodies had and that other bodies spent years trying to acquire and that the acquiring was the work and the having was the gift.

The girl was fast. The girl was the kind of fast that you recognised before you measured, the fast that the eye saw and the brain registered and the body felt as a response — the response being awe, the specific awe that humans felt when watching a body that moved with a precision and an efficiency that exceeded the normal, the awe that was the ancestor's recognition of the hunter, the tribe's recognition of the runner, the community's recognition of the body that could do the thing that other bodies could not.

"That's Isha," Rukmini said. I had not heard Rukmini approach — Rukmini had finished her lap and had arrived at the track's edge and was now standing beside me, breathing hard, her face flushed with the exertion and the November heat.

"Isha Gaikwad," Rukmini continued. "She holds the district record. Under-17. 1500 metres. She'll hold the state record by December. Mane madam says she's the best distance runner Kolhapur has produced since... since Mane madam."

Isha Gaikwad. The girl on the track. The girl who ran like water. The girl who held the district record and who would hold the state record and who was, I understood with the specific clarity of a girl who had run twenty laps around a Borivali building and who was now watching a girl run on a red track in Kolhapur, the standard against which my running would be measured.

The standard was high. The standard was Isha Gaikwad. The standard was the kind of runner that I was not — not yet, maybe not ever, the not ever being the voice of the withdrawal, the volume-turned-down voice that said you are not this, you are not here, you are the girl who ran around a building and buildings are not tracks and laps are not races and Borivali is not Kolhapur.

Isha finished her lap. Isha slowed. Isha stopped at the track's edge — the stopping being not abrupt but graduated, the deceleration happening over twenty metres, the body transitioning from the running state to the standing state with the specific fluidity of a runner whose body understood the physics of deceleration and whose deceleration was as coached as the acceleration.

Isha looked at me. The look was the assessment — the runner's assessment, the assessment that measured not clothes or posture or social position but the body, the specific anatomical assessment that runners performed on other runners, the assessment that measured leg length and muscle definition and the ratio of torso to limb and the specific indicators that a trained eye could read the way a literate eye read text.

The assessment lasted two seconds. The verdict was in Isha's expression — the expression that was not dismissal and not interest but the neutral expression of a runner who had assessed a non-runner and who had filed the assessment in the category of not relevant.

Not relevant. The category hurt. The category hurt because the category was accurate — I was not relevant to Isha Gaikwad's running the way the Borivali compound was not relevant to the Kolhapur track, the scales being different, the ambitions being different, the specific, measurable gap between running for exercise and running for records being the gap that Isha's assessment had measured and found uncloseable.

But the hurt was interesting. The hurt was the first feeling that was not sadness or withdrawal or the specific numbness that Baba's leaving had installed. The hurt was competitive. The hurt was the feeling of being dismissed and not accepting the dismissal, the feeling that said you assessed me in two seconds and your assessment is wrong and I will show you that your assessment is wrong even though I do not yet know how.

The hurt was the spark. The spark was what Aai had prescribed. The spark was the thing that the running was supposed to produce — not fitness, not health, not the lifestyle-brand wellness that Mumbai's Marine Drive joggers pursued, but the spark, the ignition, the moment when the volume turned back up and the silence was replaced by the sound that was not peace but purpose.

Purpose. The word that I had not had since Baba left. The word that the Borivali compound had not provided. The word that was now, in the two-second assessment of a girl named Isha Gaikwad on a red track in Kolhapur, beginning to form.

"Come," Rukmini said. "I'll introduce you to Mane madam."

I followed Rukmini to the track's edge, where Mane madam stood with her clipboard and her stopwatch and the specific authority of a woman who had built a running programme from eleven grant applications and two successes and ₹12 lakhs and the belief that Kolhapur's girls could run.

"Mane madam," Rukmini said, "this is Janhavi. She's new. From Mumbai."

Mane madam looked at me. The look was different from Isha's look — Mane madam's look was not the runner's assessment but the coach's assessment, the assessment that measured not the body's current state but the body's potential state, the assessment that saw not what was but what could be.

"You run?" Mane madam asked.

"I ran. In Mumbai. Four kilometres."

"Four kilometres. What pace?"

"I don't know. I didn't time myself."

"You ran four kilometres without timing yourself?"

"I ran around my building. Twenty laps. I didn't have a stopwatch."

Mane madam's expression changed. The change was subtle — not the dramatic change but the micro-change, the change that coaches made when they heard something that interested them, something that did not fit the pattern, something that required further inquiry.

"You ran four kilometres every morning without timing yourself," Mane madam repeated. "Why?"

The question. The question that was not how fast or how far but why. The question that went past the body and into the mind, past the mechanics and into the motive. The question that I had not been asked and that I had not asked myself and that required, for the answer, not the athlete's vocabulary but the person's vocabulary — the vocabulary that included Baba and Mumbai and the silence and the running-as-quieting.

"Because it was quiet," I said. "When I ran, it was quiet."

Mane madam did not respond immediately. The not-responding was the processing — the processing of a coach who had heard many reasons for running (competition, fitness, parental instruction, peer pressure, the specific Indian motivation of sports quota college admissions) and who had now heard a reason that was different. Running because it was quiet. Running because the noise stopped. Running because the body in motion produced a silence that the body at rest could not.

"Come tomorrow," Mane madam said. "4:00. Bring shoes."

"I don't have running shoes."

"Bring whatever you have. We'll start with what we have."

We'll start with what we have. The sentence was the sentence that Mane madam had built the programme on — the sentence that said the starting point was the starting point and not the ending point, the sentence that said the shoes you had were the shoes you ran in and the shoes you ran in were the shoes that would get you to the shoes you needed, the sentence that was the red laterite track's philosophy in seven words: we start with what we have.

I walked home. Left on Tarabai Road. Past the autorickshaws and the temple and the tambda rassa hotels and the evening crowd that was beginning to form for the lake walk. Kolhapur in the evening was Kolhapur at its best — the temperature dropping, the jaggery smell fading to the evening smell of jasmine from the flower sellers and the specific composite of temple smoke and cooking smoke and the smoke of a city winding down.

I walked and I thought about Isha Gaikwad's two-second assessment. I thought about the assessment being wrong. I thought about the wrongness being the thing I wanted to prove. I thought about proving it being the thing I wanted to do — not for Isha, not for Mane madam, not for Aai, but for the girl who had run twenty laps around a Borivali building and who had not known why she ran and who now, walking home on Tarabai Road in the Kolhapur evening, was beginning to know.

The why was the spark. The spark was the start. The start was tomorrow. 4:00. The red track. Whatever shoes I had.

We start with what we have. We have what we start with. The circle was the runner's circle — the lap, the oval, the distance that ended where it began but that was, in the ending, not the same as the beginning because the runner who ended the lap was not the runner who started it, the lap having changed the runner, the running having changed the body, the body having changed the mind.

Tomorrow. The red track. The start.