Chapter 11: Veer

# Chapter 11: Veer

## The Bond

Something changes between Pallavi and me. The change happening not in one moment but over days, over the days that follow Gauri's arrival, the arrival that shifts the model flat's dynamics the way a third leg changes a stool: from unstable to stable, from wobbling to standing, from the precarious balance of two to the solid geometry of three.

The change is: Pallavi begins to let me hold Kiaan.

Not just hold, feed. Not just feed — care for. Not just care for, love.

The word love being the word that I have been avoiding because the word implies permanence and permanence implies future and future implies that I believe we will survive and the believing-we-will-survive is the thing I have not permitted myself because permitting requires hope and hope is the thing that the new world rations the way the old world rationed water during drought: sparingly, carefully, with the knowledge that the supply is limited and the limited means: don't waste it.

But Kiaan does not know about rationed hope. Kiaan does not know about the virus or the dead city or the model flat or the fact that his mother is dead in a Maruti Ertiga on the Katraj-Dehu Road bypass. Kiaan knows: milk, warmth, the feel of Pallavi's heartbeat, the feel of my voice, the weight of Bholu's head on the blanket beside him, and now the sound of Gauri singing. Gauri who sings to Kiaan in the evenings, the singing — an old Marathi lullaby that her mausi used to sing:

Nimbonichya zaadaakhali* *Chandoba jhopala* *Chaandanyaancha paalna

Under the neem tree / the moon fell asleep / the stars' cradle / the wind rocked it.

The lullaby — Sunanda Mausi's lullaby, the lullaby that Gauri had heard as a child when she visited Baner and that Gauri now sings to Kiaan because singing the lullaby is singing to Mausi: I remember. I carry your song. I give your song to this baby who is not mine and not yours but who is ours because we are the ones who are here.

Kiaan sleeps when Gauri sings. Kiaan sleeps with the profound unconsciousness of a baby who is fed and warm and held and who does not know that the world has ended because the world that Kiaan knows has not ended: the world that Kiaan knows is: milk, arms, blanket, song. And that world is intact.

I feed Kiaan for the first time on a Wednesday. The Wednesday, the Wednesday: indistinguishable from Monday or Thursday or Saturday because the days of the week are the old world's categories and the new world does not have categories, the new world has only: day and night, light and dark, the binary that predates calendars and that has reasserted itself now that calendars are gone.

Pallavi shows me how. She shows me with the patience of a woman who has been doing this for seven weeks and who has developed the expertise that seven weeks of daily practice produces, the expertise being: hold his head here, arm under his back, bottle at this angle, teat flat against the roof of his mouth.

"Yahan. Haath yahan rakh."

Here. Put your hand here.

She moves my right hand. Moves it so that it cradles Kiaan's head, the head that is heavier than I expected (baby heads being heavier than they look because baby heads contain the brain that is growing faster than any other organ, the growing, which was the developmental explosion that the first year produces: the brain doubling in size, the doubling, the engineering project that Kiaan's body is executing while the rest of the world has stopped executing anything).

"Ab bottle de."

Now give him the bottle.

I bring the bottle to his mouth. He latches. The latching: instant, the instant, which was baby's expertise: Kiaan knows bottles. Kiaan has been latching onto bottles since Day One. The latching is his skill, his only skill, and he executes it with the efficiency that COEP's placement cell would have admired.

"Wah. Dekh. Pi raha hai."

Look. He's drinking.

He is drinking. The milk flowing through the teat into his mouth, the mouth working with the rhythmic sucking that is the baby's engine: suck, swallow, breathe, suck, swallow, breathe. The rhythm: the first rhythm that humans learn, the rhythm that precedes speech and walking and thinking, the rhythm that is the body's first poem.

I watch him. I watch his eyes. The eyes that are looking at me and not looking at me, the looking; unfocused gaze of a two-and-a-half-month-old who sees shapes and light and faces but who does not yet distinguish between faces, the not-distinguishing that was developmental stage that will change in a few weeks when Kiaan will begin to know: this face is Pallavi. This face is Veer. This face is Gauri. This face is Bholu.

But for now, Kiaan sees: face. And face is enough. Face is the thing that feeds him and holds him and sings to him and is present, and the present is the thing that Kiaan needs.

"Kaisa lag raha hai?" Pallavi asks. How does it feel?

"Achha," I say. The word: insufficient — the word, word that does not capture the feeling but that is the only word I have, the only word that a twenty-three-year-old man who has never held a baby before two months ago can produce: achha. Good. The word that covers everything from acceptable to transcendent because Hindi uses achha the way English uses fine; as the default, the safe word, the word that does not commit to an emotion.

But the truth is: the feeling is not achha. The feeling is larger than achha. The feeling is the feeling that the body produces when the body is holding a life; holding a life that is small and fragile and trusting and that is drinking milk from a bottle that you are providing, the providing —: you are keeping this life alive. You are the reason this mouth has milk. You are the reason this body is warm. You are, in this moment, the thing that stands between this baby and the void.

The feeling is: responsibility. And the responsibility is: terrifying. And the terrifying is: also beautiful. And the beautiful is the thing that I have not felt in seven weeks.

---

Gauri and I talk. We talk on the evening walks, the walks that have become our ritual, the ritual, which was: 6 PM, after Pallavi has fed Kiaan and put him down for his evening nap, Gauri and I walk through the Sai Srushti Phase 2 development. We walk through the incomplete landscaping. Through the red-soil paths and past the concrete swimming pool and around the roofless clubhouse. Bholu walks between us, the between — Bholu's position: always between the two humans, always the mediator, the mediator whose presence says I am here. Between you. Connecting you.

Gauri talks about Nagpur. She talks about VNIT — about the hostel, about her friends (dead), about her professors (dead), about the mess food (terrible even before the virus), about the annual tech fest (Axis: the tech fest that VNIT hosted every February and that Gauri had helped organize, the organizing —: logistics, sponsors, the kind of work that engineers did when the engineering was not engineering but was event management disguised as engineering).

She talks about her family. Her parents: alive, maybe, she says. Alive-maybe because her parents are not in Nagpur and not in Pune but in Amravati, the Amravati — the city between Nagpur and Aurangabad, the city that was her parents' home and that she has not been able to reach because Amravati is four hours from Pune by car and the four hours require petrol and petrol is the thing that is running out because petrol pumps are closed and the closed means that the petrol in the pumps is the last petrol and the last petrol is being consumed by the generators that she and I have found and that we use for charging the inverter battery and that will, someday, run out.

"Shayad zinda hain," she says. Maybe they're alive. The shayad being the word that the new world uses instead of hain (they are): shayad. Maybe. The maybe — the condition that the virus has imposed on every statement about every person: maybe they are alive. Maybe they are dead. Maybe they are somewhere between alive and dead, the somewhere-between, which was limbo that the virus has created for everyone who is unaccounted for.

"Shayad," I say. Confirming the maybe. Not denying it. Not confirming it. Just: shayad. The word that is the new world's conjunction: the word that connects hope to reality without committing to either.

She talks about her mausi. She talks about Sunanda Mausi the way people talk about the dead who mattered, the talking: specific. Not she was a good person (the generic eulogy that meant nothing). But: she made the best sabudana khichdi on fasting days. And: she wore Cuticura talcum powder, the Cuticura that smelled like a grandmother even though she was an aunt. And: she kept her sandals arranged by colour at the door, brown for daily, black for school, gold for festivals; and the arrangement was so precise that moving one sandal by two centimetres would produce a lecture.

The specificity, the love. The love that lives in the details, the details that the generic eulogy cannot capture and that the specific eulogy captures perfectly: the sabudana khichdi and the Cuticura and the sandals-by-colour. The details that say: *I knew her. I knew her deeply. I knew the small things.

I talk about Harsh. I talk about Harsh for the first time since finding him dead, talk about him not as the dead friend but as the living friend. The living Harsh who had beaten me at BGMI seventeen consecutive times and who had claimed each victory with the same sentence: "bhai, tu engineering kar, gaming chhod de." Bro, stick to engineering, quit gaming. The living Harsh who had been my partner in every COEP hackathon and who had produced, in our final-year hackathon, a project so bad that the judges had asked us if it was a joke (it was not a joke, it was a health-monitoring app that crashed every forty-three seconds, the forty-three, the number thatHarsh had calculated as the mean-time-between-failures and that he had presented to the judges as a feature: "sir, it auto-restarts every 43 seconds for security purposes").

Gauri laughs. The laughing, the laughing: second laugh(the first, the VNIT-ka-faayda joke). The second laugh being louder than the first. The second laugh being the crack in the wall widening into a gap and the gap letting the light through.

"Woh sachchi mein judges se bola — security purposes?"

He actually told the judges: security purposes?

"Haan. Aur judges ne maan liya. Third prize mila humein."

Yes. And the judges believed it. We got third prize.

The story: true, the story of Harsh and the hackathon that was one of the stories that I had told a hundred times in the before-times and that I had not told since the virus and that I am now telling again because Gauri's presence has made the telling possible. The telling, the resurrection: not of Harsh (Harsh cannot be resurrected) but of Harsh's memory. The memory that the telling keeps alive. The memory that says: he existed. He was funny. He was brilliant. He was my friend. And the friend is gone but the story remains.

"Achha insaan tha," Gauri says. He was a good person.

"Haan. Sabse achha."

Yes. The best.

We walk. We walk through the red-soil paths. Bholu between us. The evening sun behind the hills. The gulmohar sky. The silence that the evening produces in a dead city. The silence that is the sound of no traffic and no television and no children playing and no Azaan from the mosque and no temple bells and no bhajan speakers and no argument between Deshpande Uncle and his wife about money.

The silence that is the sound of everything we have lost.

And the footsteps that are the sound of everything we have kept.