Chapter 2: Samaj Mein Swagat

## Chapter 2: Samaj Mein Swagat

VIVEK

Lakshman walks me through the camp the way a landlord walks a tenant through a property. Pointing out features, narrating history, assuming consent.

"Yeh humara sabzi ka khet hai, brinjal, bhindi, tamatar, palak. Blake, matlab, Bharat, woh sambhalta hai. Ex-farmer hai, Maharashtra se. Bahut kabil aadmi." He gestures toward the vegetable patches, their neat rows of green cutting through the red laterite like stitches in flesh. "Aur woh dekho, murgiyan. Unke andey humara protein source hain. Aur Sundari; humari gaay. Woh doodh deti hai, bilkul limited, lekin deti hai."

I nod. I make the sounds of someone who is impressed. Haan. Accha. Waah. The verbal equivalent of nodding, a performance, nothing more.

Because while I nod and make sounds, I am cataloguing.

Cameras. I count three in the first sixty seconds — mounted on poles, angled downward, their small red lights blinking with the patient persistence of surveillance. One at the entrance to the camp. One overlooking the vegetable patches. One fixed to the roof of a hut, pointed at the clearing where the picnic benches are arranged in rows.

Guards. Two visible from here, standing at the edge of the treeline where the estate's lawn meets the dense Goan forest. They wear what used to be police uniforms, khaki, but the insignia torn off, the fabric faded. And in their rough hands, held with the casual ease of men who know how to use them: rifles. AK-pattern. I don't know enough about guns to identify the exact model, but I know the shape. Every Indian who has watched a Hindi movie knows the shape.

So. Cameras. Armed guards. A perimeter.

This is not a community. This is a compound.

Meera follows three steps behind us, as she has since we started walking. I can feel her the way you feel a headache; persistent, low-grade, impossible to ignore. She doesn't speak. She doesn't need to. Her presence is its own statement: I am here. I am watching. And if you run, I am faster.

"Sab ek saath khaate hain," Lakshman is saying. "Subah nashta, raat ko khana. Bahut democratic hai. Sab barabar. Koi bada nahi, koi chhota nahi."

Democratic. The word is so absurd in this context that I almost laugh. A democracy with armed guards and surveillance cameras and a man who had me kidnapped and bound and driven for hours in the back of a cargo van.

But I swallow the laugh. I swallow everything. Because I am Will, no, I am Vivek; and I am playing a game now, a game whose rules I don't fully understand but whose first principle is clear: appear compliant. Appear grateful. Appear stupid.

"Bahut accha lag raha hai," I say. The words taste like ash.

We enter the clearing. Picnic benches, wooden, the kind that schools use for outdoor assemblies. About thirty people are scattered across them, eating, talking, laughing — a community that functions, or appears to function, or has been arranged to appear to function.

Heads turn as we approach. First one, then several, then all of them: a wave of attention rolling through the crowd like a ripple through standing water. I feel it physically, the weight of thirty pairs of eyes, and my stomach clenches with the specific anxiety of a person who has not been in a crowd for two months and has forgotten how it feels.

A boy, seven, maybe eight; points at me and says something to the woman beside him. She looks up. She smiles. It looks genuine. I file this information and move on.

"Sab suno," Lakshman announces, his voice filling the clearing with the effortless projection of a man accustomed to being heard. "Humare do naye nagrik aaye hain. Yeh Vivek hai. Aur woh, woh wahan Bingo ke saath daud raha hai — woh Bholu hai."

I follow his gesture. Bholu has found another dog, a golden retriever, thick-coated and grinning with the permanent idiocy of a breed that was designed for happiness. They're circling each other in the universal dog-greeting dance: sniff, sniff, bow, chase.

"Namaste, Vivek," says the crowd, roughly in unison. The sound is warm and practised, a greeting that has done this before, that has welcomed others before me, that has absorbed new members into its body with the efficiency of an organism.

The boy at the front, the seven-year-old: laughs as Bholu and the retriever collide in a tangle of legs and tails.

Lakshman puts a hand on my shoulder. "Kuch kehna chahoge apne naye parivar se?"

Parivar. Family. The word hits me in a place I wasn't expecting — somewhere deep and unprotected, somewhere that I thought the virus had cauterised. I buried my family. Appa. Amma. My cousin Sneha, who was the closest thing I had to a sister. I buried them in the garden of our flat in Kothrud, because the cremation grounds were full and there was nobody left to light the pyres.

These people are not my family. They are strangers in a compound, surrounded by guards and cameras, led by a man who smiles too much and says too little.

But I can't say this. So I say, instead, with a smile that I pull from somewhere deep inside my performance: "Namaste sab ko. Main aap sab se milke bahut khush hoon."

Lakshman beams. The crowd smiles. Meera, behind me, is still.

The tour continues.

---

The tent is smaller than I expected.

It's the kind of tent that trekking companies rent out for Himalayan base camps, a dome shape, polyester walls, a zip-up flap for a door. Inside: two camping cots, their metal frames rusty, their mattresses so thin that I can see the cross-hatching of the support mesh through the fabric. A pile of blankets; thin, the kind that bus companies in India provide on overnight Volvo services, adequate for air-conditioned coaches, inadequate for Goan nights in April. 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. And in the corner: a ceramic pot. The kind that aajibaai used for storing achaar. Except this one, from its position and context, is meant for something else entirely.

"Jab Chaya aur Dhruv aayenge," says Lakshman, "woh bhi yahan rahenge tumhare saath. Filhaal temporary hai, baad mein hum kuch permanent banayenge."

"Kab aayenge woh?" I ask. The question escapes before I can stop it, and I hate myself for asking, because the asking reveals the caring, and the caring is a lever they can use.

"Jald. Bahut jald." Lakshman's smile is a smile who has a timeline but won't share it. "Ab, kuch rules. Khana ek fixed time pe milta hai, subah aur raat. Curfew raat das baje. Uske baad tent se bahar nikalna mana hai, bilkul. Subah ki ghanti bajne tak."

"Aur agar raat ko toilet jaana ho?"

He points at the ceramic pot.

"Meri salah hai: rok ke rakho."

Brilliant. Even my bladder will be governed here.

"Do aur cheezein. Ek — ghar ke paas kabhi mat jaana. Yeh bahut important rule hai. Samjhe?"

I want to ask why. What's in the house? Who lives there? Why is a whitewashed Portuguese mansion in the middle of an apocalyptic compound off-limits to the people who farm its land and eat its food and sleep in its shadow?

But the asking would be dangerous. I can feel it; the way you can feel a third rail before you touch it. The questions about the house carry a charge.

"Samjha," I say.

"Accha. Aur doosri cheez, camp se bahar jaana mana hai. Jahan lawn khatam hota hai aur jungle shuru hota hai; woh hadd hai. Uske aage nahi. Kyunki agar tum jungle mein chale gaye aur kho gaye..."

The way he says kho gaye, lost — has a weight to it that has nothing to do with getting lost in a forest and everything to do with getting lost permanently.

"Theek hai," I say.

"Bahut accha." Lakshman claps his hands: a sudden burst of energy, like a teacher ending a lesson. "Bass yehi tha. In rules ko follow karo, aur tumhara yahan achha waqt guzrega. Fresh kapde bed ke paas hain. Ek ghante mein khana milega. Milte hain dinner pe."

He turns. Walks out. Meera lingers, her eyes on me, that smirk curling the corner of her mouth; then follows.

I stand in the tent. Bholu sits at my feet, looking up at me with the round, trusting eyes of a dog who believes that his person will fix everything.

"Hum kahan aa gaye, Bholu?" I whisper.

He whimpers. Licks my hand. Then jumps onto the cot, circles twice, and curls into a ball.

I look at the clothes they've left. A thin shirt, the colour of dried leaves. Trousers that used to be white and are now the colour of mud. Rubber chappals. Wellington boots, caked with soil.

Farmer's clothes. So that's what I'll be, a farmer. I, Vivek Kulkarni, who has never grown anything more ambitious than methi in a pot on my Kothrud balcony, will now apparently feed a compound of survivors with the agricultural knowledge I have acquired from watching my mother's kitchen garden die every summer. The air was thick with the layered smell of turmeric and heated oil and the caramelised edges of onions that had been cooking too long. I change. The clothes are dry and rough against my skin, but they're cleaner than what I was wearing, and at this point, cleanliness is a luxury I've learned to appreciate.

I sit on the cot. The springs protest. the soft mattress offers the structural support of a chapati.

I close my eyes and think of Chaya.

She'll be frantic by now. the warm sun has gone down, I can tell from the fading light through the tent's polyester walls — which means I've been gone for at least eight hours. Eight hours of stillness. Eight hours of not knowing.

I know Chaya. I know what she does when she's scared, she moves. She cleans. She organises. She picks up Dhruv and walks from room to room, narrating the world to him in the distinct sing-song voice she uses when she's trying to convince herself as much as him that everything is fine. Dekho, Dhruv, yeh kitchen hai. Yeh fridge hai. Yeh fridge mein kuch nahi hai, lekin koi baat nahi, Vivek butter lekar aayega.

Except I'm not coming back with butter. I'm not coming back at all. Not tonight. Maybe not for days.

The fear for her, not for myself, for her, for Dhruv: is the worst of it. It sits in my chest like a physical object, heavy and unmovable, an anvil where my heart should be.

I lie back on the cot. Bholu readjusts, pressing his spine against my thigh. His warmth seeps through the thin trousers.

"Hum sab theek kar denge," I tell him. "Pata nahi kaise. Lekin kar denge."

His tail thumps once. Twice. Then he sleeps.

---

The dinner bell rings as the last light leaves the sky.

I unzip the tent and step out into a Goan evening; the air warm and thick with the smell of laterite and vegetation, the exact humid sweetness of a coastal state in April. The sky is dark blue, fading to black at the edges, and the first stars are appearing with the tentative brightness of lights being tested before a show.

The clearing is already full. Thirty people, maybe more, seated at the picnic benches in rows. the warm air smells of something — dal, maybe, or a curry, something with onions and garlic and that warmth of haldi, the smell that is, for every Indian, the smell of home.

My stomach groans. I haven't eaten since the morning. The Amul butter that started all this is somewhere on the cold floor of the Big Bazaar in Panaji, dropped when fifty thousand volts rearranged my priorities.

I scan the benches for an empty seat. They're mostly taken. Groups have formed. clusters of people who sit together out of habit or preference, the way office canteens organise themselves into invisible territories.

A hand lands on my shoulder.

I flinch. Hard. My entire body contracts, and my right hand forms a fist before I'm aware of it; the taser has rewired my startle reflex, turned every unexpected touch into a threat.

"Arey, sorry! Daraane ka irada nahi tha."

I turn. Look up. Then up a bit more.

The man is enormous. Six-three, maybe six-four, with shoulders that belong on a bullock cart and hands that could palm a watermelon. His beard is brown, flecked with grey, and his eyebrows are thick enough to shade his eyes. He wears the same farmer's clothes as me, muddy shirt, stained trousers, Wellington boots, but on him, they look like the uniform of a man born to this work.

"Main Bharat hoon," he says. His Hindi is the Hindi of Maharashtra: heavy on the consonants, the vowels rounded, a cadence of a man who grew up speaking Marathi and learned Hindi the way you learn a cousin's language, fluently but with the accent of home. "Chandni ne kaha ki tum kal se mere saath kaam karoge. Farm pe. Extra haathon ki zaroorat hai, toh accha hai."

Chandni. That must be the woman Lakshman mentioned: Charlie, in the original's terms. The middle management of this operation.

"Main bhi toh farmer nahi hoon," I say. A truth that I can afford.

Bharat laughs. It's a big laugh, matching his body, a sound that starts in his belly and rolls out of him like thunder. "Koi nahi. Seekh jaoge. Meri bhatiji. Esha — woh tumhe sikhayegi. Woh bahut accha kaam karti hai ab."

His niece. I file this. Uncle and niece, both survivors. The gene theory that Chaya and I had debated, the possibility that survival was hereditary, that something in certain bloodlines made them resistant to the A-Virus; gains another data point.

"Chalo, mere saath baitho," says Bharat, guiding me toward a table at the far end of the row. His hand on my shoulder is heavy but not threatening; a weight that touches people because that's how he communicates, the physical language of a person who has spent his life around livestock and family.

"Yeh Kevin hai. Yeh Paul," he says, gesturing to two middle-aged men who give me nods of greeting. "Aur yeh Karen hai." A woman in her forties waves. Her smile is tired but kind.

"Aur yeh — Esha."

The last person at the table turns to look at me. And everything stops.

Not dramatically. Not the way it happens in films, with swelling music and slow motion and the sudden conviction that the world has been rearranged. It stops the way a clock stops: carefully, mechanically, without announcement. One moment, time is moving. The next, it isn't.

Esha is my age. Maybe a year younger. Her hair is dark, the deep, almost-blue black that you see in paintings of Draupadi; pulled back in a braid that reaches the middle of her back. Her skin is the colour of winter wheat. And her eyes —

Her eyes are the brown of strong chai. Not the pale, milky chai of the tapris. The deep, concentrated brown of the first pour, before the milk goes in, when the decoction is pure and dark and holds the light.

She gives me a smile. Small. Shy. The smile of a person who is not accustomed to smiling at strangers but is trying.

"Hi," she says. Her voice is calm. Almost a whisper.

"Hi," I say. I sound like a Class 5 student meeting the headmaster. My hands are suddenly damp. My heart has decided, without my permission, to accelerate.

It's anxiety. Obviously. I haven't spoken to a person my age in two months. The social muscles have atrophied. That's all this is.

"Bharat ka bahut accha hai," says Bharat, grinning at me with an uncle who has been waiting to introduce his niece to someone her age. "Esha ek mahine se intezaar kar rahi thi ki koi uski umar ka aaye. Well, Joseph ke alawa."

The table laughs. Everyone except Esha, who gives her uncle a look that could curdle dahi.

I sit beside her. The bench is hard. The curry, it is a curry, chicken curry with rice, and it's good, genuinely good, the kind of food that tastes better when you're starving, is served in steel thalis, the communal kind that railway canteens use. I eat with my hands, the way I've eaten my entire life, the way Amma taught me — "Haath se khao, Vivek, khana haath se khaane mein alag hi maza hai."

For several minutes, I just eat. The table talks around me. Bharat and Kevin debating the potato harvest, Karen complaining about the chickens, Paul making a joke that I miss the punchline of. Esha is quiet. She eats slowly, methodically, the way people eat when they're thinking about something else.

I'm thinking about something else too. I'm thinking about the cameras and the guards and the house that we can't approach and the curfew that we can't break and the ceramic pot in the corner of my tent. I'm thinking about Chaya and Dhruv, alone in Candolim, the heavy door probably barricaded, Dhruv crying because he can sense Chaya's fear the way babies sense everything. Through the skin, through the breath, through the unmistakable frequency of a mother's heartbeat when it's racing.

"Kaise lag raha hai sab?" Esha asks. She's looking at me. Or rather, she's looking at the rough table near me, which is how she looks at things: indirectly, as though direct eye contact is a commitment she's not ready to make.

"Hard work hai," I say.

"Aadat ho jaati hai. Aur team acchi hai — Karen aur Kevin aur Paul. Woh sabr rakhte hain. Mere saath bhi rakha."

"Accha hai sunn ke."

Stillness. The weight of it pressed against her chest. She goes back to her thali. I go back to mine.

Then: "Tum kahan se ho?" she asks. Still looking at the table.

"Pune. Kothrud."

"Main bhi Maharashtra se hoon. Kolhapur."

"Kolhapur? Accha."

"Haan. Bharat mama ke saath aayi. Woh mere mama hain. Amma ke bhai."

She doesn't elaborate. The stillness after the words is the weight of a door closing, not slammed, just pulled shut, gently, firmly. The story of how she got here, of what happened before, is behind that door. And she's not opening it for me. Not yet.

"Samajhta hoon," I say. "Tumhe batane ki zaroorat nahi."

She looks at me then. Directly. For the first time since I sat down. And in her eyes, those deep-chai eyes — I see something that I recognise, because I see it in my own eyes every time I catch my reflection.

Grief. That personal, untranslatable grief of a person who has lost everything and is learning, slowly and against their will, how to carry the loss without being crushed by it.

"Shukriya," she says. Then she looks away.

The dinner continues. People laugh. Bharat tells a story about the pig, Guddu, his name is Guddu, because of course it is; that involves a vegetable patch and a midnight escape and Karen finding him asleep in her tent. Karen protests that the story is exaggerated. Paul confirms that it isn't. Bholu lies at my feet, his head on my shoe, his body warm and still.

And through it all, I catalogue.

The boy, the seven-year-old; sits three tables away with a woman who I initially thought was his mother but who, from their body language, seems more like a caretaker. He eats with the careful concentration of a child who has learned that food is not guaranteed.

Joseph, a young man, my age or close to it, sits at the far end of the clearing. He glanced at me once, early in the meal, and then looked away with the deliberate speed of a person who doesn't want to be seen looking. There's something in his posture — a tension, a vigilance, that doesn't match the relaxed camaraderie of the others. He's watching. Not me, specifically. Everything.

The guards are still at the treeline. They don't eat with us. They stand and watch, their rifles held loosely, the way men hold things they've held so many times that the holding has become unconscious.

And Meera. She's at a bench near the back, alone, eating with the mechanical efficiency of a person fuelling a machine. She doesn't socialise. She doesn't smile. She eats, and she watches, and the taser on her belt catches the light from the solar lamps that someone has strung between the huts.

I eat my curry. I smile at the jokes. I laugh when Bharat laughs. I am performing, someone who is grateful, who is cooperative, who is not cataloguing the positions of cameras and guards, who is not counting the steps from his tent to the treeline, who is not wondering what is inside the house that glows white in the darkness behind us.

After dinner, I walk back to my tent alone. Bholu walks beside me, his nose to the ground, reading the scents of this new place with the thoroughness of a scholar reading a primary source.

I zip the tent shut. Lie on the cot. Pull the thin blanket over me. Goan nights in April are warm, but the tent adds a dampness that settles on the skin and doesn't leave.

I close my eyes and think of Chaya.

The house in Candolim. The blue tiles in the kitchen. The terrace where we sat in the evenings and watched the sun drop into the Arabian Sea, Dhruv in her arms, Bholu at my feet, the four of us forming an unit that was not a family in any legal or biological sense but that functioned as one: held together not by blood or law but by the simple, desperate arithmetic of survival: we are alive, and we are together, and that is enough.

I miss her with a physical intensity that surprises me. Not the romantic missing of lovers separated, Chaya and I are not lovers, not in that way, not yet, though the possibility sits between us like an unlit diya, present and potential; but the missing of a partner. A co-parent. A person who shares the weight.

Without her, the weight is all mine. And it is heavier than I thought.

Kal,* I tell myself. *Kal kuch hoga. Kal woh aayegi. Ya kal mujhe kuch samajh aayega. Kal.

Tomorrow. The word that the hopeful use as a shield against today.

Bholu snores. The tent walls flutter in the Goan breeze. Somewhere beyond the camp, an owl calls. The low, two-note hoot of an Indian scops owl, a sound that I heard every night in Kothrud from my bedroom window and that is, in this strange and frightening place, the only familiar thing.

I listen to it until I sleep.

---