Chapter 10: Vihan

# Chapter 10: Vihan

## Kirana

Day 24. The supply run.

We go in pairs. Tanvi and me. Gaurav stays at the school with Maitreyi and Sudhir Kaka. The logic is simple: Tanvi knows the streets, knows how to siphon fuel, knows how to assess danger. I know the neighbourhood from eight months of reluctant residence. Together, we are a functional unit.

We leave at 5:30 AM. The air is cool, the last gasp of night before the March sun begins its assault. We wear N95 masks, carry empty rucksacks (mine, the Wildcraft; hers, a JanSport she found in a classroom), and Tanvi carries the Swiss knife in her pocket. We also carry two empty jerrycans, because fuel and food are equally essential currencies.

Our target: the residential lanes behind Karve Road, between Kothrud and Erandwane. These are the old Pune lanes. Narrow, tree-lined, the kind where kirana shops occupy ground-floor spaces of residential buildings and have been run by the same family for thirty years. The kind of shops that stock everything from atta to phenyl to binding wire and that have hand-painted signs in Marathi and sell loose spices weighed on brass scales.

The D-Marts and Big Bazaars have been looted, smashed doors, empty shelves, broken glass. But these small shops, tucked into residential buildings, invisible to anyone who does not live in the lane, these might still have stock.

---

The first shop we find is on a lane behind the MIT College campus. The shutter is down. A corrugated metal shutter, locked from outside with a simple padlock. The building above the shop is three stories, residential. The windows on the upper floors are dark.

"Padlock," says Tanvi, examining it. "Standard Godrej. We can break it."

"With what?"

She looks around. Finds a loose brick from a crumbling compound wall two metres away. Picks it up. Tests its weight in her hand.

"With this."

Three strikes. The hasp tears from the shutter with a screech of metal that makes both of us freeze, listening. No response. No shouts. No footsteps. Just the crows, scattering from a nearby tree, then resettling.

I lift the shutter. The metal groans as it rolls up, revealing the interior. Dark, smelling of cardboard and spice and the specific scent of an Indian kirana shop: a blend of hing, turmeric, soap, and the dust of a hundred transactions.

Tanvi flicks on a torch. The beam sweeps across the shop.

My chest tightens. Not from fear. From abundance.

That shelves are mostly full. Bags of atta stacked three deep. Packets of rice — Kohinoor basmati, India Gate, local varieties in unmarked white bags. Tins of cooking oil, Sundrop, Fortune, Saffola. Packets of dal — moong, masoor, chana, toor. Sugar in kilo bags. Salt in half-kilo packets. Spices in small packets, red chilli powder, garam masala, haldi, dhaniya-jeera. Soap — Lux, Lifebuoy, Godrej No. 1. Shampoo sachets pinned to a display board. Toothpaste, Colgate, Pepsodent. Candles — thick white ones, the kind used during power cuts, which is to say the kind used always in India.

There are things missing — the biscuit shelf is empty (someone has been here before us), the cold drinks fridge is dead and smells of rotting milk, and the display of mobile recharge cards is laughably irrelevant. But the core stock, the food, the cooking supplies, the daily necessities — is intact.

"How, " I start.

"Because nobody loots kirana shops," says Tanvi. She is already loading her bag. "They loot malls. They loot showrooms. They smash the glass at D-Mart because it looks like a target. But this, " She gestures at the modest shop, its hand-painted sign reading Shri Ganesh Provision Store in orange Marathi script, its interior no larger than a small bedroom. "This looks like someone's uncle's shop. And even in the apocalypse, people have a hard time stealing from someone's uncle."

I start loading my bag. I take: 5 kg atta, 5 kg rice, 3 kg mixed dal, 2 litres of oil, 1 kg sugar, salt, turmeric, chilli powder, garam masala, a packet of tea, two bars of soap, a tube of toothpaste, and, a find that makes me emit a sound of pure joy, a packet of shev and a packet of chakli. Farsan. The Maharashtrian savoury snacks that Aai used to buy from Chitale Bandhu every weekend, the crunchy, spiced, oily snacks that have no nutritional value whatsoever but that taste like home.

Tanvi takes a similar haul, plus candles, matches, two packets of glucose biscuits, and a bottle of Dettol. We fill both rucksacks until they are heavy enough to make us lean forward when we walk.

"We should come back," I say. "There is enough here for weeks."

"We will. But not too often — I do not want to create a visible trail. If someone is watching these streets, a trail of footprints leading to and from a kirana shop is a map to our food supply."

I had not thought of that. Tanvi thinks in threat patterns. I think in meal plans. Together, we are a functioning survival organism.

---

On the way back, we make two detours.

First is to a pharmacy — a small medical store on the Karve Road service lane, its glass door cracked but not shattered. Inside, the shelves have been partially raided, the painkillers, the antibiotics, the cough syrups are gone. But the less glamorous medicines remain: Crocin (paracetamol), Digene (antacid), Imodium (for the stomach problems that come from eating questionable food in questionable conditions), ORS packets (for dehydration), Betadine (antiseptic), cotton rolls, bandages, and — a critical find, a box of Amoxicillin capsules (a broad-spectrum antibiotic, the kind that Aai used to keep in the house for emergencies, the kind that treats everything from throat infections to wound infections).

Tanvi fills a plastic bag with everything useful. "We are not doctors," she says, reading the Amoxicillin label, "but we are better than nothing. And nothing is currently the alternative."

The second detour is to a nursery — a plant shop on a side lane, the kind that sells potted money plants and tulsi and seasonal flowers to Pune's apartment dwellers. The nursery is a riot of green, the plants, unwatered for weeks, are dying, but the seed rack near the counter is intact. Tanvi grabs packets: tomato seeds, chilli seeds, coriander, methi (fenugreek), palak (spinach), bottle gourd, ridge gourd. I grab three more: brinjal, okra, and — because I am my mother's son, a packet of mogra seeds.

Tanvi sees the mogra packet in my hand. She does not comment. She puts it in her bag without a word.

---

We return to the school at 8 AM. The sun is already fierce. Sudhir Kaka meets us at the gate, his face cracking into the first genuine smile I have seen from him.

"You found food?"

"Enough for another month," says Tanvi, swinging her rucksack onto the kitchen counter and starting to unload. "Plus seeds, medicines, and diesel from a Tata Tiago on Lane 4."

The inventory is updated. The spreadsheet, Sudhir Kaka's handwritten Bible, grows by two pages. Our food supply has jumped from thirty-three days to approximately seventy days. Two months and change.

Plus the garden. The potato sprouts are already visible. small green shoots poking through the red-brown soil, reaching for the sun with the determination of things that do not know the world has ended and would not care if they did.

"Seventy days of food, plus the garden harvest in six to eight weeks," says Sudhir Kaka, doing the maths. "If the garden produces even a modest yield, we could be self-sustaining by June."

Self-sustaining. The word feels impossible and necessary simultaneously.

---

Day 26. Maitreyi speaks.

Not that she has been silent — she has answered questions, said please and thank you, asked where things were. But she has not spoken — has not initiated a conversation, has not volunteered information about herself, has not done anything that could be mistaken for engaging with the people around her rather than merely coexisting with them.

She speaks to me. In the art room, at nine PM, the generator off, the room lit by candlelight that makes the paintings on the wall, her paintings, painted over the past three days in acrylics she found in the supply cupboard, glow with the amber warmth of a Tanjore miniature.

She has painted her family. Not photographs — not the careful, posed compositions of Diwali cards and WhatsApp profile pictures — but impressions. Her grandfather, large and silver-haired, sitting in his armchair. Her grandmother, small and fierce, standing at a kitchen counter. Her parents, holding hands, their faces turned away from the viewer, walking toward a light source that is not visible in the frame. Her cousins, three of them, running, their bodies blurred with movement.

"They are beautiful," I say. I am not being polite. They are.

"They are dead," she says.

"They can be both."

She looks at me. Her eyes, dark, deep-set, rimmed with the exhaustion of a girl who has not slept properly in two weeks, study my face the way she studies her own paintings: looking for something beneath the surface.

"You lost your parents too," she says.

"Yes."

"Both of them?"

"Both."

"How do you, how are you still, "

"Functioning?"

She nods.

I think about this. I think about the khichdi and the generator and the charcoal drawings and the poha that Tanvi makes and the garden and the fuel runs and the inventory and all the small, daily acts that fill the hours and push the grief to the edges.

"I do not know," I say honestly. "I think, I think you just keep doing the next thing. And the next thing. And eventually, the next things add up to a day. And the days add up to a week. And the weeks, I do not know what the weeks add up to yet. I have only had three of them."

She considers this. Then she picks up a brush. Dips it in blue paint. Adds something to the painting of her parents. A small detail, near the bottom of the canvas. A flower. White, star-shaped, small.

Mogra.

"My grandmother grew mogra on her balcony," she says. "She said it was the only flower that smelled like love. Not rose, rose smells like romance, which is different. Mogra smells like the love that stays."

I think of Aai's mogra on the balcony in Aundh. The three white flowers that bloomed while the world was dying. The scent that threaded through the night air while I stood on the terrace of a school and watched the city go dark.

"My Aai grew mogra too," I say.

"Then our mothers would have been friends," says Maitreyi. And she smiles. Not the practiced, polite smile of social interaction, but the involuntary, surprised smile of a person who has found an unexpected connection in an expected emptiness.

I smile back.

The candle flickers. The paintings glow. Somewhere outside, a dog barks. The first dog I have heard bark in days, a sound that is simultaneously mundane and miraculous, evidence that life continues in forms that do not care about viruses or grief or the collapse of human civilization.

We sit in the art room until the candle burns down. Maitreyi paints. I draw. Neither of us speaks again. The silence between us is different from the silence of the first weeks. Not the silence of loneliness, but the silence of company. The silence of two people who are broken in the same way and who have found, in the breaking, a shape that fits.

---

Day 28. Four weeks. One month since the virus.

I stand on the terrace at sunset and count the lights. Three. Down from nine last week. Down from eighteen the week before. The city is dimming, bulb by bulb, generator by generator. Soon the only light in Pune will be ours.

But we are five. And we have food for seventy days. And the garden is growing. And Maitreyi is painting. And Gaurav is calculating survival probabilities on his whiteboard. And Sudhir Kaka is tracking every grain of rice in his register. And Tanvi is securing the perimeter.

And I am standing on a school terrace, watching the stars emerge over a dead city, wearing a Kolhapur Warriors cap and carrying a photo of a family that no longer exists and a mangalsutra that belongs to a woman who gave it to me so I could sell it if I needed to eat.

I have not sold it. I will not sell it. I will eat dal-rice for a year before I sell it.

The stars are bright tonight. A milky Way, visible without light pollution, stretches across the sky like a river made of dust and light. Baba's voice in my memory: That star might already be dead. The light is still traveling, but the source is gone. You are seeing a ghost.

I am surrounded by ghosts. I carry them with me. In the cap on my head, in the photo in my bag, in the mangalsutra in my pocket, in the charcoal drawings on the physics classroom wall, in the mogra seeds that I planted this morning in the third garden bed.

But I am not a ghost. Not yet. I am sixteen, and I am alive, and I am standing on a school terrace in a dead city, and the potatoes are sprouting, and the onions are growing, and tomorrow Tanvi and I will go on another supply run, and the day after that Sudhir Kaka will update the inventory, and the day after that Maitreyi will finish another painting, and the day after that Gaurav will present his latest calculations on how many survivors Pune might have, and the days will add up, and the weeks will add up, and eventually, maybe, the weeks will add up to something that looks like a future.

Maybe.

The stars do not answer. They never do. They just shine, indifferent and eternal, their light traveling through the void, arriving at my eyes millions of years after it was emitted, carrying the message that all light carries: I existed. I burned. I am still here, even if the source is gone.

I go downstairs. The generator is running. The kitchen light is on. Tanvi is making dinner. Dal fry, the tadka crackling, the hing stinging my nostrils, the smell of food filling the corridor.

"Dinner in ten," she calls.

"Coming," I call back.

I walk into the kitchen. I sit at the counter. I wait for dinner.

Tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that.

One day at a time.