Chapter 9: Lakshman Ka Raasta

## Chapter 9: Lakshman Ka Raasta

LAKSHMAN

The boy thinks I don't see him.

I see everything. That is the difference between Vivek and me — he observes, I see. He catalogues the guards' rotations, the cameras' angles, the fence's weak points. He thinks he's building a map. He is building a map. But I built the territory.

I stand at the window of my study on the second floor of the house, the house that they call the mansion, the house that was built by Francisco da Costa in 1847 and occupied by his descendants until the virus emptied it in a single Tuesday afternoon. The glass is old, hand-blown, with the imperfections that make colonial glass beautiful — bubbles, waviness, a slight green tint that turns the laterite lawns into something underwater.

Through this glass, I watch Vivek dig potatoes.

His rough hands have hardened. I noticed this three days ago — the change in his grip on the shovel, the absence of the wince that accompanied every stroke in the first week. The body adapts. The body is the easiest thing to control, because the body wants to survive, and survival means compliance, and compliance means the shovel goes into the soil and the soil yields its potatoes and the potatoes feed the camp and the camp continues.

The mind is harder. Vivek's mind is a problem I haven't solved yet.

I turn from the window. My study is the only room I use on the second floor. The rest of the house — fourteen rooms, three bathrooms, a library, a chapel — is sealed. Not because the rooms are dangerous. Because the rooms are necessary. Necessary for what they contain, and necessary for the mystery of what they contain. A locked room is more powerful than anything inside it. I learned this from Appa, who kept a locked cabinet in his office at the Pune Municipal Corporation and never told us what was inside. We speculated for years. Bribery records. Love letters. A gun. When he died, we opened it. It was empty.

The empty cabinet controlled us more effectively than any full one could have.

I sit, the surface hard beneath me, at the rough desk. The desk is mahogany, heavy, carved with the vines and flowers that Portuguese craftsmen loved. On it: a ledger, a solar-powered radio (tuned to nothing — there has been nothing on any frequency for seventy-one days), a bottle of feni that I haven't opened, and a framed photograph that I brought from Pune.

The photograph shows a woman. My wife. Kavita. She's standing in the garden of our flat in Koregaon Park, holding a mug of chai, laughing at something I said that I can't remember. Her hair is open, black and thick, the kind of hair that Marathi women oil with coconut and braid for work and leave loose for their husbands. The mug says WORLD'S OKAYEST HUSBAND, which she bought me for our tenth anniversary as a joke that was also, she said, an accurate assessment.

Kavita died on the fourth day of the virus. I held her. Her skin was hot — not fever-hot but burning, the virus cooking her from inside, the proteins denaturing, the cells rupturing. She held my hand. Her grip weakened over six hours, the fingers loosening one by one, the thumb last, the thumb always last, because the thumb is the strongest digit and the last to surrender.

I didn't cry. I haven't cried since. Crying is a luxury of people who can afford to be broken, and I cannot afford it, because forty-seven people depend on me not being broken, and their survival is the only thing that matters, and I will do whatever is necessary to ensure it.

Whatever is necessary.

---

The camp runs on four principles. I developed them during the first week, when it was just me and Tarun and Chandni and three strangers we'd found on the highway outside Margao, dehydrated and terrified, stumbling through the debris of a civilisation that had ended while they were sleeping.

Principle One: Structure. People need routine. Without it, the mind collapses. The bell, the meals, the work shifts, the curfew — these are not punishments. They are architecture. The scaffolding that holds the human psyche upright when the ground has been removed.

Principle Two: Purpose. Every person must have a role. Bharat farms. Karen cooks. The guards guard. Even the children have tasks — sorting seeds, feeding chickens, sweeping the mess hall. Idle hands don't just make mischief. Idle hands make despair. And despair is a contagion more deadly than the virus.

Principle Three: Hierarchy. Democracy is a luxury of abundance. When resources are scarce and threats are real, decisions must be made quickly, by someone who is willing to bear the weight of being wrong. That someone is me. Not because I'm the smartest or the strongest. Because I'm the one who stepped forward when everyone else stepped back.

Principle Four: The House. The house must remain forbidden. Not because of what's inside — though what's inside matters — but because the prohibition itself is the foundation of the social contract. A community needs a taboo. A thing that everyone agrees not to do. The prohibition creates the boundary between inside and outside, between us and chaos. Without it, the camp is just a collection of individuals. With it, the camp is a society.

Samaj.

I named it that because the word means both "society" and "understanding." The double meaning is deliberate. We are a society. And we are an understanding — an agreement between forty-seven people that they will submit to a structure they didn't choose in exchange for survival they couldn't achieve alone.

Most of them understand this. Most of them are grateful. Bharat, who lost his entire family and found purpose in potatoes. Karen, who was a chef before and is a chef still and who treats the kitchen as a kingdom where she is sovereign. 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. Even the children, who adapt to captivity the way water adapts to a container, taking its shape without complaint.

But some don't understand. Some resist. Not openly — openly is easy to deal with. Slowly. The calm resistance of people who smile and comply and dig their potatoes and all the while are building something in their heads, something that threatens the structure, something that could bring the rough walls down.

Vivek is one. The girl, Chaya, is another. Together, they are a problem.

And Jai.

Jai is the problem I've been watching for three weeks.

---

I discovered his incursions two weeks ago. Not through the cameras — Jai is clever with cameras, he's mapped their blind spots with an accuracy that I find, privately, impressive. I discovered them through Chandni, who never sleeps, who patrols the grounds between midnight and four with the disciplined insomnia of a woman who watched her daughter die and now fills the hours of darkness with vigilance.

Chandni saw him. Moving through the shadows between the outhouse and the garden wall. She didn't confront him. She told me. Because Chandni understands, as I do, that confrontation is a tool, and tools must be used at the right moment, not the first moment.

I waited. Watched. Let Jai make his incursions. Let him feel the thrill of transgression, the satisfaction of approaching the house and retreating undetected. Let him build his confidence, his certainty that he was smarter than the cameras, smarter than the guards, smarter than me.

Confidence is the heavy door through which people walk into traps.

And tonight, Jai will walk through it. 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. Chandni told me an hour ago — he's planning to enter the house. Not just approach it. Enter it. The sealed section, the rooms on the ground floor where the medical supplies are stored, where the radio equipment sits, where the records are kept. The records of the virus. The records of how it spread, who it killed, the patterns of mortality that I've been tracking since the first week.

The records that explain why forty-seven people are alive.

Jai wants to know why he survived. They all want to know. It's the question that burns in every survivor — why me? Why did the virus take everyone I loved and leave me standing? The question is natural. The question is human. And the answer, if they found it, would destroy the community I've built.

Because the answer is: I chose them.

Not randomly. Not by chance. I had access to the municipal health records — years of data, blood types, medical histories, genetic markers. When the virus hit Pune, when I watched the pattern of who died and who didn't, I saw what the epidemiologists missed: the correlation. A specific genetic marker. A protein. HLA-B*57:01. Present in approximately three percent of the Indian population. Present in one hundred percent of the survivors I've found.

I didn't save these people. The gene saved them. But I found them. Tracked them. Sent Tarun and the scouts to locate them, assess them, bring them here. To Goa, to this house, to this compound, to Samaj.

Forty-seven people with a gene that makes them immune to the virus that killed eight billion.

They think they survived by luck. They think Samaj is a refuge. They think I'm a leader.

I am a farmer. And they are the crop.

The feni bottle catches the lamplight. I pour a measure. The liquor is warm, the colour of pale gold, the smell of cashew fruit and fermentation and Goa's three-hundred-year history of turning tropical abundance into controlled intoxication.

I drink. The feni burns on the way down. The burn is clean. Simple.

Not like the other burn. Not like the burn of knowing that what I'm doing is necessary and that necessary things are not always good things and that the line between a leader and a tyrant is drawn not by the leader but by the people who survive him.

I set down the cold glass. Pick up the photograph.

Kavita would hate this. She would hate the compound, the guards, the cameras, the prohibition, the control. She was a schoolteacher — she believed in questions, in curiosity, in the right of every person to know the truth and make their own decisions. She would have sided with Vivek. She would have sided with Jai.

She would have been right to.

But she's dead. And I'm alive. And the forty-seven people in my care are alive. And keeping them alive requires things that Kavita would have hated and that I hate too and that I do anyway, every day, because the alternative is letting them die, and I held my wife while she died, and I will not hold anyone else.

The lamplight flickers. Outside, the laterite glows red in the moonlight. The camp is quiet. The tents are dark. Forty-seven people sleeping in the belief that they are safe, and they are safe, and I will keep them safe, and the cost of their safety is a secret that I carry alone, in a house they're forbidden to enter, in a study they'll never see, at a desk where a photograph of a dead woman watches me do terrible things for good reasons.

Tomorrow, Jai will try to enter the house.

Tomorrow, I will stop him.

And the day after, I will do what is necessary.

Whatever is necessary.