Chapter 10: Ishani

## Chapter 10: Ishani

ISHANI

The track was mine again.

I shouldn't have thought it that way. The phrasing was ugly, possessive, the kind of thing that would make Aai narrow her eyes and say Ishani, duniya tumhari personal property nahi hai. But there it was, sitting in my chest like a stone I couldn't cough up: Kaveri Sharma was injured, and the track was mine again, and the relief I felt was so sharp it disgusted me.

I ran my warm-up laps in the January cold. Five-thirty AM. The school ground was empty except for me and Pandey-ji, who sat in his booth at the gate drinking chai from a steel glass with the methodical disinterest of a man who'd watched a thousand mornings arrive and found none of them interesting. The air smelled of dew and eucalyptus and the faint, acrid tang of coal smoke from the chawl behind the school wall, where the women were already cooking breakfast.

My feet hit the gravel with the steady, metronomic rhythm that Coach Patkar had spent three years drilling into me. Thap-thap-thap-thap. The sound of a runner who'd been doing this since she was eleven, whose body had been shaped by this track the way a river shaped its banks — slowly, persistently, until the shape was permanent.

I was the best runner at St. Xavier's. This was not vanity. This was mathematics. My 5K time was 18:23. The next closest was Sanika's 19:07. A forty-four-second gap. In cross-country, forty-four seconds was a canyon.

Until September. Until a girl named Kaveri Sharma walked onto this track with three-thousand-rupee Nikes and a stride that made my stomach drop.

I'd watched her first tryout from the middle of the pack, pretending to stretch, pretending not to care, pretending that the girl eating into my lead with every lap was not the most frightening thing I'd seen since I'd started running. She'd finished three seconds behind me. Three. The canyon had become a crack, and the crack was closing.

Four months of training together had closed it further. The water ran between her fingers, cold and insistent. By December, our practice times were separated by less than a second on most days. Coach Patkar stopped posting individual times on the board. I knew why. He didn't want to create a rivalry. Too late. The rivalry was already there, living in the space between our lanes, in the way I adjusted my pace when I heard her footsteps behind me, in the way she adjusted hers when she heard mine.

And now she was injured. IT band. Two to three weeks. And the track was mine again.

I hated myself for the relief.

---

The thing about being the best is that nobody asks you how it feels.

They assume it feels good. They assume that winning, that being first, that standing on the top step — is an experience of pure, uncomplicated joy. They see the medal and the applause and the photograph in the school newsletter and they think: she must be happy.

I am not happy. I am afraid.

The fear started when I was twelve. Before that, running was simple. I ran because my body wanted to, because the movement felt like flying, because the wind on my face and the ground under my feet and the burning in my lungs were sensations so alive that nothing else compared. I ran the way Tukaram the street cat hunted sparrows — with instinct, with joy, without thinking about outcomes.

Then I won my first district championship. And Aai's face, at the finish line, did something I'd never seen it do. It opened. The careful, controlled face of a woman who managed a household and a career and a husband who traveled eleven months a year and two children who needed things she couldn't always provide — that face cracked, and behind it was something raw and proud and desperate.

"Meri beti," she'd said, holding my face in her hands. "Meri champion."

And I understood, with the instant, devastating clarity of a twelve-year-old who was too smart for her own good, that my running was not just my running. It was her validation. Her proof that the sacrifices — the 5 AM drives to practice, the ₹800 monthly coaching fees carved from a budget that had no room for carving, the arguments with Baba about whether athletics was "practical" for a girl — had been worth it.

I was not running for myself. I was running for her.

And if I stopped being the best — if someone else was faster, if the gap closed, if the canyon became a crack became nothing — then the sacrifices became just sacrifices. Costs without returns. A mother's investment that hadn't paid off.

The fear lived in my stomach. A cold, tight knot that activated every time I laced my shoes, every time Coach Patkar clicked his stopwatch, every time I heard footsteps behind me on the track. The fear of not being enough. The fear of being caught. The fear of standing at the finish line second and seeing Aai's face close again, the pride retreating behind the careful control, the champion becoming just a girl.

Kaveri Sharma activated the fear like nothing else.

---

I finished my warm-up and moved to hill repeats. The Pashan hill, the same hill where Kaveri had been injured four days ago. I could see the exact spot — the midpoint, the gradient change, "the kicker." The grass was still pressed flat where she'd sat down. Or maybe I was imagining that. Maybe the grass had already recovered, and what I was seeing was my own projection, my own guilt, the part of me that knew the relief was wrong and was looking for evidence of the event that caused it.

Hill repeat one. I attacked it hard. Too hard. Coach Patkar would have told me to hold back, to run at ninety percent, to save the effort for the race. But Coach Patkar wasn't here. It was 5:30 AM, and I was alone, and the hill was mine.

The burn started in my quads at the midpoint. I leaned into it. The burn was familiar, an old friend, the sensation that separated runners from people who jogged. Runners welcomed the burn. They needed it. The burn was proof that you were working, that you were pushing, that you were doing the thing that made you the thing you were.

Hill repeat two. Faster. My lungs working like bellows, the cold air scraping the back of my throat with each inhale. My arms pumping. My feet finding the ground with the sure, aggressive contact of someone who knew this hill the way she knew her own body — every grade, every root, every stone.

Hill repeat three. My legs were screaming now. The lactic acid pooling in the muscle fibres, thickening the movement, turning fluid motion into something heavier, harder. I pushed through it. Not because I needed to. Because pushing through pain was the only thing I knew how to do.

At the top, I stopped. Bent over. Hands on knees. The city spread below me — Pune, grey and vast and waking up, the smoke rising from a thousand kitchens, the traffic already building on the Paud Road, the sun touching the top of Sinhagad Fort in the distance with a light that made the ancient stone glow.

I thought about Kaveri.

Not the runner. The person. The girl who sat alone in the canteen on her first day and ate poha with the focused intensity of someone who was using food as a social shield. The girl who changed into running clothes with her back to the room, not from modesty but from the habit of someone who'd grown up in a small flat where privacy was a negotiated commodity. The girl who called her father "Baba" with a softness in her voice that made me, Ishani Desai, whose own father was a name on a phone screen and a quarterly deposit in a bank account, feel something I couldn't name.

I didn't like Kaveri. This was not about liking. This was about the specific, complicated, entirely unwanted recognition that she was better than me. Not faster — not yet, not quite — but better. She ran with a purity that I'd lost. She ran because she loved it. I ran because I was afraid of what would happen if I stopped.

The difference was everything.

---

School without Kaveri was strange.

I noticed her absence in the places I hadn't realized she'd occupied. The canteen, where she no longer sat at the end of the long table with Tara. The corridor outside 9-B, where she no longer stood with her back against the wall between periods, her face in a textbook. The changing room, where her locker — third from the left, bottom row — remained closed.

Tara noticed me noticing.

"She's resting," Tara said, appearing beside me at the water cooler with the stealth of a five-foot girl who moved through crowds like a cat through furniture. "IT band. Doctor said three weeks minimum."

"I know."

"Do you care?"

The question was direct in a way that only Tara could manage. Tara, who said everything she thought and thought everything she said, who had no filter between brain and mouth and considered this not a flaw but a feature.

"Of course I care," I said. "She's my teammate."

"She's your rival."

"She can be both."

Tara studied me. Her glasses magnified her eyes, making the scrutiny feel amplified, as if I were being examined under a lens.

"My Aai says that rivals are the people who make us better," Tara said. "And the people who make us better are the people we should be most grateful for."

"Your Aai also says bananas cure everything."

"Bananas DO cure everything. That's not the point." She lowered her voice. "The point is, Ishani, you've been running alone every morning since Kaveri got hurt. The dawn smelled of wet earth and the faint sweetness of neem flowers opening. You've been pushing too hard. Coach would be furious if he knew."

"How do you know I've been running alone?"

"Because I live three streets away and my bedroom window faces the road and I can hear your stupid shoes on the pavement at five-thirty every morning. You run past my house. You've been running past my house every day for three years. I know the sound of your stride the way I know the sound of my mother's mixer grinder."

I stared at her. This small, round-faced girl who'd arrived at St. Xavier's five months ago and had, without my permission or awareness, become someone who knew the sound of my stride.

"You're worried," Tara said. "Not about Kaveri. About yourself. About what happens when she comes back."

"I'm not—"

"You are. You're pushing harder because she's not here to pace against, and without her, you don't know where your limits are. You're running from fear, not toward anything. And running from fear is how people get injured."

The corridor was loud with the between-periods rush. Three hundred students moving through a space designed for a hundred, the noise bouncing off the concrete walls, the smell of chalk dust and phenyl and adolescent perspiration. In the middle of this chaos, Tara Kulkarni stood four feet eleven inches tall and told me the truth about myself.

"How do you know this?" I asked.

"Because I'm not fast enough to be your rival," she said. "So I watch. And watching is how you learn things that running doesn't teach."

---

That evening, I went home and sat in my room and didn't run.

The room was small. Our flat in Kothrud was a 2BHK — two bedrooms, hall, kitchen — that Aai had bought on a bank loan after Baba left for the Dubai posting that was supposed to be temporary and became permanent in everything but paperwork. My room had a bed, a desk, a shelf of trophies and medals that Aai dusted every Sunday with the reverence of a priest tending a shrine. The shelf caught the evening light from the west-facing window, and the medals glowed — gold, silver, bronze, the accumulated hardware of four years of competitive running.

I sat on the bed and looked at the shelf. The ground pressed cold through the fabric of her clothes. Twelve medals. Seven gold. Three silver. Two bronze. Every medal attached to a memory: the race, the weather, the course, the specific quality of the pain in the last kilometre. I could recall each one with the precision of a photograph — the feeling of as the medal was placed around my neck, the weight of it against my chest, the way Aai's face looked in the crowd.

But I couldn't recall the joy.

I remembered the relief. The relief of having won, of having maintained the standard, of having kept the canyon between me and second place wide enough that no one could question my position. I remembered Aai's face opening. I remembered the photographs and the newsletter and Coach Patkar's nod, the nod that was his version of a standing ovation.

But joy? The pure, uncomplicated happiness of doing a thing you love?

I couldn't find it.

It had been there once. When I was eleven, twelve, running because the wind felt good and the ground felt solid and the world made sense when my legs were moving. Before the medals. Before the expectations. Before Aai's face became a metric I was constantly trying to optimise.

Kaveri had it. I'd seen it — not in races, where Kaveri was all focus and intensity, but in practice, in the easy runs, in the cool-down laps after a hard session. In those moments, Kaveri's face did something that mine hadn't done in years. It relaxed. Her jaw loosened. Her eyes softened. A micro-expression, barely visible, that said: this is why I run. Not for medals. Not for her mother's face. For the running itself.

I envied that expression more than I envied her speed.

My phone buzzed. Aai.

How was practice?

I typed: Good. Ran hill repeats. Strong session.

What was your time?

I stared at the question. The question she always asked. The question that reduced every run to a number, every session to a metric, every moment of physical and emotional and spiritual effort to a figure on a stopwatch.

I typed: Didn't time today. Just ran.

The response took twenty seconds. I counted them.

Why not? You should always time. How will you know if you're improving?

I put the phone face-down on the bed. Lay back. Stared at the ceiling. The ceiling had a crack in the plaster that ran from the light fixture to the corner, a crack that I'd been watching grow for three years, millimetre by millimetre, the slow, patient deterioration of a structure that looked solid but wasn't.

Kaveri was coming back. In two weeks, maybe three, she'd be on the track again, her stride smooth, her eyes focused, her IT band healed by the rest that her body needed and her mind resisted. She'd come back and the gap would close and the rivalry would resume and the fear in my stomach would tighten and the running would continue to be about winning instead of about running.

Unless I changed something.

Unless I found the joy again.

I sat up. Picked up the phone. Not to answer Aai. To call Coach Patkar.

He picked up on the third ring. "Desai. It's eight PM. This better not be about your split times."

"Coach. I want to change my training."

Silence. The specific Coach Patkar silence that meant he was listening with his entire attention.

"I've been pushing too hard since Kaveri's injury. Running scared. Tara noticed. And she's right."

"Tara told you this?"

"Yes."

"That girl sees more than she runs. Which is saying something, because she's running quite well." A pause. "What do you want to change?"

"I want to run without timing for a week. No stopwatch. No splits. Just run. Feel the ground. Feel my body. Remember why I started."

Another silence. Longer this time. The silence of a coach who had been waiting three years for this call and was trying not to show it.

"Desai."

"Yes?"

"That's the smartest thing you've ever said to me."

"Is that a yes?"

"That's a yes. One week. No watch. Just run. And when the week is over, we'll talk about regionals."

"Thank you, Coach."

"And Desai?"

"Yes?"

"Call Kaveri. She's alone, she's injured, and she's your teammate. Rivals call each other when they're hurt. That's what makes them rivals and not enemies."

I hung up. Looked at my phone. Scrolled to Kaveri's number — saved, but never called, because calling your rival felt like admitting something I hadn't been ready to admit.

I pressed call.

It rang three times. Then:

"Hello?" Kaveri's voice, cautious, the voice of a person who doesn't recognize the number.

"It's Ishani."

A pause. The kind of pause that contained an entire history — four months of shared tracks and silent competition and the unspoken acknowledgment that they were the two best runners at St. Xavier's and had never once had a conversation that wasn't about running.

"Hi," Kaveri said.

"How's the knee?"

"Getting better. Slowly."

"Good. Because I need you back. The track's boring without someone to chase."

Another pause. Then a sound I hadn't expected. A laugh. Small, surprised, the laugh of a person who'd been sitting alone with her injury and her fear and had just received the last phone call she'd expected from the last person she'd expected.

"I'll be back," Kaveri said. "And when I am, I'm going to beat you."

"I know," I said.

And for the first time in two years, the fear in my stomach loosened. Not disappeared. Loosened. Made room for something else. Something that felt, if I was honest, a little bit like joy.

"See you on the track, Sharma."

"See you on the track, Desai."

I hung up. Looked at the medals on the shelf. They glowed in the evening light, gold and silver and bronze, the accumulated weight of four years of running from fear.

Tomorrow, I would run without a watch.

Tomorrow, I would find out what running felt like when you weren't afraid.