NAYE UCHAIYAN
Chapter 5: The Struggle
## Chapter 5: The Struggle
November arrived with Diwali, and Diwali arrived with noise.
The firecrackers started three days before the festival. The impatient ones, the kids who couldn't wait, the neighbours who treated noise pollution as a competitive sport. By the night of Diwali itself, the sky above Kothrud was a chaos of light and smoke and the specific thunderous cracking that made car alarms go off and dogs cower under beds and Kaveri's running schedule impossible.
She tried anyway. The morning of Diwali, 5 AM, she laced up her Nikes and stepped out of the building's entrance into a world that smelled like gunpowder and marigold and the sweet, cloying smoke of a thousand diyas. The pavement was littered with the detritus of last night's celebrations; spent rocket casings, strings of cracker paper, the sticky residue of chakris that had spun their incandescent circles on every doorstep.
She ran two kilometres before a fresh volley of firecrackers, someone, somewhere, celebrating at 5:15 AM with the enthusiasm of a person who'd never heard of sleep, exploded so close that she felt the concussion in her ribcage. She turned around and went home.
"You went running? On Diwali morning?" Aai looked at her with the expression reserved for people who had voluntarily chosen suffering when joy was available. "The whole city is celebrating and you're running in smoke."
"I need to train, Aai."
"You need to live, Kaveri. One day off won't end your career."
"Coach says consistency is—"
"Coach is not your mother. Come. Help me with the rangoli."
Kaveri helped with the rangoli. Aai had been making the same design for years, a lotus pattern at the entrance of the flat, using coloured powder that she bought from the vendor on Karve Road. The powder came in small plastic bags: red, yellow, blue, green, white. Aai worked with a concentration that elevated rangoli-making from decoration to something approaching meditation — her fingers pinching the powder, releasing it in thin, controlled lines, the pattern emerging like a photograph developing.
Kaveri's contribution was the outer border; a series of dots connected by curved lines, a simple pattern that required no artistic skill but demanded patience. She knelt beside Aai on the landing outside the flat, the concrete cool against her knees, the smell of powder mixing with the incense that Aai had lit at the small temple shelf inside.
Baba was in the kitchen, making poha, the Diwali-morning tradition, his one culinary contribution to the household, executed with the seriousness of a man performing a sacred rite. His poha was legendary in the building. Mrs. Joshi from the second floor had once asked for the recipe, and Baba had given it with the solemnity of someone passing down a family heirloom.
"More jaggery, Baba?" Kaveri called.
"The amount of jaggery in my poha is perfect. It has always been perfect. This is not a negotiable parameter."
"It's too sweet."
"It's exactly sweet enough. This is a debate that has been settled. I refer you to the Joshi-kaka precedent of 2019, when he tasted this poha and declared it, and I quote, 'divine.'"
"Joshi-kaka also thinks homeopathy works."
"His medical opinions are not relevant to his poha opinions."
Aai smiled. The smile she reserved for moments when her family was together and ridiculous and entirely themselves. The smile that existed in the spaces between the pressure and the expectations, in the cracks where ordinary happiness leaked through.
Diwali break was four days. Four days without practice, without the track, without Coach Patkar's stopwatch and Ishani's back and the relentless arithmetic of seconds and gaps.
On the first day, Kaveri was restless. She ran in the evening, after the crackers had subsided to a manageable level — doing laps of the colony's internal road, a 400-metre loop that wound between buildings and parked cars and the occasional stray dog that joined her for a lap before losing interest.
On the second day, she was less restless. Aai's brother, Mama, as Kaveri called him: came from Satara with his family, and the flat was suddenly full of people and food and the happy chaos of Indian family gatherings. Kaveri's cousin Riya was twelve, loud, and obsessed with K-pop. She'd arrived with a Bluetooth speaker and a playlist that she played at a volume that suggested she was trying to reach the K-pop idols directly.
"Kaveri-tai, do you know BTS?"
"I know they exist."
"That's not enough. You need to KNOW them. I'll educate you."
"I don't need to be educated about—"
"This is Jungkook. He's a Virgo. This is relevant information."
Kaveri surrendered. She sat on the bed in her room, the room she shared with the sewing machine and the almari and a pile of textbooks; and let Riya educate her about BTS with the dedication of a professor delivering a keynote lecture. The music was bright and fast and entirely unlike the AR Rahman that Kaveri ran to, but it had an energy that was infectious, and by the end of the session, Kaveri found herself humming a chorus she couldn't pronounce.
On the third day, she didn't run at all. She woke late, 8 AM, a time so scandalous by her standards that her body protested with the disorientation of a clock set to the wrong timezone. She ate breakfast (Baba's poha, leftover, still excellent). She helped Aai clean the flat — the post-Diwali clean-up, a ritual almost as significant as the festival itself, involving the removal of candle wax from every surface, the sweeping of cracker debris from the balcony, and the diplomatic redistribution of sweets that relatives had brought in quantities that suggested they were provisioning for a siege.
She sat on the balcony in the afternoon. The ground pressed cold through the fabric of her clothes. The October heat had fully given way to November's gentleness; the air was warm but not aggressive, the sun golden rather than white, the kind of weather that Pune wore like its finest clothing. From the fourth floor, she could see the road below, the neem trees, the pan-wallah on the corner whose tiny stall was a permanent fixture of the neighbourhood, as reliable as the sunrise.
She didn't think about running.
For one afternoon, she didn't think about splits or gaps or Ishani or Coach Patkar's targets. She sat on a plastic chair on the balcony and watched the world go by, the two-wheelers and the autos and the occasional cyclist, the women in bright saris, the men in white kurtas, the children running with the post-Diwali energy of sugar and gunpowder and freedom.
And something in her, something knotted, something wound so tight that she'd stopped noticing it, loosened.
Just a fraction. Just enough to breathe.
On the fourth day, she ran.
Not with the desperate, driven energy of someone chasing a time. With something else. Something lighter. She ran the Gymkhana circuit in the early morning, the air cool, the streets quiet, her feet finding the familiar rhythm on the familiar roads. She didn't check her watch. Didn't track her pace. Didn't think about the gap between her and anyone.
She just ran.
And for the first time in weeks, running felt like it used to feel. Like flight. Like freedom. Like the thing she did because her body was made for it, not because a number on a stopwatch demanded it.
Practice resumed on Monday. The team reassembled. Diwali-fed, slightly softer around the edges, carrying the residual lethargy of four days of sweets and family and not enough exercise. Coach Patkar surveyed them with the expression of a man assessing storm damage.
"You all look terrible," he said. "I can smell the kaju katli from here. Five laps. Warm up. We have work to do."
The five laps were agony. Kaveri's body, which had enjoyed its brief holiday from suffering, protested the return to work with every step. Her lungs felt smaller, her legs heavier, her stomach fuller — the cumulative effect of Aai's Diwali cooking, which had been generous in a way that only Indian mothers' cooking during festivals could be.
But she ran. And by the third lap, the heaviness started to lift. By the fifth, her body remembered what it was built for.
"Sharma." Coach Patkar, post-warm-up, clipboard in hand. "How was your Diwali?"
"Good, Coach."
"Did you train?"
"Two days out of four."
He nodded. No criticism; an acknowledgment that rest was part of training, even if his face suggested he'd personally spent Diwali doing hill repeats in his living room.
"Zonal championship is December 3rd. Three and a half weeks. I'm changing your training programme."
He handed her a sheet of paper. The handwriting was precise, each entry numbered:
1. Monday: 6K tempo run (target pace 4:10/km) 2. Tuesday: Interval training. 8 x 400m (target 82 seconds per interval, 90 seconds recovery) 3. Wednesday: 10K easy run (recovery pace) 4. Thursday: Hill repeats — 6 x Pashan hill (race effort, jog down) 5. Friday: Time trial. 3K (full effort) 6. Saturday: Long run. 12K (easy pace) 7. Sunday: Rest
"This is more than before," Kaveri said.
"Yes."
"Significantly more."
"Also yes."
"The intervals are faster than what I've been doing."
"That's the point. You've been running 3K intervals at 85 seconds. You need to be at 82. Three seconds per interval, over eight intervals, translates to roughly twelve seconds over 5K. Which would put your 5K time at 18:39."
"You said the target was 18:30."
"18:39 is the floor. The ceiling depends on how much you want it."
He walked away. Kaveri looked at the training plan. The numbers stared back at her — precise, demanding, the arithmetic of improvement laid out in Coach Patkar's handwriting like a contract.
She folded the paper and put it in her pocket. The paper was warm against her thigh for the rest of practice.
The new programme was brutal.
Not in the dramatic, cinematic way, no montage of suffering set to inspirational music. Brutal in the quiet, cumulative way that real training is brutal: the alarm at 5 AM when the body says no. The intervals that hurt from the third repetition onward. The long runs that turn the legs to concrete. The hip stretches that burn. The ice baths that Kaveri took in a bucket because they couldn't afford a proper ice bath: sitting on the bathroom floor with her legs in a plastic bucket filled with cold water and ice from the fridge, while Aai stood in the doorway and said "This cannot be healthy" with someone who believed that cold water was the enemy of human joints.
It was brutal, and it was working.
The Friday time trials showed the progress in the only language Coach Patkar trusted: numbers.
Week 1 post-Diwali: 10:36 (3K) Week 2: 10:31 Week 3: 10:28
Each improvement was small, a few seconds, a few tenths; but the trajectory was unmistakable. She was getting faster. Not through inspiration or willpower or the kind of breakthrough that made for good stories. Through work. Through the grinding, patient accumulation of marginal gains that was the only reliable path to improvement.
But the gap to Ishani wasn't closing.
Because Ishani was also getting faster. In the same time trials:
Week 1: 10:30 Week 2: 10:26 Week 3: 10:23
The gap held at six seconds. Sometimes five. Once, devastatingly, eight; a bad day for Kaveri, a stomach cramp that struck at the two-kilometre mark and turned the final kilometre into a negotiation between her will and her intestines.
Six seconds. The ocean wasn't shrinking anymore. It was holding steady, a constant distance between two boats moving at the same speed.
The struggle wasn't just physical.
It was the maths test that came back at seventy-one percent: a number that triggered a phone call from Mrs. Deshpande to Aai, and a conversation at the dining table that evening that Kaveri wished she could unhear.
"Seventy-one," Aai said. Not angry — worse than angry. Worried. The specific Indian mother worry that expressed itself as disappointment, which was more devastating than any shouting. "Kaveri, your Class 8 marks were ninety-plus."
"Class 8 was easier."
"Class 8 was at a different school with different expectations. But YOU are the same person. You're capable of more."
"I'm training fifteen hours a week, Aai. Plus school. Plus homework. There aren't enough hours."
"Then maybe you need to reduce training."
The words hung in the air like smoke from a Diwali cracker: toxic, choking, impossible to disperse.
"I can't reduce training. Zonals are in two weeks."
"And what happens after zonals? Regionals? State? Nationals? There's always another race, Kaveri. But there's only one Class 9. Only one set of marks that goes on your board exam record."
Baba said nothing. He sat at the table, his reading glasses on, the Sakal folded beside him, and he said nothing. His silence was louder than Aai's words.
"I'll study more," Kaveri said. "I'll manage the time better."
"You said that last month."
"I'll actually do it this month."
Aai looked at her. The look that mothers give when they know their child is making a promise that circumstances won't allow them to keep, the look of someone who can see the collision coming and is powerless to prevent it.
"Eat your dinner," Aai said finally. "The dal is getting cold."
Kaveri ate. The dal was yellow, thin, flavoured with cumin and garlic and the faintest hint of something Kaveri couldn't name: the taste of home, maybe, the accumulated seasoning of a thousand meals cooked in the same pot.
She ate, and she thought about hours. About the twenty-four that each day contained and the impossibility of fitting everything into them. School: seven hours. Training: three hours (including travel). Drops hit her forearms with the tiny, sharp percussion of cold on warm skin. Homework: two hours. Sleep: seven hours. That left five hours for eating, bathing, the commute, and the basic mechanics of being alive.
Zero hours for studying more. Zero hours for the extra revision that would lift seventy-one to eighty-five to ninety. Zero hours for the life that Aai wanted her to have. A student whose marks were good and whose future was secure and whose path led to engineering or medicine or commerce, the trinity of acceptable Indian careers.
Something would have to give. Kaveri knew this with the cold clarity of someone who'd been doing the arithmetic and finding the same answer every time.
She just didn't know what.
The night before the zonal championship, Kaveri couldn't sleep.
She lay on her bed, the single bed in the room she shared with the sewing machine, and stared at the ceiling. The ceiling had a crack in it, a thin line running from the light fitting to the corner, that had been there for as long as she could remember. As a child, she'd imagined it was a river on a map, flowing from one unknown country to another. Now it was just a crack — a flaw in the concrete, a reminder that buildings, like people, were imperfect.
Her phone buzzed. A message from Tara:
"Can't sleep. Eating a banana. Aai says bananas help with insomnia. Aai is wrong but the banana is nice. You awake?"
Kaveri typed back: "Yes. Nervous."
"What are you nervous about?"
"Everything."
"That's too broad. Be specific. My brother says anxiety is reduced by 47% when you name the specific thing you're afraid of. He read it in a journal."
Kaveri thought about it.
"I'm afraid of running the same race I always run. Second behind Ishani. Close but not close enough. Improving but never arriving."
A pause. Then:
"What if second is where you're supposed to be right now? Not forever. Just right now. What if the point isn't arriving; it's the running?"
"That sounds like a motivational poster."
"It sounds like a motivational poster because it's true. Motivational posters aren't wrong, they're just badly designed. The truth doesn't stop being true just because someone printed it in Comic Sans over a picture of a mountain."
Kaveri laughed. Alone, in the dark, her phone screen the only light, she laughed.
"Thanks, Tara."
"You're welcome. Now sleep. Tomorrow you run. And whatever happens, second, first, seventeenth — you'll still be Kaveri, and you'll still be my friend, and I'll still have bananas."
Kaveri put the phone down. Closed her eyes. The crack in the ceiling was invisible in the dark, and the flat was quiet, and somewhere in the building below, a dog barked once and fell silent.
She slept.
© 2026 Atharva Inamdar. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Free to read and share with attribution.