Chapter 12: Vihan

# Chapter 12: Vihan

## Wapsi

They leave at noon.

We watch from the hill, five crouched figures behind the temple wall, peering through the gaps in the stone at the school compound below. The men load the Bolero and the Scorpio with whatever they have found: bags of rice carried on shoulders, jerrycans of oil, the diesel drum from the generator shed. They move efficiently, without hurry, the choreography of people who have done this before and expect to do it again.

Tanvi counts. "They are taking the rice. Most of the dal. The oil. The ghee tin." Her voice is flat, factual. An inventory of losses. "The generator; they tried to move it. Too heavy. They will come back for it."

"How do you know?"

"Because the tall one, the leader, pointed at it and then pointed at the van. The van is already full. They will bring the van back empty."

When the Bolero and Scorpio pull away, heading west on Karve Road, toward Warje, the Eeco van following, we wait another hour. Tanvi insists. "In case they left someone behind. A lookout. It is what I would do."

Nobody argues with Tanvi's paranoia. Tanvi's paranoia has kept us alive.

At one PM, we descend.

---

School looks the same from outside. The compound wall, the peepal tree, the side gate (now hanging from one hinge, the boards Tanvi nailed across it splintered and scattered). Inside, though. Inside is a ransacked version of the place I have called home for a month.

The kitchen is stripped. The rice sacks are gone — all of them, fifty kilos, the foundation of our food supply. The dal sacks are gone. The oil jerrycans, gone. The ghee tin, gone. The sugar, the salt, the spice packets, gone, gone, gone. What remains: the gas stove (too heavy to carry easily), the LPG cylinder (still connected, still containing gas), the pots and pans (not worth the weight to scavengers), and — scattered on the floor, as if dropped in transit, a handful of loose rice grains, a torn packet of turmeric, and one broken biscuit.

I stand in the kitchen and look at the floor. The floor where I made my first khichdi. The floor where Tanvi sat and cried a single tear and asked if she could stay. The floor where Sudhir Kaka spread his register and tracked every gram of food with the precision of a man who believed that accounting could save the world.

Register. Sudhir Kaka has it, he took it when we fled. He opens it now, flips to the inventory page, and draws a line through almost every entry. His pencil moves slowly, deliberately, each line a deletion, a subtraction, a loss made concrete.

"What do we have left?" I ask.

"The caches," says Tanvi. She is already moving, heading for the library. We follow.

Cache one: intact. The ceiling tile is undisturbed; the men did not think to look up. Five kilos of rice, two kilos of dal, one litre of oil, matches, candle, water, medicine. All there.

Cache two: intact. The culvert has not been entered. Another five kilos of rice, another two kilos of dal.

Cache three: intact. The metal box behind the bougainvillea is still buried, the marker stone in place.

Total recovered: 15 kg rice, 6 kg dal, 3 litres oil. Plus what Tanvi and I carried in our rucksacks. Another 3 kg of rice, some biscuits, water.

Sudhir Kaka does the maths. His pencil scratches on the register page. "At minimum rations, 200 grams of rice per person per day, which is subsistence, not comfort, this gives us approximately fifteen days."

Fifteen days. Half a month. The number sits in my stomach like a stone.

"Plus the garden," says Gaurav.

We rush to the back compound. The garden; my heart is pounding as we round the corner of the sports block, Tanvi in front, me behind, the others following.

The garden is untouched.

That potato plants stand in their rows, green and growing, their leaves spread like small hands reaching for the sun. The onion shoots are tall and straight. The tomato seedlings, still small, still fragile, are alive. The mogra bed shows no sign of sprouting yet, but the soil is undisturbed.

Men did not find the garden. They entered from the front, looted the kitchen and the storerooms, and left through the front. The back compound, hidden behind the sports block, screened by the building itself, was invisible to them.

I kneel beside the potato bed. I touch the soil. It is warm, dry. we have not watered in a day, and the March sun has been brutal. But the plants are alive. The roots are in the ground. The food is growing.

"We need to water," I say. "Now."

I carry four buckets from the terrace tank. The tank is still full. The men did not climb to the terrace, or if they did, they did not drain the tank. The water splashes onto the soil, darkening it, and the plants seem to straighten, to reach, to drink.

Tanvi watches me water. Her face, which has been carved from stone since the men appeared this morning, softens. Not into a smile, smiles are expensive right now, but into something less hard. Recognition, maybe. Of what the garden means. Of what it means that we planted food and the food survived the raid.

"How long until the potatoes are ready?" she asks.

"Six to eight weeks from planting," says Sudhir Kaka. "We planted on Day 21. It is now Day 34. So. Another four to six weeks."

"That is longer than fifteen days."

"Yes. Which means we need another supply run. A big one. Tomorrow."

---

The supply run on Day 35 is different from the previous ones.

Previously, we went in pairs. Tanvi and me. Previously, we carried rucksacks and took what we could fit. Previously, we were cautious, measured, Tanvi's voice in my ear reminding me to leave no trail, to take only what we needed, to move like water through the streets.

This time, we go in force. All five of us. Because fifteen days of food is not a buffer. It is a countdown, and countdowns demand urgency.

We take the Eeco-sized route that Tanvi has mapped: through the culvert (now our primary exit and entry, since the front gates are compromised), up the lane, and into the residential blocks of Erandwane. We carry rucksacks and also a trolley; a wheeled shopping trolley that Gaurav found in the school storage, the kind that kirana shops use to move sacks from delivery trucks to the shop floor.

The trolley rattles on the broken pavement. The sound is loud, absurd. Five survivors pushing a shopping trolley through a dead city, like a grotesque parody of a Big Bazaar shopping trip. Maitreyi giggles, then covers her mouth, startled by her own laughter.

We hit three shops in two hours.

The first — a kirana shop in a residential lane off Prabhat Road, yields rice (10 kg), dal (5 kg), oil (3 litres), and a box of jaggery that Sudhir Kaka spots behind the counter. Jaggery — gul, the dark, sticky blocks of unrefined sugar that Maharashtrians put in everything from puran poli to morning chai. Sudhir Kaka holds the block to his nose and inhales, his eyes closing, and I know he is remembering something, a kitchen, a wife, a chai that tasted of gul and love.

The second shop, a provisions store near Nal Stop, is larger and less looted. We take flour (10 kg), more rice (15 kg), more dal (5 kg), salt, sugar, tea, soap, and a treasure: a sealed tin of Britannia Marie Gold biscuits. The biscuits are a luxury. A decadence. In the world before, I would not have looked twice at Marie Gold; they were aaji-biscuits, the plain, boring biscuits that grandmothers bought in bulk and served with chai. Now they are gold. Literal gold.

The third shop is a medical store that has been partially raided but still contains: more Crocin, more ORS, a box of multivitamin tablets (expired in two months, but Tanvi says the expiry date on vitamins is conservative, and expired vitamins are better than no vitamins), and, a discovery that makes Gaurav's eyes widen, a blood pressure monitor. Battery-operated, portable.

"For what?" I ask.

"For monitoring. If anyone gets sick, not the virus, but anything else, any infection, any complication, we need to be able to check vitals. Blood pressure, heart rate. This is basic triage."

I look at Gaurav. The engineering student. The boy with the probability calculations and the survival data on his whiteboard. The boy who is now talking about triage.

"You are becoming a doctor," I say.

"I am becoming whatever we need me to be."

---

We return to the school with the trolley overloaded. The caches are replenished. The kitchen is restocked. Sudhir Kaka updates the register, his pencil flying across the page, numbers flowing like water.

"New total: approximately forty-five days of food. Plus the garden. Plus the possibility of future supply runs."

Forty-five days. Better than fifteen. Not as good as seventy. But enough. Enough to breathe.

---

That evening, Tanvi calls a meeting. She does not use the word meeting, she says, "Everyone, kitchen, after dinner", but the formality of the gathering, the five of us sitting on the floor in a circle, a candle in the centre, feels like something official. Something that communities do.

"We need to talk about security," she says.

Nobody disagrees.

"The men will come back. For the generator, if nothing else. And when they come back, they might look harder. They might find the garden. They might find us."

"What do you suggest?" asks Sudhir Kaka.

"Three things. First: we reduce our visible footprint. Generator only at night, one hour maximum. No lights facing the road. No cooking during the day. Cook in the evening, eat cold food during the day."

"Second?"

"We create a warning system. I want someone on the terrace at all times during daylight. Two-hour shifts. If a vehicle approaches, or if people approach on foot, the watcher comes down and we evacuate through the culvert. No hesitation. No debate."

"Third?"

"We learn to defend ourselves."

Silence. The candle flame flickers.

"Defend ourselves how?" asks Gaurav. "We do not have weapons."

"We have cricket bats in the sports room. We have hockey sticks. We have the pickaxe from the garden. We have kitchen knives." Tanvi pauses. "I am not saying we fight eight armed men. I am saying we need to be able to protect ourselves against one or two desperate people who stumble upon us. Because the groups are not the only threat. The lone survivors, the hungry ones, the sick ones, the ones who have lost everything and have nothing left to lose, they are a threat too."

"You want us to carry weapons," I say.

"I want us to be able to say no to someone who tries to take what is ours. I want us to be able to back up that no with something other than words."

I think about Aai's advice: Watch their eyes. Watch their hands. If someone smiles too quickly, walk away. Walking away is the first option. But what if walking away is not possible? What if the person does not let you walk away?

"Okay," I say. "We learn."

Sudhir Kaka nods. Gaurav nods. Maitreyi, clutching her painting, nods.

Tanvi stands. "Good. We start tomorrow. Everyone picks a weapon they can carry comfortably. And we practice."

She blows out the candle. The meeting is over.

---

That night, lying on the blue foam mat in the physics classroom, I think about what we have become. Five people in a school. A boy who draws. A girl who fortifies. An engineer who calculates. A painter who remembers. An accountant who tracks.

Five people who, four weeks ago, did not know each other existed. Five people who now share food, water, space, fear, and the stubborn, irrational belief that tomorrow will be better than today.

We are not a family. Families are chosen by biology, by blood, by the accident of birth. We are something else. We are chosen by catastrophe. By the random, brutal mathematics of a virus that killed ninety percent and left ten percent standing in the rubble, blinking, wondering what to do next.

What we do next: we survive. We garden. We cache food and scout supply routes and stand watch on the terrace. We carry cricket bats and kitchen knives and the knowledge that the world outside our school walls is not empty — it is occupied by people who are also surviving, and some of them will want what we have.

I close my eyes. The silence of the school wraps around me like a second skin.

Tomorrow. Garden. Watch. Cook. Survive.

One day at a time.