Chapter 11: Vihan

# Chapter 11: Vihan

## Khatre

Day 31. One month and one day.

Trouble starts with a sound.

I am on the terrace, doing my morning watch, the habit I have adopted from Tanvi, scanning the streets as the sun comes up, checking for movement, for smoke, for anything that deviates from the new normal of emptiness. The air is warm already, the March-to-April transition that Pune handles with no subtlety, one week it is 32 degrees, the next it is 39, as if someone has turned a dial.

The sound is an engine. Not a generator. generators have a steady, chugging rhythm that I can now identify by brand (Kirloskar sounds different from Honda sounds different from the cheap Chinese ones that rattle like a dabba full of loose screws). This is a vehicle engine. A car, maybe, or a small truck. Moving.

I have not heard a moving engine in three weeks.

I lean over the terrace wall. Scan Karve Road in both directions. There — to the east, coming from the Deccan side. A white Mahindra Bolero, driving slowly, weaving between the abandoned vehicles that litter the road. Bolero has no number plate — or rather, the number plate has been removed, the bracket empty, two holes where the screws were.

A Bolero passes the school. I duck, instinct, the kind of instinct that Tanvi has been drilling into me since Day 10. If you can see them, they can see you. If they can see you, they know you exist. If they know you exist, they know you have resources. The Bolero continues down Karve Road, toward Warje, and the engine sound fades.

I wait five minutes. Then I go downstairs.

"We have a problem," I say.

---

Tanvi listens without interrupting. She is sitting on the kitchen counter, her legs dangling, eating a cold roti with pickle. Her standard morning snack, consumed while the chai water boils. When I finish describing the Bolero, she puts down the roti.

"No number plate."

"No."

"How many people inside?"

"I could not tell. The windows were tinted. But it looked like at least two in the front."

"Direction?"

"East to west. From Deccan toward Warje."

She chews her lip. This is her thinking face. The face she makes when she is running scenarios, calculating risks, the face of the girl who survived three days alone on the streets of Pune and learned to think like prey.

"They are scavenging," she says. "Same as us. But with a vehicle, which means they have fuel, which means they are organized. And the missing number plate means they do not want to be identified, which means they are doing things they do not want to be held accountable for."

"That is a lot of conclusions from one Bolero."

"That is a lot of information from one Bolero. Listen. People who are just surviving, like us, do not remove their number plates. They are too busy finding food and water to care about license tracing. People who remove number plates are people who are taking things from other people and want to make sure they cannot be found afterward."

Gaurav, who has been listening from the staff room doorway, steps in. "She is right. Before the networks went down, the last posts on Twitter were about organized groups. Gangs, essentially. They were moving through neighbourhoods, taking food, water, fuel, medicine. Sometimes violently."

"In Pune?"

"In Mumbai, definitely. In Pune, the posts were not clear. But it was only a matter of time."

Sudhir Kaka looks up from his register. His face, which has been slowly regaining colour over the past week (regular meals will do that), goes grey again. "My neighbour in Deccan — before I left, told me that a group of men had been going through the buildings in Sadashiv Peth. Taking whatever they could carry. He said they had weapons — lathis, maybe knives. He was not sure."

"And you did not think to mention this earlier?" Tanvi asks.

"I did not think they would come this far. Kothrud is... was... a different area. More residential. Less to take."

"Less to take is still something. And if they have a vehicle, distance is not a problem."

---

We spend the afternoon preparing. Tanvi leads, because Tanvi is the one among us who thinks in terms of defence, who has the instinct for it, who approaches the school not as a building but as a fortress that needs to be held.

Step one: visibility. We board up the remaining ground-floor windows. The ones that face Karve Road, the ones that could reveal light or movement to anyone passing. Gaurav and I hammer plywood panels (salvaged from the furniture store room) over the glass, the nails biting into the window frames with satisfying thuds.

Step two: the generator. We relocate the generator to the interior of the sports equipment room, deeper inside the school compound, further from the road. The sound will still be audible, but muffled. Tanvi also decides to reduce our runtime: two hours a day, split into two one-hour blocks, and only after dark, when the sound is harder to locate.

Step three: escape routes. Tanvi walks the perimeter of the school compound, mapping exits. The main gate on Karve Road. The side gate near the peepal tree. A gap in the compound wall behind the sports ground, partially hidden by a bougainvillea bush, wide enough for a person to squeeze through. And, a discovery, a drainage culvert that runs under the compound wall on the western side, large enough to crawl through, opening onto a lane that connects to the Parvati Hill footpath.

"If they come through the front, we go out the back," she says, sketching the layout on a piece of cardboard. "If they come from both sides, we use the culvert. The culvert leads to the hill. On the hill, we can hide."

"And the food? The supplies?"

"We cannot carry it all. But we can cache some. Hide small stocks in different places. The library ceiling, the drainage culvert, the gap behind the bougainvillea. If we have to abandon the school, we can come back for the caches later."

I look at her. She is seventeen. She should be studying for her FYJC exams, complaining about accounting assignments, watching reels on Instagram. Instead, she is planning defensive positions and supply caches like a guerrilla commander.

"Where did you learn all this?" I ask.

"I did not learn it. I am making it up as I go." She pauses. "But my uncle, the mechanic in Sinhagad Road, he was also ex-army. Territorial Army, not regular. He used to tell me stories about training camps. How to set up a perimeter. How to think about defensible positions. I thought it was boring. I wish I had listened more carefully."

---

We create three caches. Each contains: 5 kg of rice, 2 kg of dal, 1 litre of oil, a box of matches, a candle, a bottle of water, and basic medicine (Crocin, bandages, ORS). The caches are hidden:

1. In the library ceiling, we remove a ceiling tile, place the supplies on the supporting beam, and replace the tile. Invisible from below.

2. In the drainage culvert, wrapped in plastic bags (the thick, black garbage bags from the school caretaker's supply), stuffed into a hollow in the culvert wall, covered with loose gravel.

3. Behind the bougainvillea, in a metal box that Gaurav finds in the workshop, buried six inches under the soil, marked with a small stone that only we know the significance of.

Work takes all afternoon. By sunset, we are exhausted — arms aching, hands dirty, clothes soaked with sweat. Sudhir Kaka makes chai. We drink it on the terrace, watching the sky turn from orange to purple to black, the city below us dark except for two distant lights — down from three yesterday.

"Do you think they will come?" Maitreyi asks. She has been quiet all day, helping with the caches without complaint, but her eyes have been wide, watchful, the eyes of a girl who has already lost everything once and is now contemplating losing the little she has rebuilt.

"I do not know," I say. "Maybe they were just passing through."

"Maybe," says Tanvi. "But we prepare as if they are coming. Because if they come and we are not prepared, we lose everything. And if they do not come and we are prepared, we lose nothing except an afternoon."

The logic is flawless. The logic is also exhausting.

---

Day 34. They come.

Not the Bolero. Something worse.

I am in the kitchen, making breakfast, upma, Tanvi's recipe, which I have finally mastered after three failures (the secret is to roast the rava dry before adding water, otherwise it clumps into a paste that resembles, and tastes like, wet cement). The morning is quiet. Maitreyi is painting. Gaurav is on his whiteboard. Sudhir Kaka is updating the inventory.

Tanvi is on the terrace.

Her voice comes down the stairwell, sharp and low. Not shouting, Tanvi does not shout, because shouting carries, but the urgency is unmistakable. "Vihan. Up here. Now."

I leave the upma. I take the stairs two at a time.

She is at the terrace wall, crouched, peering over the edge. I crouch beside her.

"Look."

I look. On Karve Road, in front of the school's main gate, three vehicles are parked: the white Bolero (no number plate), a black Scorpio (also no number plate), and a red Maruti Eeco van. Eight men stand around the vehicles. They are not old — most look to be in their twenties, maybe thirties. They are dressed in a mix of casual and military-surplus clothing: cargo pants, t-shirts, one man in an army-pattern jacket. Three of them are carrying cricket bats. One has a machete, the long, curved blade glinting in the morning sun. One has what looks like a lathi — a thick bamboo stick, the kind that police use.

They are looking at the school gate.

My mouth goes dry. My hands, gripping the terrace wall, are suddenly cold despite the heat.

"Eight," Tanvi whispers. "Armed. Organized."

"What do we do?"

"Watch. They have not tried to enter yet. They are assessing."

One of the men, the tallest, wearing the army jacket, clearly the leader, walks to the gate. He rattles the padlock. Pulls at the chain. Then he steps back and looks up at the building.

I duck. Tanvi ducks. We press ourselves against the terrace wall, breathing hard.

"Did he see us?"

"I do not think so. The sun is behind us, we are silhouettes, hard to make out."

We wait. Thirty seconds. A minute. I risk a glance over the wall.

Men are talking. I cannot hear the words, but the body language is clear, the leader is pointing at the school, gesturing, giving instructions. Two men walk along the compound wall, testing it, looking for weak points. One kicks at the side gate, the gate that Tanvi has reinforced with boards and wire, the gate where the tripwire is set.

"They are going to try the side gate," I whisper.

"Let them try. The boards will hold for a few minutes. The tripwire will slow them down."

"And then?"

"And then we use the culvert."

I stare at her. "We run?"

"We run. Five people against eight armed men is not courage, Vihan. It is suicide."

"But the food. The supplies. The garden —"

"We come back for them. After they leave. The caches will still be there."

I feel it in my chest, the hot, tight feeling of loss approaching, of the thing you have built being threatened, of the school that has become my home (my second home, the home I chose, the home I made from rice bags and charcoal drawings and generator diesel) being invaded.

"There has to be another way."

Tanvi grabs my arm. Her grip is iron. "There is no other way. Go downstairs. Get the others. Tell them: culvert. Now."

---

The next ten minutes are a blur of adrenaline and controlled panic.

I find Gaurav first, he is in the maths classroom, still at his whiteboard. I explain in four sentences. His face goes white. He drops the marker.

Maitreyi is in the art room. When I tell her, she does not speak. She picks up one painting, the one of her parents, and tucks it under her arm.

Sudhir Kaka is in the staff room. He closes the register. Puts it in his bag. "Let us go."

Tanvi meets us in the corridor. She has her rucksack — pre-packed, always, the bug-out bag she prepared on Day 12, containing water, food, the Swiss knife, the first-aid supplies, and the torch. She hands me my Wildcraft bag — also pre-packed, also ready.

"Follow me. Single file. No noise."

We move through the school. Past the classrooms, past the kitchen (the upma is burning on the stove. I can smell it, the rava scorching, and the absurdity of mourning burnt upma while fleeing for our lives almost makes me laugh), past the sports equipment room, out the back door.

The garden is there. The potato plants, now twelve centimetres tall, their leaves bright green. The onion shoots, standing straight. The tomato seedlings that Tanvi planted last week, tiny and fragile, just beginning to show their first true leaves. The mogra seeds that I planted — no sign of sprouting yet, but they are there, under the soil, waiting.

I cannot take the garden with me.

We reach the compound wall. The bougainvillea bush. The drainage culvert.

Behind us, inside the school, I hear it, the crash of the side gate giving way. Shouts. Footsteps. The sounds of men entering the building.

"In," says Tanvi, pointing at the culvert.

Maitreyi goes first, she is the smallest, and she squeezes through the concrete tube without difficulty, her painting held above her head. Sudhir Kaka goes next, grunting, his shoulders scraping the sides. Gaurav. Me.

Culvert is dark, damp, and smells of old rainwater and mud. I crawl through on my hands and knees, the concrete rough against my palms, the rucksack catching on the ceiling. Behind me, Tanvi enters last, pulling a piece of broken wall over the entrance to conceal it.

We emerge on the other side — a narrow lane, shaded by overhanging trees, leading toward the footpath that winds up Parvati Hill.

"Move," says Tanvi. "Up the hill. Do not stop until I say."

We move. Five people, climbing Parvati Hill in the morning heat, carrying bags and paintings and registers and the weight of everything they have lost and the fear of losing more.

At the top, behind the temple wall, we stop. We crouch. We breathe.

Below us, the school sits in its compound, and through the trees, I can see movement, figures in the corridors, figures in the kitchen, figures in the rooms that were ours, touching the things that were ours, eating the food that was ours.

Maitreyi is crying. Silently, the tears running down her cheeks, dripping onto the painting she clutches to her chest.

Gaurav has his hands on his knees, gasping. Sudhir Kaka is leaning against the temple wall, his face grey.

Tanvi is watching the school. Her face is still. Her eyes are cold.

"We wait," she says. "They will take what they can carry and leave. They always do. Then we go back."

"How do you know they will leave?" I ask.

"Because they have a vehicle. Vehicles mean they are mobile. Mobile groups do not stay. They raid and move on. It is more efficient."

"And if they stay?"

"Then we find another school."

I sit on the ground. The stone is hot, sun-baked. I lean back against the temple wall. Above me, the Parvati temple rises, ancient, stone, the Devdeveshwar temple that has stood on this hill since 1749, that has survived the Peshwas and the British and Independence and the IT boom and now the virus. The temple does not care about the Bolero or the men with cricket bats. The temple will be here when all of us are gone.

I close my eyes. I think about the garden. The potatoes. The onions. The mogra seeds.

I will come back. I will water the garden. I will eat the potatoes. I will smell the mogra when it blooms.

This is not over.

We wait.