SAMAJ KA SACH
Chapter 16: Candolim Ki Taraf
## Chapter 16: Candolim Ki Taraf
VIVEK
We leave Ponda at dusk.
the warm sun drops behind the Western Ghats, that long, ancient spine of mountains that runs down India's west coast like a vertebral column; and the sky turns the colour of marigolds in a temple offering, then the colour of embers, then the colour of nothing. The dark arrives with the swiftness of a Goan evening, the light withdrawing like a tide, leaving the town exposed and shadowless.
Twenty-one people walk out of Ponda the way they walked in, in a loose column, the strongest at the front and back, the weakest in the middle. The configuration is instinctive, the way herds organise when crossing open ground, the vulnerable at the centre, the able-bodied forming a perimeter.
I walk at the front. Bholu beside me, his nose to the road, his body loose with the easy alertness of a dog who has walked many roads and who assesses each one with the professional attention of a critic.
Chaya walks behind me, Dhruv strapped to her chest. She's carrying a bag, a school bag, found in the classroom, filled with baby formula, two bottles of water, and a packet of glucose biscuits. The bag is pink, with a cartoon princess on it, and the incongruity of a woman carrying a baby through an apocalypse with a Disney princess on her back is the kind of detail that the universe produces when it's decided that tragedy needs a garnish of absurdity.
Esha walks beside Chaya. They've been talking; not about the escape, not about Bharat, but about small things. Recipes. The horses. Kabir's Goosebumps obsession. The small talk that women use to build trust, each exchange a brick in a wall that will, eventually, become a structure.
Karen and Kabir are in the middle. The boy walks now, he slept through most of the day, storing energy the way children do, in concentrated bursts of unconsciousness that leave them, upon waking, inexplicably restored. He walks with Bholu's rope leash in his rough hand — the dog trotting back periodically to check on him, the partnership now so established that it functions without prompts.
Paul guards the rear. His shovel, the sharpened one, its edge bright in the dark; rests on his shoulder like a soldier's rifle. He walks with the steady, unhurried pace of a man who has decided that his job is to be last and that he will do this job until he can't.
The road from Ponda to Mapusa is state highway: NH 748, the signs still readable, their green rectangles and white letters preserved by the specific durability of Indian road signage, which was designed to withstand monsoons and truck exhaust and the general indifference of a country that builds things to last because it cannot afford to build them twice.
We walk the highway without a word, the air thick against their skin. The tar is warm under my feet: residual heat from the April sun, the surface releasing the day's energy in slow, thermal waves that I feel through the blisters on my soles. The warmth is almost pleasant. Almost.
The countryside scrolls past like a film; coconut palms, paddy fields, the occasional house (dark, empty, its inhabitants either dead or gone), a temple (its gopuram visible against the stars, its courtyard still, the bell unstruck), a bridge over a river that I can hear but not see, the cold water's sound a low, continuous hush that is, in the weight of the abandoned world, almost musical.
We walk for three hours before the first stop.
"Pani break," I announce. The column halts. People sit, on the road, on the verge, wherever their bodies choose to stop. Water is distributed — the filtered water from Ponda, rationed, one cup per person, as the cold cup was a single steel tumbler that is passed from hand to hand.
Kabir drinks his share, then asks for Bholu's.
"Bholu ka paani Bholu ka hai," says Karen.
"Lekin woh mujhe share karega. Hum friends hain."
Karen looks at me. I shrug. Bholu drinks from a puddle at the roadside, having resolved the issue himself with the pragmatism of someone who doesn't participate in discussions about water allocation.
"Kitna aur?" asks Suresh. The farmer's voice: a man who measures distances in the same units he measures crop yields: large, medium, insufficient.
"Aaj raat. Mapusa tak," says Esha. "Lagbhag gyaarah-baarah kilometre aur. Subah se pehle pahunchna chahiye."
Mapusa. The Saturday market town, the crossroads of North Goa, the place where fisherwomen sell pomfret and farmers sell cashews and tourists buy souvenirs. Mapusa, where we'll rest for the day and then, the following night, cover the last twelve kilometres to Candolim.
"Aur Lakshman?" asks Pushpa. She says the name the way you'd say bimari. disease. A thing to be avoided, a thing that follows.
"Agar woh scouts bheje hain, toh woh roads pe honge. Gaadiyyon mein. Tez. Unke paas advantage hai; speed." I pause. "Lekin humara advantage hai ki unhe direction nahi pata. Chaaron taraf search karna padega. Time lagega."
"Kitna time?"
"Pata nahi. Lekin — jitna tez hum chalein, utna better."
People stand. Stretch. Drink the last of their water. Resume walking.
The column moves.
Mapusa appears at four in the morning, the distinct hour when the night is at its deepest, the stars at their brightest, the human body at its lowest. The town's silhouette rises against the eastern sky — the buildings' dark shapes, the church spire, the market's corrugated roof.
Like Ponda, Mapusa is empty. Like Ponda, the buildings stand. Like Ponda, the absence of people transforms the town from a living place to a museum: everything preserved, nothing animated, the stillness of a diorama in a natural history exhibit.
We find shelter in the Municipal Market, the covered market that dominates Mapusa's centre, its concrete pillars and tin roof creating a space that is open-sided but covered, dry, with enough room for twenty-one people to spread out and sleep.
The market stalls are empty, the wooden tables bare, the hooks where meat hung still fixed to the ceiling, the cold stone slabs where fish was displayed still carrying, faintly, a smell that was once powerful enough to make your eyes water from the entrance.
We claim a section near the centre. People collapse onto the cold concrete floor. some falling asleep before they've finished lying down, the exhaustion so complete that the transition from consciousness to unconsciousness is instantaneous, a switch thrown, a light extinguished.
I don't sleep immediately. I walk the market's perimeter, checking exits, checking sightlines, a habits that has learned, through captivity and escape, that safety is not a state but a practice. The market has four exits: north, south, east, west. Each one opens onto a different street. Each street leads to a different part of Mapusa. The warm air carried the mixed scent of petrol fumes and jasmine from the garland stall. Four escape routes if we need them.
Bholu walks with me. His nose catalogues the market's olfactory history; the fish stalls, the meat hooks, the spice section where the warm air still carries traces of red chilli and turmeric, the exact perfume of a place where India's food culture was displayed in its full, overwhelming, magnificent chaos.
"Bahut khaana tha yahan, Bholu," I whisper. "Ek time pe."
His tail wags. He understands khaana.
I return to the group. Lie down beside Chaya, who is already asleep, Dhruv between us, his small body rising and falling with the rhythm of a baby's breath.
I close my eyes.
I dream of Bharat. Of Laxmi, galloping through the Goan night, Bharat hunched over her neck, the sound of hooves on laterite, the sound of shots, the sound of —
I wake. Gasping. The market is dark. The dream clings to me like a wet shirt.
Bholu puts his chin on my chest. Looks at me. The round eyes, steady and brown.
"Theek hai," I whisper. "Bas sapna tha."
He doesn't believe me. But he stays.
The day in Mapusa is spent in preparation.
More scavenging, another pharmacy, another grocery store. The haul is smaller than Ponda's but sufficient: antibiotics (expired, but Jyoti says they'll work), more ORS, canned goods (sardines, a Goan staple, their tins rusted but intact), and, a treasure, a crate of Frooti juice boxes, the small ones, the 200ml packs that every Indian child has drunk at every school picnic since the company started making them. Kabir's face when he sees them, that luminous, radiant joy of a seven-year-old encountering a familiar pleasure in an unfamiliar world — is, for a moment, the best thing I've seen since the escape.
"FROOTI!" he announces, at full volume, and the market echoes with the word, the abandoned stalls amplifying it into a declaration.
"Ek abhi. Baaki baad mein," says Karen, handing him a box with the practiced rationing of a woman who has been managing a child's sugar intake since she took responsibility for him.
"THANK YOU KAREN AUNTY!"
Bholu gets a sardine. He eats it in one gulp and looks at me as though I've insulted him with the portion size.
In the afternoon, I sit with Esha in a calm corner of the market.
"Kal raat," I say. "Mapusa se Candolim. Baarah kilometre. Agar sab theek raha; toh subah tak pahunch jaayenge."
"Aur phir?"
"Phir, ghar. Humara Candolim wala ghar. Woh chhota hai; sab ke liye jagah nahi hogi. Lekin aas paas aur ghar hain. Portuguese villas. Sab khaali hain."
"Aur boats?"
"Beach pe hain. Chaya ne dekhe the, paanch ya chhah. Chhoti fishing boats. Agar humein yahan se nikalna hai, by sea, toh option hai."
"Kahan jaayenge? Sea se?"
"South. Karnataka coast. Ya — North. Maharashtra. Mumbai, shaayad."
Mumbai. The word carries a weight that was, before the virus, home to twenty million people. What is it now? I don't know. Nobody knows. Communication ended in the second week of the virus, when the cell towers ran out of backup power and the internet, that vast and invisible ocean on which modern life floated, simply evaporated.
"Mumbai mein koi hoga?" asks Esha.
"Shaayad. Itne bade sheher mein — koi toh bacha hoga."
"Haan." She pauses. "Ya shaayad nahi."
We sit with the possibility. The possibility that we are, in fact, the last. That the twenty-one people sleeping in this market are among the final humans on the subcontinent, or the planet; and that the search for others is a search for ghosts.
I reject this possibility. Not because I have evidence against it but because accepting it would make everything, the escape, the walk, the plan, the hope — meaningless. And I cannot afford meaninglessness. Not yet.
"Hum chahte hain ki koi ho," I say. "Toh hum maanenge ki koi hai. Jab tak opposite prove nahi hota."
Esha almost smiles. "Optimist."
"Nahi. Practical."
She does smile then. Small, but real. The first real smile since the escape.
That night, as we prepare to leave, Kabir does something unexpected.
He walks to the centre of the group, all twenty-one of us, gathered in the market's main aisle, bags packed, water bottles filled, ready for the last twelve kilometres: and he stands there, small and serious, Bholu beside him, and he says:
"Mujhe kuch kehna hai."
The group looks at him. Twenty pairs of adult eyes on a seven-year-old boy.
"Main jaanta hoon ki sab dar rahe hain," he says. His voice is high and clear, someone who has not yet learned to modulate for emotion. "Main bhi dar raha hoon. Lekin, Debbie Aunty hamesha kehti thi ki brave hona matlab darna nahi nahi hota. Brave hona matlab darne ke baad bhi kaam karna. Toh; main brave hoon. Aur aap sab bhi brave ho. Aur Bholu bhi."
He looks down at Bholu. The dog looks up at him.
"Aur hum sab saath mein Candolim jaayenge. Aur wahan bahut maza aayega. Karen Aunty ne kaha ki beach hai. Mujhe beach bahut pasand hai."
He finishes. Nods once, as though approving his own speech, and walks back to Karen.
Nobody speaks for a moment. The stillness is the stillness of twenty adults who have been addressed by a seven-year-old with more clarity and courage than any of them have managed since the escape.
Then Karen laughs. The first real laugh since the escape, a warm, full laugh that breaks the tension like a hammer breaks glass. And the laughter spreads — person to person, a contagion of the best kind, the virus of joy.
"Chalo, Kabir bhai," says Paul, grinning. "Beach pe chalte hain."
We walk out of Mapusa as the warm sun sets.
Twenty-one people. A baby. A dog.
Heading home.
© 2025 Atharva Inamdar. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Free to read and share with attribution.