Chapter 18: Naya Samaj

## Chapter 18: Naya Samaj

VIVEK

The first morning in Candolim begins with chai. The dawn smelled of wet earth and the faint sweetness of neem flowers opening. Chaya makes it on the gas stove, the cylinder that has been sitting in the kitchen for a month, its valve closed, its contents preserved by the simple physics of pressurised gas. She lights the burner with a match, one of the matches she stole from the camp kitchen for the fire, repurposed now for a more peaceful flame; and the blue ring ignites with a sound that is both familiar and miraculous, the whoosh of gas meeting oxygen, the sound of civilisation's most fundamental technology.

She boils water. Adds tea leaves, loose-leaf, found in a tin in the cupboard, the same tin we bought from a shop in Candolim's main road three months ago, the shop now shuttered, its owner dead. Adds sugar. Adds milk, powdered, reconstituted, not fresh, but milk nonetheless. Lets it boil. Lets the colour darken from pale amber to the deep, reddish brown that chai achieves when it's been given time and attention and specific patience, because the difference between chai and coloured water is sixty seconds of simmering.

She pours it into cups, mismatched, a collection that accumulated crockery over decades, ceramic and steel and one that's porcelain with a chip on the rim. Twenty-one cups. Not enough — people share, the way families share, the cold cup passing from hand to hand, each person drinking and passing, a beverage that is, for Indians, what wine is for the French: not a drink but a sacrament.

I take my cup. The first sip, hot, sweet, the tannins sharp against my tongue, the milk smoothing the edges, hits me with a force that is entirely disproportionate to the act. It's just chai. It's just water and leaves and sugar and milk. But it is also everything; every morning in Kothrud when Amma made chai before school, every evening on the terrace when Chaya and I watched the sunset, every chai I've ever drunk in my life, compressed into this single cup, in this kitchen, on this morning, after everything. the warm air was thick with the layered smell of turmeric and heated oil and the caramelised edges of onions that had been cooking too long. My eyes are wet. I blame the steam.

"Acchi hai?" asks Chaya, watching me from across the kitchen, Dhruv on her hip, the ladle in her free hand.

"Perfect hai."

She smiles. The full smile, the one she keeps for moments that matter.

---

The settlement of Candolim takes three days.

Day One: Housing. The villas that line the beach road are empty, Portuguese colonial houses, whitewashed and tile-roofed, their gardens wild with bougainvillea and coconut palms. We claim five of them, enough for twenty-one people, with room to spare. Each house is checked, cleaned, assessed. Windows opened. Floors swept. The specific archaeology of dead people's lives; photographs, clothes, kitchen utensils, the objects that outlast their owners, is treated with the respect it deserves: left in place, undisturbed, a memorial maintained by the living for the dead.

Day Two: Resources. The beach provides fish: Suresh and Pradeep, both from coastal Maharashtra, know how to cast a net, and the Arabian Sea, ungoverned by quotas and trawlers, offers a bounty that the pre-virus fishing industry would have envied. Pomfret. Surmai. Bangda. The silver bodies, pulled from the waves, flashing in the April sun.

The surrounding gardens provide fruit — coconuts, obviously, Goa's most reliable crop; mangoes, approaching season, the Alphonso trees heavy with green fruit that will, in weeks, turn the gold that Goa is famous for; cashew apples, ripe and fragrant, their juice fermenting in the heat into a liquid that Paul discovers is, essentially, feni.

Water comes from wells: the old wells that every Goan village has, stone-lined, rope-and-bucket operated, their water clean and cold and tasting of the earth through which it filtered.

Day Three: Organisation. Not the organisation of the camp, not the top-down, camera-monitored, curfew-enforced organisation of a place run by a man with a pistol. This organisation is organic; it emerges from the group the way order emerges from chaos, not imposed but grown.

Chaya runs the kitchen. Not because anyone appointed her: because she's the best cook, and because Pushpa and Savita defer to her with the exact grace of older women who recognise competence in a younger one and who are content to follow rather than lead.

Suresh and Pradeep run the fishing. They go out at dawn, return by mid-morning, the catch distributed among the five houses with an equity that would make a socialist weep.

Karen takes the children. Kabir, Dhruv, Anvi, the three youngest members of our group, whose educations have been interrupted by the end of the world and who need, according to Karen, "structure." She sets up a school in the living room of one of the villas — a makeshift classroom with books scavenged from abandoned houses and a blackboard made from a piece of plywood painted with the blackboard paint that Pradeep found in a hardware store.

Paul handles construction and maintenance. Fixing roofs, clearing drains, reinforcing walls. The cold water ran between her fingers, cold and insistent. The practical work that keeps twenty-one people housed and dry.

And Esha: Esha takes the lookout.

It's her idea. She proposes it on the second day, standing in the living room of the main house, addressing the group with quiet authority from four weeks in a surveillance state, understanding, better than anyone, the value of watching.

"Lakshman humare peeche aayega," she says. "Yeh guarantee hai. Uske paas resources hain: gaadiyaan, scouts, weapons. Humein dekhte rehna padega. Har waqt."

She establishes a rotation, two people at all times, stationed at the highest point in the settlement: the rooftop terrace of the tallest villa, which provides a 270-degree view of the road from Mapusa, the beach road from Calangute, and the beach itself.

The lookouts are equipped with binoculars, found in a tourist shop, the kind that birdwatchers use, powerful enough to see a vehicle at two kilometres. They work in four-hour shifts, dawn to dusk. At night, the shifts continue, but the watchers listen rather than look, the darkness making sight useless and sound essential.

"Agar kuch dikhe, koi gaadi, koi insaan, kuch bhi: toh signal do," Esha says. "Whistle. Ek whistle matlab dhyan do. Do whistle matlab danger. Teen whistle matlab bhaago."

Three whistles. Run. The failsafe of a community that knows it's being hunted.

---

A week passes. Then two.

The settlement finds its rhythm, not the mechanical rhythm of the camp, the bell-and-curfew rhythm of imposed order, but the organic rhythm of people who are choosing to live together. Mornings are for work, fishing, cooking, maintenance, lookout. Afternoons are free — rest, conversation, the small pleasures that emerge when people have enough food and enough safety to remember that they are human.

Kabir thrives. The beach is his kingdom; he runs along the sand with Bholu, the two of them chasing waves and crabs and each other with the inexhaustible energy of a boy and a dog who have been given space and sun and the permission to be young.

Karen's school operates three hours a day. Kabir learns, reading (he's advanced, his Goosebumps obsession having given him a vocabulary that exceeds many adults), maths (basic, but improving), and science (Karen teaches what she knows, which is more than she thinks, and supplements with books found in abandoned houses).

Anvi, the three-year-old, sits in on the lessons with solemn toddler attention, content irrelevant, ritual everything. Her father, Hemant, still calm, still speaking only to his daughter; sits outside the classroom and listens, and sometimes I catch him mouthing the words along with Karen, learning alongside his child.

Dhruv grows. The baby formula, supplemented by Chaya's breast milk and the mashed banana and rice that she introduces in his fifth month, fuels a growth that is visible week to week, the filling of cheeks, the thickening of limbs, the increasing solidity of a body that is being built, cell by cell, from a world that tried to kill him and failed.

He laughs now. Full laughs — belly laughs, the world suddenly containing funny things, like Bholu's face when he's confused, like Kabir's voice when he's excited, like Chaya's fingers when they tickle his stomach. The laugh is loud and uncontrolled and completely inappropriate for the apocalypse, and it is, without question, the best sound in Candolim.

Esha and I work together on the lookout. We take the dawn shift: four to eight, the hours when the light changes and the sea turns from black to grey to blue and the warm air smells of salt and possibility.

We talk. Not about the camp, not about Lakshman, not about Bharat, those subjects are too heavy for the dawn, too loaded for the subdued hours when the world is waking up. We talk about before. About Pune. Kothrud and Kolhapur, the two Maharashtrian cities that produced us. About families; hers, mine, the people we buried, the people we carry. About small things, favourite foods (hers: misal pav; mine: vada pav), favourite films (hers: Queen; mine: Dil Chahta Hai), favourite places (hers: Panchgani; mine: Lonavala).

The conversations are ordinary. That is their value. In a world that has been stripped to its essentials, survival, fear, the mechanics of not dying; ordinary conversation is a luxury. It is the thing that reminds you that you are a person, not a survivor. That you have a past, not just a present. That you liked things, and disliked things, and had opinions about films and food and the relative merits of Pune's two major vada pav vendors.

"Vivek," she says one morning, as the warm sun clears the horizon and the sea catches the light and turns it into a million fragments.

"Haan?"

"Tu jaanta hai na — ki yeh forever nahi chalega. Yeh shanti. Lakshman aayega."

"Haan."

"Toh: plan kya hai? Jab woh aaye?"

I've thought about this. Every night, lying in bed with Chaya and Dhruv, listening to the sea, I've thought about it. The boats on the beach. The road to Mapusa. The forest behind the settlement. The options: fight, flee, hide.

"Boats," I say. "Agar Lakshman aaye; toh hum boats se niklenge. Sea se. South, Karnataka coast ki taraf."

"Sab? Ikkees log?"

"Paanch boats hain. Chaar-chaar log har boat mein. Baby aur bacche bhi. Tight hoga — lekin possible hai."

"Aur agar boats ready nahi hon?"

"Tab forest. Peeche jaao, Ghats ki taraf. Lakshman ki gaadiyaan forest mein nahi ja sakti. Humein paidal jaana padega. Lekin woh bhi."

She nods. Files the information. Returns to the binoculars, scanning the road from Mapusa with methodical patience, vigilance being not paranoia but survival.

"Esha."

"Haan?"

"Bharat bhai ke baare mein, tujhe kya lagta hai? Honestly?"

She lowers the binoculars. Looks at me. The chai-brown eyes, steady, but behind them: a tremor that she has been containing for two weeks with the discipline of a soldier containing a breach.

"Main nahi jaanti," she says. "Main chahti hoon ki woh zinda hon. Lekin, shots thi. Rifles thi. Aur mama, mama bahut bada target the. Horse pe. Andhere mein bhi — woh miss nahi hote."

"Esha —"

"Lekin main yeh bhi jaanti hoon, mama ne mujhe bachpan mein ek baat sikhayi thi. Unhone kaha tha. 'Esha, kisan kabhi nahi marta. Kisan sirf crop badalta hai.'" She almost smiles. "'Farmers never die. They just change crops.' Yeh unka joke tha. Bahut bura joke tha."

"Bahut bura."

"Haan. Lekin, agar koi survive kar sakta hai, toh mama kar sakte hain. Woh strong hain. Woh smart hain. Aur woh, unhe mujhe dhundhna hai. Woh jaante hain ki main Candolim aaungi."

"Toh — woh aayenge?"

"Agar zinda hain — toh aayenge."

She raises the binoculars again. Scans the road. The horizon. The sea.

Waiting.

---