Chapter 14: Jungle Ka Raasta

## Chapter 14: Jungle Ka Raasta

VIVEK

We walk for four hours.

The road is laterite, unpaved, unlit, a red ribbon cutting through Goan forest that is black and absolute on either side. The moon is absent, new moon, chosen for exactly this reason; and the only light comes from the stars, which provide enough illumination to see the road's edges but not its surface, so we walk by feel, our feet reading the terrain the way Bholu's nose reads scent. Drops hit her forearms with the tiny, sharp percussion of cold on warm skin. Twenty-one people. A baby. A dog.

The group stretches along the road in a loose column, not military, not organised, the ragged formation of people who are walking because the alternative is worse. At the front: me and Chaya, Dhruv asleep against her chest, Bholu trotting ahead with his nose down. Behind us: Esha, still, her arms crossed against the night chill. Then Karen and Kabir, the boy's hand in hers, his steps small and frequent, the steps of a child who is walking because an adult told him to and who will walk until he can't. Then Paul, his sharpened shovel over his shoulder. Then the others. Suresh, Pradeep, Arun, Pushpa, Savita, faces I know and names I've learned, people who planted potatoes beside me and ate dal with me and who are now, by the simple arithmetic of shared escape, my people.

Nobody speaks. Speaking requires energy, and energy is finite, and the finite energy we have is being spent on the only thing that matters: forward.

The forest sounds surround us: cicadas, their electric buzz a wall of noise that is both deafening and invisible; frogs, from the drainage ditches that line the road, their croaking a low, rhythmic counterpoint; and somewhere, deep in the canopy, a nightjar, its call a hollow, two-note whistle that follows us like a companion.

I listen for other sounds. Engines. Voices. The mechanical snap of a rifle being cocked.

Nothing. The estate is behind us, how far, I can't say. Four hours of walking at maybe four kilometres per hour, so sixteen kilometres. Maybe more, if the road's curves have been generous. Maybe less, if my sense of speed is distorted by adrenaline and fear.

"Vivek." Chaya's whisper, beside me. "Dhruv ko doodh chahiye. Ruk sakte hain?"

I signal the column. We stop. People sit — on the road, on the roadside, wherever their legs give out. The collective exhale is audible, the sound of twenty-one bodies releasing the tension that has kept them moving.

Chaya sits on a rock, unties the carrier, and puts Dhruv to her breast. The baby latches with someone who has been patient beyond his capacity and who is now correcting the imbalance. The feel of his feeding, the small, rhythmic gulps; is the most peaceful sound in the world, a sound that belongs to kitchens and nurseries and not to dark roads in Goan forests.

I kneel beside them. Look at Dhruv's face, the round cheeks, the closed eyes, the absolute concentration of a baby at the breast. He doesn't know what happened tonight. He doesn't know that the sound he heard, the gunshot that killed Jai, weeks ago; was the sound of murder. He doesn't know that the people who fed him and smiled at him were prisoners. He doesn't know that his parents are dead, that the woman feeding him is not his mother, that the man beside her is not his father, that the world he was born into ended before he could form a memory of it.

He knows milk. He knows warmth. He knows the heartbeat against which he sleeps.

For now, that's enough.

"Kitna aur hai?" asks Paul, from somewhere behind us. His voice is hoarse; a man who has been walking for four hours in stillness and whose throat has dried to sandpaper.

"Pata nahi," I admit. "Esha?"

Esha is sitting on the road, her knees pulled to her chest, her face invisible in the dark. When she speaks, her voice is flat; the flatness of someone who is holding herself together by force of will and who knows that the will has a finite supply.

"Agar hum south jaate rahe — toh Ponda aana chahiye. Shaayad do ghante aur. Shaayad teen."

Two or three more hours. On a road. In the dark. With a baby and a seven-year-old and a group of people whose bodies were designed for farming, not marching.

"Pani?" asks Karen. "Kisi ke paas pani hai?"

Nobody answers. We left with nothing: no water, no food, no supplies. The plan was speed, not sustenance. Get out. Get far. Figure out the rest later.

Later is now.

"Road ke kinaare naala hai," I say. "Drainage channel. Pani hoga: saaf nahi hoga, lekin —"

"Peene layak hoga," finishes Paul. The pragmatism of a man who has drunk worse.

We drink from the drainage ditch. the cold water is warm, slightly brown, tasting of earth and vegetation and the specific mineral tang of Goan laterite. It is, by every reasonable standard, unfit for human consumption. We drink it anyway. Cupping our hands, bringing them to our mouths, the universal gesture of human thirst that predates cups and bottles and municipal water supply.

Bholu drinks beside us, his tongue working the shallow water with an efficiency who has been drinking from ditches since Kothrud and who considers this particular ditch adequate if not impressive.

"Ek minute," says Karen. She's kneeling by the ditch, Kabir beside her. The boy is drinking; slowly, carefully, the way Karen taught him, small sips, not gulps. When he finishes, he wipes his mouth and says, in a voice so small that I barely hear it:

"Kya Bharat uncle theek hain?"

The question. The question that everyone has been thinking and nobody has asked.

Karen looks at me. In the starlight, I can see her face — the weathered skin, the kind eyes, an expression that has been asked a question she cannot answer.

"Haan, beta," she says. "Woh theek hain."

A lie. A necessary lie. The kind of lie that adults tell children at the end of the world, because the truth is a burden that seven-year-old shoulders cannot carry.

Kabir nods. Accepts the lie. Reaches down and strokes Bholu's head, and Bholu licks his rough hand, and the transaction, comfort given, comfort received, is complete.

---

We walk for two more hours.

The road changes. Laterite gives way to tar, cracked, potholed, the surface of an Indian state highway that was last maintained before the virus and that has deteriorated in the months since with the speed of infrastructure freed from human intervention. But tar is better than laterite. Tar is civilisation. Tar means proximity to something: a town, a junction, a place where roads meet and people once gathered.

The forest thins. Coconut palms replace the dense canopy, their tall, thin trunks rising on either side of the road like sentinels, their fronds dark against the stars. Beyond the palms: paddy fields, dry now in April, but structured — the geometric patterns of agriculture, the bunds and channels and levelled terraces that indicate human organisation, human effort, human presence.

"Ponda," says Esha.

The town appears gradually, first a few structures at the roadside, abandoned, their windows dark, their doors open or missing. A petrol pump, its canopy sagging, the pumps rusted, the digital price display blank. A bus stand; the concrete shelter still standing, the tin roof intact, the rough bench inside occupied by nothing but dust and time.

Then the town itself. Ponda, a small Goan town that I remember driving through on the way to Panaji, a lifetime ago. Its main road is lined with shops, shuttered, most of them, the cold metal grilles pulled down, the padlocks rusted. A few are open, doors swinging, glass broken, the distinct disorder of shops that have been looted systematically and then abandoned.

No people. No lights. No sound except the cold wind through the empty buildings, the hollow whistle of air moving through a place that was designed for density and has been emptied of it.

The virus took Ponda the way it took everything — completely, without a word, without the decency of destruction. The buildings stand. The roads are passable. The infrastructure is intact. But the people are gone, and without people, a town is nothing but geometry.

"Yahan ruk sakte hain," says Paul. "Ek raat ke liye. Chhupne ke liye bahut jagah hai."

I look at the group. Twenty-one faces; some visible in the starlight, some hidden. The exhaustion is palpable, a thing with weight, a thing that pushes down on shoulders and eyelids and spirits.

Kabir is asleep on Karen's back; she's been carrying him for the last hour, his arms around her neck, his face pressed into her shoulder, the dead weight of a sleeping child who has walked as far as his body will allow.

Dhruv is asleep on Chaya's chest. He hasn't woken since the feeding. The baby's capacity for sleep in crisis situations is either a blessing or a survival mechanism, and I don't care which.

"Theek hai," I say. "Yahan rukenge. Ek raat."

We choose a building, a school, from the look of it. A government primary school, single-storey, its classrooms opening onto a corridor that faces a small courtyard. The classrooms are bare; desks and chairs stacked against walls, blackboards still bearing the last lessons taught before the virus. In one classroom, the blackboard reads: "Mera desh mahan hai. Mere desh ka naam Bharat hai." My country is great. My country's name is Bharat.

I read it twice. The words, written in a teacher's neat hand, are both true and devastating. True because the country was great, devastating because the country is gone.

We spread across three classrooms. People claim spaces — corners, walls, the areas near windows where the cold air is marginally fresher. Blankets are improvised from curtains and the fabric covers of desks. It's not comfortable. It's not warm. But it's enclosed, and enclosed is safe, and safe is the only thing that matters tonight.

Chaya and I take a corner of the largest classroom. She arranges Dhruv on a folded curtain: the baby stirs, resettles, continues sleeping with an infant who has decided that the world can manage without him for the next eight hours.

Bholu curls against me. His body is warm and solid, the warmth of a living thing that has walked sixteen kilometres on four legs and is now entitled to rest.

"Vivek."

"Haan?"

"We made it."

I look at her. In the darkness of the classroom, her face is a pale oval, the features indistinct, the expression unreadable. But her voice: her voice is someone who has been holding her breath for hours and has finally exhaled.

"Haan. Nikle."

"Sab theek hain?"

I do the count again. Twenty-one. Minus the riders, Bharat, Kevin, Devika. Twenty-one who walked. All present. All alive.

"Sab theek hain."

"Accha." She lies down beside Dhruv. Closes her eyes. Within a minute, she's asleep: the sudden, total sleep of a body that has been running on adrenaline and has finally been given permission to stop.

I should sleep too. My body demands it, every muscle, every joint, every cell screaming for the oblivion that sleep provides. But my mind won't subdued. It runs the night's events in a loop; the fire, the horses, the ditch, the road, the shots.

The shots.

Two, maybe three. From the direction of the guards. At the riders.

At Bharat.

I don't know if he's alive. I don't know if Kevin is alive. I don't know if Devika, the retired schoolteacher from Kolhapur who learned to ride from her father and who offered her life so that a boy named Kabir could escape — is alive.

I think of Bharat's face. Looking down from Laxmi's back at Esha. Tu meri beti hai. Hamesha thi.

I think of Devika's voice. Calm, certain. Yeh mera faisla hai.

I think of Kevin. The practical man. The quiet man. The man who mounted a horse knowing that the horse was riding toward rifles.

These are the people who bought our freedom. Their lives, their possible deaths, are the price we paid. And I am the one who set the price.

The weight of it, the crushing, physical weight of responsibility for other people's sacrifice: presses me into the cold floor of the classroom. I lie there, Bholu warm against my ribs, Dhruv's breathing soft beside me, and I feel the weight, and I carry it, because carrying it is the least I owe the people who are not here to carry anything.

Sleep comes eventually. Not as relief but as defeat. The mind surrendering to the body's demands, the way a general surrenders a battle he cannot win.

The last thing I see before unconsciousness takes me is the blackboard. The teacher's neat handwriting, preserved in chalk:

Mera desh mahan hai.

My country is great.

Was great.

---