SAMAJ KA SACH
Chapter 12: Raakh Se Aag
## Chapter 12: Raakh Se Aag
VIVEK
The camp after Jai's execution is a different country.
The same tents, the same picnic benches, the same vegetable patches and the same pig named Guddu rooting in the same trough. But the cold air has changed. Thickened, as though the gunshot has left a residue that settles on everything, a fine, invisible dust of fear that coats the food and the cold water and the breath of every person who was standing in that clearing when Lakshman pulled the trigger.
People don't laugh anymore. They speak in whispers, if they speak at all. The communal meals, once the camp's only genuine pleasure, the time when people relaxed and told stories and Karen made jokes about the chickens; have become still affairs, forty-seven heads bowed over thalis, the only sounds the scrape of fingers on steel and the occasional whimper of a child who is not Kabir but who is young enough to feel the fear without understanding it.
Kabir has stopped coming to meals. Devika brings him food in his tent, where he stays all day, reading the same Goosebumps book he finished weeks ago, the rough pages so worn that the words are fading. Bholu goes to him, every day, without fail, the dog trotting to the boy's tent and lying outside it, ears pricked, guarding. When Kabir comes out, briefly, for fresh air, for the bathroom. Bholu walks beside him, his body pressed against the boy's leg, a living wall between Kabir and the world that hurt him.
Esha is quiet. Quieter than usual, which is a depth of calm that approaches stillness. She works beside me on the farm, shovelling, planting, feeding the horses — but the softness that she showed in the stables is gone, replaced by something harder, something that I recognise as the specific armour that people build when they've been reminded that the world can kill them at any moment.
Bharat doesn't sing anymore. Before the execution, he sang while he worked: old Marathi folk songs, the ones that farmers sing in the fields, the rhythmic, repetitive melodies that make the work bearable. Now he works without a word, skin prickling, his massive body moving through the motions without the soundtrack that made it human.
Karen cries. Not openly. She's too smart for that, too aware of the cameras. But I see her eyes, red and swollen, when she arrives at the farm in the morning. I see the way she pauses between tasks, staring at nothing, her face collapsed into distinct grief, not crying because the tears have temporarily run out.
Even the guards are different. The young one, the one with the pale eyes, the one who aimed his rifle at the crowd, patrols with a swagger now, a swagger that has been validated, whose authority has been proven. He looks at us the way a farmer looks at livestock; with disinterested assessment, owning what he surveys.
And Lakshman walks the lawn. Every day, as before. the soft linen kurta, the Kolhapuri chappals, the smile. The same smile. Unchanged. Unaffected. The smile of killing a boy in front of fifty people and sleeping well at night.
I hate him with a purity that surprises me. I have never hated anyone; not James and Chris, whoever they were in the original story, not the virus, not even the god that I used to pray to in Amma's mandir and who took her anyway. Hate was always too heavy for me, too consuming, a thing that I left to people with larger hearts and smaller imaginations.
But I hate Lakshman. I hate his smile and his chappals and his linen and his word, parivar — and the casual, practised motion with which he pressed a pistol to a boy's head and fired. I hate him with every callus on my hands, every ache in my back, every scar on my stomach where the taser hit.
And hate, I discover, is not a weakness. Hate, properly contained, properly directed, is fuel.
Three days after the execution, I call a meeting.
Not a meeting, exactly. Meetings are visible, conspicuous, the kind of thing that cameras catch and guards report. What I call is something smaller: a series of whispered conversations, conducted in the camera-free zones, relayed through the network that we built before Jai died and that his death has, paradoxically, strengthened.
Because Jai's execution has done what weeks of quiet persuasion could not. It has shown every person in this camp, not told, not whispered, not hinted: shown them, with the incontrovertible evidence of a bullet through a boy's skull, what Lakshman is.
The twenty-five who knew before the execution still know. But now, the other twenty-two know too. Not the details; not the basement, not the military crates, not the sealed section. But the essential truth: they are prisoners, and their jailer will kill them if they disobey.
This truth, once seen, cannot be unseen. And the people who have seen it are angry.
The plan comes together in the stables.
Not all at once; in pieces, over days, assembled the way the camp's huts are assembled: from salvaged materials, with improvised tools, by people who are making it up as they go.
The core group: me, Chaya, Esha, Bharat, Karen, Kevin, Paul, Devika. Eight people. The inner circle.
The wider group: another thirty or so, informed through the network, aware of the plan's general shape but not its specifics. The specifics are dangerous, if even one person is caught with specific knowledge, the entire operation collapses.
The plan is simple. Simple plans are the only plans that work when your army is made of farmers and cooks and a retired schoolteacher.
Phase One: Distraction. At dinner, on the chosen night, an incident in the kitchen. A fire, controlled, small enough to be realistic, large enough to require attention. Pushpa and Savita, Chaya's kitchen colleagues, will set it. Not in the main cooking area; in the storage tent, where the dried goods are kept. The fire will draw guards and camp leadership to the kitchen, away from the clearing and the camp's north edge.
Phase Two: Exodus. While the fire burns and the guards respond, the camp evacuates. Not through the treeline, the guards' default position, but through the stables. Beyond the stables, behind the slope where the horses graze, there's a gap in the estate's perimeter. Esha found it — a section where the forest meets a drainage ditch that runs downhill, away from the estate, toward the valley below. The ditch is overgrown, invisible from the cameras, and wide enough for a person to crawl through.
Phase Three: Dispersal. Once through the ditch, into the forest. Not as a group, a group of forty is slow, visible, impossible to hide. In pairs or small clusters, each with a direction, each with a destination. The coast is west, eight to ten kilometres through forest, then the road to Panjim. The highway is south, longer, maybe fifteen kilometres, but more options for transport and shelter.
The plan's weakness is obvious: the guards. Even with the distraction, there will be armed men between us and freedom. Not all the guards will respond to a kitchen fire. Some will stay at their posts, the treeline, the house, the perimeter.
Bharat's solution: "Ghode."
"Ghode?"
"Haan. Teen ghode hain. Agar teen log ghode pe nikle, alag direction mein: guards ko choice karni padegi. Kiski taraf jaayein? Teen targets, tez, alag-alag direction mein. Tab tak baaki log ditch se nikal jaayenge."
"Lekin ghode pe kaun jayega? Woh toh direct line of fire mein honge."
"Main jaaunga," says Bharat. Simply. The way he says everything — without performance, without emphasis. The declaration of someone who has calculated the risk and accepted it.
"Nahi, Bharat bhai. Tera life —"
"Meri life meri beti ke saath gayi." He looks at me. The burnt-chocolate eyes, steady. "Meri do betiyan thi, Vivek. Anamika aur Sanika. Chaar saal aur do saal. Woh virus ne unhe ek hafte mein le liya. Main; main unke bina jee raha hoon. Lekin jee nahi raha. Bas chal raha hoon."
He pauses. The stillness is the weight of a man opening a door he usually keeps locked.
"Esha, woh bach jaaye. Woh meri behen ki beti hai. Woh mera khoon hai. Agar main ghode pe jaake do minute ka waqt khareed sakta hoon jo Esha ko nikalne de, toh woh meri zindagi ka sabse important kaam hoga."
I can't argue with this. I can't argue with a man who has buried his children and is offering his life so that his niece can live. The calculus is his, and it is final.
"Aur baaki do?" I ask. "Doosre ghode pe kaun?"
"Main jaaunga," says Kevin. Paul looks at him; someone who has known another man for three weeks and who is, in that look, saying goodbye.
"Aur main," says a voice I don't expect. From the stable's doorway, silhouetted against the afternoon light.
Devika.
"Kabir ki jagah koi aur dekhega," she says, before I can object. "Karen le jayegi usse. Main; main ghode pe ja sakti hoon. Main bachpan mein seekhi thi. Kolhapur mein. Mere papa ke pass ghode the."
"Devika ji —"
"Yeh mera faisla hai. Main ek budhiya hoon jisne apna sab kuch kho diya. Kabir ko Karen le jayegi, usse pata hai. Maine usse bata diya. Aur Kabir — woh samjhega. Jab bada hoga, woh samjhega."
Her voice doesn't break. Her face doesn't crack. She is, in this moment, the most terrifying person I have ever met: a woman who has weighed her life against a child's escape and found the equation simple.
The night is chosen. Three days from now. New moon: the darkest night, when the sky gives nothing and the forest takes everything.
The preparations are invisible. They happen in the blind spots, the stables, the workshop, the moments between surveillance sweeps. Chaya secures matches and kerosene from the kitchen. Kevin fashions bridles from rope, the horses have been ridden with improvised tack since the scouts brought them in, so new bridles won't look suspicious. Paul sharpens three shovels until their edges are bright; not weapons, exactly, but closer to weapons than anything else we have.
Esha maps the ditch. She spends two afternoons in the horse paddock, which borders the ditch, and reports back: "Panch foot chauda. Do foot gahera. Jhaadiyon se dhaka hai, upar se dikhai nahi deta. Neeche jaata hai, valley ki taraf. Ek kilometer ke baad road milti hai. Ponda ki taraf."
Ponda. I know Ponda, we drove through it on our way from Mumbai to Goa, a lifetime ago. It's a town. Not large, but a town, with roads that lead to other roads, with shelter and distance and the possibility of disappearing.
I brief the wider group through the network. Not the details — the timing. Three days. After dinner. When the fire starts, move. Follow the person in front of you. Don't stop. Don't look back. Take nothing except the people you love.
The camp, on the surface, continues. Potatoes are planted. Dal is cooked. Guddu roots in his trough. Lakshman walks the lawn. The cameras blink. The guards stand.
But beneath the surface, in the whispered conversations, in the sharpened shovels, in the rope bridles hidden in the stable's hay pile, in the kerosene tucked beneath Chaya's cot in a bottle that used to hold cooking oil: the camp is a bomb with a three-day fuse.
And I am the one who lit it.
The night before the plan, I can't sleep. 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 warm air carried the mixed scent of petrol fumes and jasmine from the garland stall. Chaya can't either. We lie in our cots, Dhruv between us, Bholu at my feet, and we talk in whispers about everything except tomorrow.
"Agar sab theek raha," she says, "toh hum coast pe pahunchenge. Phir kya?"
"Phir hum free hain. Koi ghar dhundhenge. Jaise pehle kiya tha. Candolim jaisa kuch."
"Aur Dhruv?"
"Dhruv humare saath hoga. Hamesha."
She's calm. Then: "Vivek."
"Haan?"
"Agar kal, agar kuch ho jaaye — agar main —"
"Kuch nahi hoga."
"Lekin agar —"
"Chaya. Kuch nahi hoga. Hum chaaron niklenge. Saath mein. Jaise hamesha."
She reaches across the gap. Her rough hand finds mine. I hold it; the familiar grip, the warmth that I have come to associate with safety, with home, with the exact feeling of being alive and not alone.
"Tu jaanta hai na," she whispers. "Ki main — tere bina —"
She doesn't finish. She doesn't need to. I know what she means. I know it because I feel it too; the wordless, enormous, terrifying thing that exists between us, that has existed since the night she opened the heavy door in Candolim and let me in, that has grown in the heavy stillness of shared meals and shared fear and the shared raising of a child who is not ours but is entirely ours.
"Main jaanta hoon," I say.
"Accha."
We hold hands across the gap until she falls asleep. Her grip loosens slowly, the gradual release of consciousness, the hand going limp as the mind lets go.
I don't sleep. I lie awake, holding her sleeping hand, listening to Dhruv's breathing and Bholu's snoring and the engines: the engines, still coming and going, the pulse of the machine that we're going to try to break.
Tomorrow.
© 2025 Atharva Inamdar. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Free to read and share with attribution.