Chapter 10: Jai Ka Patan

## Chapter 10: Jai Ka Patan

VIVEK

It happens on a Tuesday.

I know it's a Tuesday because I've been counting days since I arrived. Scratching small lines into the wooden frame of my cot with an edge that I found in the potato field and that I keep in my pocket, a talisman of resistance, a tiny tool that the cameras don't know about. Twenty-three lines. Twenty-three days.

The morning is ordinary. Bell. Dalia. Farm. The sky is cloudless, the April sun already fierce by nine o'clock, the laterite baking to a hard crust that cracks under the Wellington boots. Bharat has us in the far field today; the one nearest the treeline, where we're preparing a new bed for chillies. Green chillies, specifically. Bharat has been petitioning Lakshman for chilli seeds for a week, and the scouts apparently found a packet in an abandoned nursery near Ponda.

"Mirchi ke bina khaana kya khaana," Bharat says, dropping the seed packet into Esha's hand with the pride of someone who has conquered a bureaucracy. "Ab dekhna — do mahine mein poora camp mirchi-mirchi karega."

I'm digging. My hands, which were destroyed in the first week, are now instruments of callus and scar, the pads thickened, the blisters long healed into hard ridges that grip the shovel handle without pain. My back, which screamed at every bend, now bends automatically, the muscles trained by repetition into a mechanical efficiency that requires no thought.

This is what captivity does. It makes the body competent while the mind deteriorates.

Esha is beside me, as she always is. We work in a rhythm now, dig, turn, dig, turn — the synchrony of two people who have spent hours in proximity and whose bodies have learned to anticipate each other's movements the way musicians in a jugalbandi learn to anticipate tempo changes.

"Vivek," she says. Low. Under the sound of the shovels.

"Haan?"

"Jai raat ko phir gaya tha."

I stop digging. "Kya?"

"Kal raat. Akela. Ghar mein."

The information hits me like cold water. "Kyun? Plan toh tha ki hum saath mein —"

"Woh sealed section, woh kholna chahta tha. Woh kehta hai ki asli raaz wahan hai. Woh wait nahi kar sakta tha."

"Esha — agar woh pakda gaya —"

"Woh pakda nahi gaya. Kal raat. Lekin —" She pauses. Drives the shovel into the earth with unnecessary force. "Woh phir jayega. Aaj raat. Aur woh mujhe message nahi bhej raha ab. Usne kaha. 'Ab se direct. Tere through nahi.'"

She's upset. Not at me — at Jai. At the recklessness of a young man who has been so consumed by the need to know that he's abandoned the discipline that kept him alive.

"Usse rokna padega," I say.

"Kaise? Tu usse raat ko mil sakta hai: lekin usse rokna? Woh sunne wala nahi hai."

She's right. Jai is driven by something that I recognise because I share it: the specific fury of a person who has been caged and who will do anything, risk everything, to understand why. The difference is that I have Chaya and Dhruv to anchor me. Jai has nobody.

"Main usse baat karunga," I say. "Aaj raat."

"Vivek." She puts her hand on my arm. The touch is brief, two seconds, maybe three; but it stops me. Her hand is small and rough, the hand of a young woman who was not meant to be a farmer but who has become one, and the warmth of it on my skin is a reminder that human contact exists, that touch exists, that the world has not been entirely reduced to shovels and dirt and fear.

"Dhyan se," she says. "Please."

---

I don't get the chance.

The alarm comes at midday.

Not the bell. The alarm. A different sound, one I haven't heard before: a sustained, high-pitched wail, like a siren, emanating from somewhere near the house. It cuts through the farm like a blade, silencing the chickens, startling the horses, sending Bholu into a barking fit from wherever he's been napping.

The camp responds with the precision of a drilled unit. People emerge from tents, from the kitchen, from the construction zone. They converge on the clearing, the picnic-bench clearing, the centre of the camp — with the distinct urgency of people who know that the alarm means something and that the something is not good.

I run with them. Esha beside me. Bharat ahead of us, his long legs eating the ground. Karen, Kevin, Paul; all converging, all moving with the fear-propelled speed of people who have learned that when the siren sounds, you go to the clearing and you stand and you wait.

Chaya is already there. She's near the front of the crowd, Dhruv in her arms, her face white. I push through to her. Take her hand.

"Kya hua?" she whispers.

"Nahi pata."

The crowd assembles. Forty-seven people; minus the guards, who are not assembling but positioning, their rifles held at their sides, their faces the blank faces of men who know what's coming and have no opinion about it.

Three guards are at the clearing's edge. One, the young one, the one with the pale eyes and the empty face, stands at the front, his rifle not at his side but in his warm hands, the barrel not pointed at us but not pointed away either. The position of a man who is ready.

Lakshman emerges from the direction of the house.

He walks across the lawn with his usual unhurried gait, but today the gait is different: slower, heavier, the walk of a man carrying something. He's wearing the soft linen kurta, the Kolhapuri chappals. Chandni walks beside him, her face a mask.

He enters the clearing. Stands before us. Looks down at the ground for a long moment, as though whatever he's about to say causes him pain.

It's a performance. I know it's a performance. But it's a good one.

"Saathiyon," he begins. His voice is low, controlled, someone who has rehearsed this. "Mujhe aaj kuch bahut dukhi karne wali baat batani hai."

He looks up. His eyes sweep the crowd.

"Hum sab jaante hain Jai ko. Humara saathi. Aksar woh ek kanoon ka paalan karne wala, mehnat karne wala naujawan raha hai. Lekin, hum mein se bahut logon ko yeh bhi pata hai ki Jai aksar bahut sawaalen karta tha. Aur kuch baar: usne rules ki hadd paar ki."

Lakshman's eyes find Chaya. The look is deliberate; a reminder, a warning, a reference to the day she challenged him about the house. She stiffens beside me. I squeeze her hand.

"Lekin jaise maine kaha, Jai hamesha ek accha naagrik raha hai. Ek imandaar, dayalu insaan."

He pauses. Looks down again. The performance of grief, perfectly timed.

"Aaj tak."

My stomach drops. The free-fall sensation of a person who knows what's coming but can't stop it, can't move, can't do anything but stand and watch as the thing they feared arrives.

Does he know about our plan? About the alliance? About the twenty-five people who know what's in the basement?

"Hum sabko pata hai ki ghar ke paas jaana mana hai. Yeh humara sabse important rule hai. Aur Jai — Jai ne yeh rule toda."

The crowd murmurs. A collective intake of breath. Beside me, Chaya's hand goes rigid in mine. Behind me, I feel Bharat's presence; his massive body, suddenly still, a stillness that is processing shock and terror simultaneously.

"Sirf yeh nahi. Jai ne kisi aur ke saath milke ghar mein ghusne ki saazish ki."

Kisi aur ke saath. With someone else. My vision narrows. The world contracts to a tunnel — Lakshman at the end, his face, his words, the casual precision with which he's dismantling everything.

Does he mean me? Does he know?

But Lakshman's eyes don't find me. They sweep the crowd without stopping, without focusing. If he knows, he's not showing it. If he's waiting for me to break, to flinch, to reveal myself; he's patient.

"Aur isliye. Jai ko sazaa milni chahiye."

Lakshman looks behind him.

And Jai appears.

Two guards march him into the clearing, one on each side, their hands on his arms, rifles slung across their backs. Jai's wrists are bound, cable ties, the same kind they used on me in the van — and his face —

Oh god.

His face.

The left eye is swollen shut, a dark, purple-black mass of damaged tissue that no longer looks like an eye socket but like a bruised fruit. His lips are split in three places, the blood dried in dark lines down his chin. A gash runs from his temple to his ear, deep enough that I can see the white of the tissue beneath the skin. His nose. I think his nose is broken. It's at an angle, the bridge shifted to the left, the nostrils crusted with blood.

They beat him. With fists, with boots, with something; a pipe, a rifle butt, something hard and unforgiving. They beat him the way you beat a thing, not a person.

The crowd gasps. Chaya's fingernails dig into my palm. Bholu, who has found me in the crowd and is pressed against my leg, gives a single, sharp bark. Someone who smells blood and fear and violence.

"Yeh kya kiya uske saath?" A voice from behind me. I don't know whose.

"Jaane do! Jaane do humein!" Another voice. Terrified. Cracking.

And then — Kabir's voice, high and thin, from somewhere in the crowd: "Debbie Aunty, mujhe yahan se le jao. Please."

"Chalo, Kabir." Devika's voice. Hard. Controlled. "Humein jaana chahiye —"

But they can't go. Because the young guard, the one with the pale eyes, has stepped forward, his rifle levelled at the crowd. Not aimed at anyone specifically. Aimed at everyone.

The crowd freezes. The murmurs die. Even Kabir's crying softens to a whimper.

Lakshman doesn't react to the guard's action. He doesn't wave him down. He lets the moment exist, the rifle, the crowd, the stillness: for three seconds. Four. Five. The stillness of a room where everyone understands the rules and the rules include the possibility of death.

Then he raises his rough hands. Palms down. The gesture.

The guard lowers his rifle. Steps back.

"Shaant," says Lakshman. His voice is warm again. The switch. The seamless, horrifying switch. "Hum sab intelligent log hain. Samaj ke naagrik hain. Hum shaanti se rahenge. Haan?"

Nods. Slow, terrified nods, the bobbing heads of puppets whose strings are pulled by fear.

"Accha."

The guards bring Jai to the centre of the clearing. They force him to his knees; one guard pushing down on each shoulder, his bound hands behind his back, his battered face lowered toward the ground.

And Jai, Jai, who planned the routes through the cameras' blind spots, who mapped the guards' rotations, who crept into the house alone because he couldn't wait, because the need to know burned hotter than the need to survive — Jai does not look at the crowd. He does not search for me. He keeps his eyes down, and I understand: he's protecting me. Even now. Even beaten and bound and kneeling. He's protecting me by not looking at me.

"Jai," says Lakshman. "Kya tum mante ho ki tumne Samaj ka sabse important rule toda? Ki tum ghar ke paas gaye: jiske baare mein tumhe bahut saaf bata diya gaya tha ki woh out of bounds hai?"

Jai opens his battered mouth. The sound that comes out is not his voice; it's a voice whose jaw has been damaged, whose teeth have been loosened, whose throat has been compressed by hands that were not interested in conversation.

"Haan," he says.

"Aur kya tum mante ho ki tumne kisi aur ke saath milke ghar mein ghusne ki saazish ki?"

"Haan."

My heart stops. Kisi aur ke saath. The other person. Me. He's admitting to conspiring with someone, but he's not naming me. He's taking it alone.

"Theek hai. Tumne apne saathiyon ke saamne yeh maan liya. Ki tumne rules tode."

Lakshman holds out his hand.

A guard reaches for his belt. Unholsters a pistol. Passes it to Lakshman.

The world erupts.

"NAHI!" — from the crowd. Multiple voices, overlapping, a chorus of denial.

"RUKO!" — Blake. Bharat. The giant's voice, louder than anyone's, shaking the cold air.

"KABIR KO LE JAO!". Devika, shielding the boy, turning his face away.

"PAGAL HO KYA?". Chaya, beside me, her voice raw, her hand crushing mine.

Dhruv screams. The baby, who has been still through all of this, erupts into that terrified, piercing wail of an infant who cannot understand violence but can feel it — feel it through the warm air, through his mother's body, through the frequency of forty-seven people's collective terror.

Bholu barks. Not the gentle bark he gives Kabir, not the curious bark he gives strangers. The deep, rapid, furious bark of a dog who has identified a threat and is warning his pack.

The young guard steps forward. Rifle up. Aimed at Bharat: the biggest target, the loudest voice.

A second guard joins him. Rifle up. Aimed at the centre of the crowd.

A third.

Three rifles. Forty-seven people. And a man with a pistol, standing over a kneeling boy.

The crowd goes still. Not because they've been calmed. Because they've been calculated against. Three rifles can kill a dozen people before anyone reaches the guards. The math is simple. The math is fatal.

"Shaant," says Lakshman. Not shouting. Not needing to. The pistol in his rough hand says everything his voice doesn't.

"DEBBIE AUNTY, PLEASE!" Kabir's wail cuts through everything; the stillness, the fear, the guns. A seven-year-old boy, alone in the world except for a woman who isn't his mother and a dog who isn't his, screaming because the world that killed his family is killing someone else and he can't understand why.

Lakshman doesn't acknowledge the child. Doesn't look at Dhruv, screaming in Chaya's arms. Doesn't register the existence of the two most vulnerable people in this camp.

He points the pistol at Jai's head.

Jai closes his eyes. And for the first time since they brought him into the clearing, for the first time since the beating, the binding, the march; he breaks.

A sob. Long, anguished, the sound of a young man who is twenty-two years old and who survived a pandemic alone and who crept into a house to find the truth and who is now going to die for it.

"Please," he says. "Mujhe mat maaro."

Lakshman presses the barrel against Jai's temple.

"Tumne rules tode, Jai. Sabse important rules. Aur isliye: tumhe apne actions ki gambhirta samajhni hogi."

And Leo, Lakshman, the man in the linen kurta, the man with the Kolhapuri chappals, the man who calls us parivar — pulls the trigger.

The sound is not like in films. It's not a bang. It's an explosion, a concentrated detonation that cracks the warm air and splits the world into before and after. Before the trigger. After the trigger. Two separate universes, divided by a sound that I will hear every night for the rest of my life. The evening air was layered with the smell of incense from the neighbour’s puja and the distant, greasy warmth of street food being fried. The road smelled of hot tar and exhaust and the sweet rot of overripe fruit from the vendor cart. Jai's body falls. The side of his head, the side that was facing Lakshman: is no longer there. What remains is red and grey and wrong, fundamentally wrong, the wrongness of a human body that has been opened in a way that human bodies are not designed to be opened.

He falls to the laterite. The red soil receives him. The blood spreads: slow, thick, the colour of the earth it soaks into, as though the ground has been waiting for it.

I don't know if I'm breathing. I don't know if I'm standing. The world has contracted to a single point: Jai's body, on the ground, the hole in his head, the pistol in Lakshman's hand.

Around me: screaming. Vomiting. Chaya's arm around me. Bholu's bark, on and on, an animal who cannot understand what has happened but knows that it is the worst thing.

Kabir is wailing. Somewhere behind me, Devika is holding him, turning his face into her chest, her hand over his ear, trying to block the sound of the gunshot that is already inside him and will never leave.

Dhruv screams. Chaya has her hand over his eyes, but you can't cover a baby's ears with one hand, and the gunshot is in him too, the sound that babies shouldn't know but that this baby now knows, stored somewhere in the developing architecture of a brain that is learning, every day, that the world is a place where people die.

Lakshman hands the pistol back to the guard. The guard reholsters it. The motion is casual; the casualness of routine.

Lakshman turns to us. His arms spread. The angel-of-death posture.

"Yeh sabak ho," he announces over the screaming, over the crying, over the barking. "Hum Samaj ke rules follow karte hain. Yeh humari vyavastha hai. Jo follow karenge — unhe reward milega. Jo nahi karenge —"

He looks at Jai's body. Doesn't need to finish the sentence.

Then he turns. Walks away. Chandni beside him, rigid, expressionless. The guards fall in behind them, leaving two men to deal with the body.

The clearing empties slowly. People stagger away; to their tents, to the farm, to anywhere that isn't here. Some are crying. Some are vomiting. Some are simply walking, their faces blank, their eyes seeing nothing, the exact blankness of people who have witnessed something that their minds refuse to process.

Chaya pulls me away. Her hand on my arm, firm, guiding. Bholu at my heels. Dhruv still screaming.

We reach our tent. We go inside. She zips it shut.

And I stand, the ground solid beneath my feet, there. In the dim, polyester-filtered light of a Goan afternoon. And I see Jai's face, the battered, broken face, and I hear the sound, the crack, the explosion, the splitting of the world, and I know two things with absolute certainty.

One: Jai died to protect me. He could have named me. He could have said Vivek was with me, Vivek came to the house, Vivek knows everything. He didn't. He took the bullet alone.

Two: some way, somehow — we must escape this place.

And if we are to do so, then we must all work together.

Not tomorrow. Not when we're ready. Now.

Because the man who killed Jai will kill us too. He'll kill us all, one by one, whenever we become inconvenient, whenever we ask the wrong question or look at the wrong building or refuse to farm the wrong potato.

I look at Chaya. She looks at me. Her face is pale. Her eyes are wet. But her jaw is set.

"Ab?" she says.

"Ab."

---