Chapter 3: Kheton Mein Pehla Din

## Chapter 3: Kheton Mein Pehla Din

VIVEK

I wake to a bell.

Not the gentle, ceremonial bell of a temple. The kind that Amma rang every morning at our small mandir shelf in Kothrud, the brass one with the wooden handle, its sound designed to reach gods rather than humans. This bell is industrial. A steel pipe struck with a metal rod, the sound cutting through the tent walls with the subtlety of a truck horn on the Pune-Mumbai Expressway.

Bholu barks once, sharp, military; then sits up, ears pricked, tail rigid.

"Shh, Bholu. Nashta hai."

He understands nashta. His tail wags. He licks his lips. Even at the end of the world, a dog's relationship with mealtimes is uncomplicated.

I push myself upright. My body reports in, joint by joint: everything hurts. The cot's springs have tattooed a grid into my back. The taser burn on my stomach has crusted overnight into a scab that cracks when I stretch, leaking a thin line of something that is either blood or plasma and that I choose not to examine closely.

the warm air inside the tent is cold and damp, April in Goa, that strange month when the heat is building toward the monsoon but the nights still carry the memory of winter. 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. My skin is chilled. My breath, when I exhale, doesn't quite fog, but comes close.

I pull on the farmer's clothes. The shirt smells of someone else, not unpleasantly, just differently, the specific olfactory signature of a stranger's body that has been incompletely washed out. The Wellington boots are heavier than any footwear I've worn in my life. I feel like I'm wearing two buckets.

Outside, the camp is stirring. People emerge from tents in various states of alertness; some moving with purpose, some stumbling, one man stretching with the elaborate theatricality of a person who wants the world to know he's awake. The solar lamps that were strung between the huts last night have been extinguished, replaced by actual sunlight, which hits the red laterite and makes the whole camp glow like the inside of a kiln.

Nashta is thick porridge, dalia, made with water, sweetened with something that might be jaggery or might be the memory of jaggery. It's served in steel bowls at the picnic benches, and I eat it the way I eat everything now — fast, grateful, aware that the next meal is twelve hours away and my body will need every calorie between now and then.

Bholu gets scraps from the previous night's dinner. He eats them faster than I eat the porridge.

"Tayyar ho aaj ke liye?" Bharat drops onto the bench across from me, his weight making the whole structure shift. He eats his dalia in four spoonfuls, which is impressive given that the bowl contains enough to feed a family of three.

"Lagta hai."

"Accha. Aaj Esha ke saath rahoge. Woh tumhare mentor hogi. Sab kuch sikhayegi. Woh expert hai ab: ek mahine mein bahut kuch seekh liya usne."

Esha is already at the rough table, two seats down, eating without a word, the air thick against their skin. She glances at me when Bharat says her name, then looks away.

"Theek hai," I say.

---

By noon, I understand why Bharat is the size he is.

The morning starts with the cows. The dawn smelled of wet earth and the faint sweetness of neem flowers opening. Not Sundari, the milk cow is Karen's domain, but two bullocks that live in a shed at the camp's edge, their purpose being to plough the larger fields. The shed needs mucking out, which is a phrase I knew conceptually but had never experienced physically. The reality of it; the weight of the shovel, the smell that exists beyond smell, a smell so dense it has texture, the distinct brown universe of bovine waste, is unlike anything I have encountered, including the time I cleaned out the drain behind our building in Kothrud during the 2019 monsoon.

Esha works beside me. She shovels with the efficient rhythm of someone who has done this many times, her body angled forward, her braid swinging with each scoop. She doesn't speak much. Small instructions, "Wahan se uthaao," "Yeh container mein daalo," "Dhyan se, woh gaay kick karti hai"; delivered in a voice that is calm but certain.

I shovel. My palms, despite the rough cotton gloves they gave me, develop blisters within the first hour, hot, liquid blisters that burst and reform and burst again. My back, which was already sore from the cot, develops a new geography of pain — lower lumbar, where the spine meets the pelvis, a hinge that has been asked to perform a function it was not designed for.

But I shovel. Because there is nothing else to do, and because the shovelling keeps my body busy while my mind works.

The cameras. I've counted seven now. Three in the camp, two overlooking the farm, one on the house's roof, one on a pole near the treeline. They're the dome kind: CCTV, the same make that shops and offices used before the virus, the kind that rotate and track and see everything within their arc.

Seven cameras. At least four guards visible at any time, two at the treeline, one near the house, one roving. Armed with rifles. The guards rotate, different faces at different times: which means there are more than four. Maybe eight. Maybe twelve.

The house. I can see it from the farm, the white facade, the arched windows, the terracotta roof. It sits on a slight elevation, looking down at the camp the way a landlord's haveli looks down at a village. During the day, I've seen people enter and leave. Lakshman, Meera, Tarun, other faces I don't recognise. They use the front door, which faces away from the camp, accessible via a path that curves around the side of the building.

The forest. It rings the estate on three sides, dense Goan forest, the kind that is ninety percent canopy and ten percent visibility, a wall of green that might as well be a wall of concrete for all the penetration it allows. The fourth side, the front of the house — opens onto what was once a road. I caught a glimpse of it during the tour: a single-lane laterite track, leading away into the countryside, the kind of road that Google Maps would classify as "unpaved" and that local taxi drivers would classify as "mat jao."

Escape routes. The forest is the obvious one, lose yourself in the trees, navigate by sun or stars, head for the coast. But the guards are positioned specifically to prevent this, and their rifles make the theoretical distance between the camp and the treeline, maybe two hundred metres, a killing field.

The road is the other option. But it passes directly in front of the house, which means passing directly under whatever surveillance the house contains.

Neither option is good. Both options will require a plan. A plan requires information. Information requires time.

Time is the one thing I have.

"Arey: yahan dhyan do."

Esha's voice pulls me back. I've stopped shovelling. I was standing there, staring at the house, the shovel in my hands like a forgotten prop.

"Sorry," I say. "Soch mein pad gaya."

She looks at me. Then at the house. Then back at me. Something passes across her face. Recognition, maybe. The recognition of someone who has also stared at that house and wondered.

"Yahan mat dekho," she says. Quietly. "Woh log dekhte hain."

It's the first useful thing anyone has said to me since I arrived.

---

After the mucking out, we plant. Potatoes, specifically. Bharat wants potatoes: he has been campaigning for potatoes for two weeks, according to Karen, with the single-minded determination of a Marathi man who believes that batata is the foundation of civilisation.

"Batata wada, batata bhaji, batata rassa. Sab batata se shuru hota hai," he says, handing me a sack of seed potatoes that weighs approximately as much as a small motorcycle.

We plant in rows. Esha shows me how — the depth of the hole, the spacing between seeds, the way you cover them with soil and pat it down with the back of the trowel. It's precise work, and she does it with someone who has found, in the repetition, a kind of meditation.

I try to match her rhythm. I fail. My holes are too shallow, then too deep. My spacing is uneven. Bharat, walking the rows behind us like a quality inspector, gently corrects me twice.

"Koi baat nahi," he says. "Pehli baar hai. Seekh jaoge."

Bholu watches from a patch of sun near the fence, his chin on his paws, his eyes half-closed. He has achieved, in two days, what I have not; complete relaxation. He has decided that this place, while strange, contains food and warmth and other dogs and a patch of sunlit ground, and that these things are sufficient. Dogs are pragmatists. They don't worry about tomorrow because they don't believe in tomorrow. They believe in now.

During the break, water, served in repurposed plastic bottles, a label that no longer exists. I sit at the picnic bench and let my body complain.

My hands are destroyed. The blisters have evolved into open sores, red and raw, weeping a clear fluid that stings when the air touches it. My back has calcified into a single unit: spine, muscles, and ribs fused into an architecture of pain. My legs, from the Wellington boots and the uneven ground, feel like they belong to someone else, someone much older and much less mobile.

"Pani peelo," says Karen, pushing a bottle toward me. "Bottled hai. Lakshman ki koi badi scheme hai, water filtration system lagwana chahta hai."

Paul, Kevin, and Karen share a look: the look of people who have heard Lakshman's schemes before and have opinions about them. It's a small thing, but I file it. Dissatisfaction. Even mild dissatisfaction is a resource.

The boy appears.

He materialises from the direction of the tents, all energy and angles, his legs covering ground with the exact velocity of a child who hasn't yet learned that walking is more efficient than running. He's carrying a book. A battered paperback, Goosebumps, the cover so worn that the ghost on it has faded to a pale suggestion.

"Namaste!" he announces at approximately ninety decibels.

The table turns to him with the collective warmth of adults who have adopted a child by consensus.

"Hey, Kabir!" says Karen. "Aaj kya padh rahe ho?"

"Goosebumps. Lekin mujhe ab yaad ho gaya hai. Boring ho gaya." He notices Bholu, who has abandoned his sun patch and trotted over to investigate the new arrival. "Kya main usse pat kar sakta hoon?"

"Haan, bilkul," I say. "Woh bahut friendly hai."

"Thank you SO MUCH." Kabir kneels. Extends a hand. Bholu sniffs it, the careful, considered sniff of a dog evaluating a potential friend — then licks it, and Kabir erupts into that high-pitched giggle that only seven-year-olds can produce.

"Woh bahut cute hai. Uska naam kya hai?"

"Bholu."

"BHOLU!" Kabir repeats, as though the name itself is the funniest thing he's heard all week. He scratches behind Bholu's ears, and Bholu closes his eyes in ecstasy, his tail sweeping the ground like a metronome set to allegro.

"Mujhe jaana chahiye," says Kabir, standing abruptly. "Padhai karni hai. Guddu ko namaste bolna, okay?"

Then he's gone, sprinting back the way he came, the Goosebumps book flapping in his rough hand like a wounded bird.

After he's out of earshot, it's Bharat who speaks first.

"Bechaara baccha."

Karen's smile has folded into something else, something heavier. She looks at me. "Kabir yahan pehle se tha. Sab se pehle. Jab scouts ne usse dhundha, woh apne ghar mein akela tha. Uske mummy-papa, bhai, behen, sab mar gaye. Saat saal ka baccha, bilkul akela. Do hafte se zyada akela tha. Pehle hafte toh woh sirf rota tha. Ab better hai. Lekin; koi bachcha nahi hai yahan uski umar ka. Koi dost nahi."

The story hits me in the place where I keep my losses. Saat saal ka baccha. Seven years old. Alone in a house with the bodies of his family for two weeks.

Dhruv was alone too, when we found him. Strapped in the car seat, his parents dead in the front, the car locked, the Goan sun turning the Ertiga into an oven. If we'd found him a day later, even hours later; he wouldn't have survived.

There are hierarchies of suffering. I know this. But a seven-year-old, alone with the dead, at the end of the world: that sits near the top.

"Aur woh aurat, Debbie — woh uski maa nahi hai?" I ask.

"Nahi. Debbie ek aur survivor hai. Usne apne aap ko Kabir ki caretaker bana liya. Woh acchi aurat hai."

So Kabir's survival disproves the gene theory: or at least complicates it. His family is dead. He survived alone. There's no hereditary connection to explain it.

Unless there is, and we just don't see it yet.

---

After the break, Bharat sends Esha and me to the stables. The stables are halfway between the camp and the house, set into the slope of the hill on which the estate sits. They're old, stone walls, wooden stalls, a tiled roof that sags in the middle; and they predate the camp by at least a century, part of the original colonial estate.

Three horses. A chestnut mare with white socks. A black gelding with a stripe down his nose. A white mare with grey dapples across her flanks.

"Unhe khaana dena hai," says Esha, handing me a bucket of carrots and green apples. "Aur naya ghaas. Phir hum stalls saaf karenge."

We walk together. The path from the farm to the stables crosses open ground, the lawn that separates the camp from the house. A guard stands at the treeline, maybe a hundred and fifty metres away. He's too far to overhear a conversation at normal volume.

And, I notice this with an attention of a person who is cataloguing every detail — there are no cameras here. The poles that carry the surveillance equipment stop at the edge of the farm. The stables exist in a blind spot.

Esha notices me noticing.

"Yahan cameras nahi hain," she says. Carefully, without looking at me, as though commenting on the weather. "Isliye mujhe yahan aana accha lagta hai. Aur ghode. Ghode se baat karna easy hai."

She feeds the chestnut mare a carrot. The mare takes it with the delicate grip of an animal that understands the economics of treats: slowly, appreciatively, her lips folding around the carrot with the precision of a craftsman handling raw material.

I watch Esha. The way she stands close to the mare, her hand on its neck, her fingers tracing the line where the coat changes from chestnut to white. The way her face, which is guarded and careful in the camp, softens here. The way her shoulders drop.

"Main bhi Pune se hoon," I say. I don't know why I say it, it's not new information, I told her at dinner, but the tension between us feels like it needs something, and shared geography is the easiest bridge.

"Haan, tumne bataya. Kothrud."

"Haan. Tum Kolhapur se ho."

"Haan."

Stillness. The weight of it pressed against her chest. The mare chews. Her jaw moves in a circle, the way horse jaws do, the motion both powerful and oddly gentle.

"Tumhare parents..." I start, then stop. The question is too big, too heavy, too presumptuous. You don't ask a person about their dead at the end of the world. It's the one social convention that has survived the apocalypse. The unspoken agreement that grief is private, that the listing of losses is not conversation but confession.

"Mere parents mar gaye," she says. Simply. Without affect. The words laid out like objects on a table, arranged for examination. "Aur mera bhai. Aur meri dadi. Bharat mama bach gaye. Unka phone aaya: woh Goa mein the jab virus aaya. Kisi tarah hum dono bach gaye aur saath mein pahuche yahan."

"Mujhe bahut dukh hai."

"Sab ko dukh hai." She looks at me. "Tumhare?"

"Mummy-Papa. Pune mein. Main unhe... garden mein..." I can't finish the sentence. The image, the two graves, side by side, under the mango tree that Appa planted when we moved in, the tree that he said would give fruit in five years and that never did — rises in my mind and blocks my throat.

"Samajhti hoon," she says.

And that's it. That's all we say about it. Two sentences each. The minimum viable exchange. But in those sentences, something shifts: a weight redistributed, a door opened an inch, just enough to see that behind it, the other person carries the same darkness.

We muck out the stables in silence. The work is lighter than the cows; horse manure is drier, less voluminous, the waste product of an animal that is more efficient than cattle in converting feed to output. Or maybe I'm just getting used to shovelling shit. Both explanations are plausible.

"Vivek," says Esha, when we're done. We're standing outside the stables, the afternoon sun warm on our faces, the estate spread before us; the camp to the left, the house above us, the forest encircling everything like a wall.

"Haan?"

"Yahan ek ladka hai, Jai. Woh humare group mein nahi hai. Woh alag rehta hai. Woh, woh bahut sawaalen karta hai."

She says sawaalen karta hai, asks questions, the way you'd say cigarette peeta hai — smokes cigarettes. A habit. A vice.

"Kaise sawaalen?"

"Ghar ke baare mein. Rules ke baare mein. Guards ke baare mein." She pauses. Looks at the house, then back at me. "Woh bura nahi hai. Lekin. Dhyan rakhna. Yahan har kisi pe bharosa nahi kiya ja sakta."

I wait for her to say more. She doesn't. She picks up the buckets, turns, and walks back toward the farm.

I follow. Bholu falls into step beside me, his nose working overtime, reading the laterite the way a scholar reads Sanskrit, slowly, thoroughly, with the conviction that meaning is buried somewhere beneath the surface.

Jai. I file the name. Joseph in the original. The one who asks questions. The one I need to find.

The afternoon passes in potatoes and pain. By the time the dinner bell rings, my body has transcended pain and entered a new state; a numbed acceptance, the body's equivalent of a white flag. Everything hurts, therefore nothing hurts. The logic is Buddhist in its simplicity and untrue in its application, but it gets me through the last hour of planting.

Dinner is dal and rice. The dal is yellow, arhar, probably, the everyday dal of India; and it's seasoned with haldi, jeera, and a tadka of rai and curry leaves that fills the clearing with the smell of home. The rice is plain, slightly overcooked, the grains swollen and soft. the cold water ran between her fingers, cold and insistent. It is, by pre-virus standards, basic. By post-virus standards, it is a feast.

I eat with Bharat and the team. Esha sits beside me. She eats in stillness, as she did last night. But the stillness is different now. Warmer, the weight of two people who have shared a day of work and a small exchange of grief and who are content, for now, to be quiet together.

Kabir appears again, briefly, to pet Bholu and announce that he has finished his Goosebumps book and needs a new one. Karen promises to look for one among the camp's meagre library; a box of books salvaged from abandoned houses, mostly self-help and religious texts, with a few novels scattered among them like survivors themselves.

I scan the clearing for Jai. I find him at a table near the edge, eating alone. He's my age — dark-skinned, sharp-featured, with the wiry build of a person who runs. He eats fast, like someone who doesn't want to be at the table longer than necessary. As if he feels my gaze, he looks up. Our eyes meet.

He looks away immediately. Fast. Deliberate.

Not yet,* his body language says. *Not here.

After dinner, I go back to the tent. Bholu curls at my feet. I lie on the cot and stare at the polyester ceiling and think about everything.

Chaya. Where is she? Is she safe? Have they taken her already?

The house. What is inside it? Why can't we go near it?

The cameras. Seven that I've counted. Are there more?

The guards. At least four on duty at any time. Rifles. Probably more inside the house.

Jai. The one who asks questions. What does he know? What has he figured out?

Esha. Her warning: Yahan har kisi pe bharosa nahi kiya ja sakta. You can't trust everyone here. Which implies: you can trust some. Who?

Lakshman. The smile. The linen kurta. The Kolhapuri chappals. The way he says parivar, family: as though the word is a net and we are the fish.

Sleep comes eventually, not as a decision but as a surrender. My body, which has been pushed beyond its limits, simply quits, the way a generator quits when the fuel runs out.

The last thing I hear before consciousness leaves is the sound of engines.

Vehicles. Coming from the direction of the house. Coming and going. Coming and going, through the night, like a pulse, like a heartbeat, like the machinery of something that runs while we sleep and stops before we wake.

I want to look. I want to unzip the tent and crawl to the edge and see what's moving in the darkness.

But I remember the guards. The rifles. The way Lakshman said kho gaye with the weight of a threat.

I stay in the cot. I listen. I file.

And then I sleep.

---