Chapter 13: Vihan

# Chapter 13: Vihan

## Sangharsh

Day 38. We learn to fight.

Not fight in any cinematic sense. Not the choreographed violence of Bollywood, where the hero dispatches twelve henchmen with a single slow-motion kick while the heroine watches from a conveniently placed balcony. We learn to fight the way people actually fight when their lives depend on it: messily, desperately, with whatever is at hand.

Tanvi runs the sessions. Every morning, for one hour, in the sports hall. a large, echoing room with a wooden floor scarred by a thousand pairs of kho-kho shoes. She has raided the sports equipment room and laid out our arsenal on the floor: two cricket bats (SS Ton, heavy willow, the kind that Pune's school cricketers use for net practice), three hockey sticks (the cheap fibreglass ones that every Indian school buys in bulk), the pickaxe from the garden (too heavy for fighting, but good for intimidation), and three kitchen knives of varying sizes.

"Pick one," she says on the first morning. "Something you can hold comfortably. Something you can swing without losing your balance."

I pick a cricket bat. It feels natural in my hands. The grip familiar from a thousand hours of gully cricket in Kolhapur, the weight distributed in a way that my muscles remember even if my brain has no idea what I am doing with it in a combat context. Gaurav picks a hockey stick. Maitreyi picks the smallest kitchen knife, holds it like a paintbrush, and stares at it as if it has personally offended her. Sudhir Kaka picks nothing.

"Kaka?"

"I am fifty-three years old with arthritis in both knees. If it comes to a fight, I will be the one running to the culvert while you brave souls hold them off."

Tanvi does not argue with this. "Fair. You are our early-warning system. If you are on watch and you see them coming, you shout. That gives us two to three minutes."

She teaches us three things. Only three, because three is the maximum number of things that panicking humans can remember under stress.

One: stance. Feet shoulder-width apart. Weight on the balls of your feet. Knees slightly bent. The stance of a batsman facing a fast bowler, or a kabaddi player about to raid. "If you are standing straight," Tanvi says, demonstrating with a hockey stick, "you are a target. If you are low, you are harder to hit and faster to move."

Two: swing. Not a delicate, controlled swing. A full, committed, everything-you-have swing. "Hit once and hit hard," she says. "Do not tap. Do not poke. If you swing, you swing to hurt. Aim for the arms or the legs. If you aim for the head and miss, you are off-balance and exposed. Arms and legs. Disable, then run."

Three: run. "If you get one hit in and they do not go down, do not stay for a second hit. Run. Run to the culvert. Run to the hill. Run to anywhere that is not here. Your life is worth more than this building."

We practice. We pair up — I swing the cricket bat at a padded bag that Tanvi has made from a sack stuffed with rags. The impact jars my wrists. The bag does not move as dramatically as I expect — it takes three swings before I can dislodge it from the hook where Tanvi has hung it, and by the third swing my arms are shaking.

"Again," says Tanvi.

"My arms are, "

"Again."

I swing. The bat connects with a flat thwack that echoes off the sports hall walls. The bag shudders. My palms sting, the blisters from the garden digging reopening, weeping.

"Better. But you are closing your eyes on impact. Keep them open. You need to see where the bat lands."

I swing again. Eyes open. The bat hits the bag squarely, and this time I feel the connection travel through the willow, up my arms, into my shoulders. the solid, satisfying feedback of a hit that landed where I intended.

"Good," says Tanvi. "Now do that a hundred times."

I do it a hundred times. By the end, my arms feel like they are filled with wet sand, my palms are raw, and I am drenched in sweat. But when Tanvi tests me, stepping in suddenly from the side, simulating an approach, I swing. Instinctively. Without thinking. The bat arcs through the air and stops six inches from her hip.

She does not flinch. "You would have connected. That is enough."

---

Day 40. The lookout.

From the terrace, on my afternoon watch shift, I see something that changes everything.

Smoke. Not the diffuse, invisible smoke of a small cooking fire — this is a column. Thick, dark, rising from somewhere in the Kothrud valley, maybe two kilometres south. The smoke rises straight up in the windless afternoon, a black pillar against the pale sky, before spreading into a haze at altitude.

I watch it for thirty minutes. The column does not diminish. Whatever is burning is large, sustained, deliberate.

"That is not a cooking fire," says Gaurav, when I bring him to the terrace. He has been tracking anomalies on his whiteboard, a map of Pune drawn from memory, with marks for observed lights, sounds, smoke. The map looks like a star chart of a dying galaxy: fewer marks each week, the darkness spreading.

"Could be an accident," I say.

"Or a signal. Or a camp."

"A camp?"

"If there are other survivors, and there are, the maths guarantees it, they are doing what we are doing. Finding buildings, fortifying, stockpiling. A sustained fire like that could mean a large group. A settlement."

"Or it could mean the men from the Bolero."

Gaurav considers this. "Possible. But the Bolero group was mobile, they had vehicles, they raided and moved on. A settlement implies staying. Two different strategies."

"Should we investigate?"

"Not yet. We watch. We mark it on the map. If the smoke continues, if it is there tomorrow, and the next day, then it is a settlement, and we need to decide what to do about it."

This smoke is there the next day. And the next. And the next.

---

Day 43. We decide.

The decision happens in the kitchen, at one of Tanvi's evening meetings. The five of us, the candle, the floor.

"There are people two kilometres south," I say. "They have a sustained fire. They are not moving. That means they have a base."

"And?" says Tanvi.

"And we should make contact."

A silence that follows is thick. Tanvi stares at me. Maitreyi looks at the floor. Gaurav adjusts his glasses. Sudhir Kaka taps his pencil.

"Why?" says Tanvi.

"Because we are five people with forty days of food and a garden that will not produce for another month. Because the Bolero group will come back, and when they do, five people cannot hold a school against eight armed men. Because, " I pause. I have been thinking about this for three days, and the thinking has crystallised into a conviction that feels both rational and desperate. "Because isolation is death. Slow death, maybe. But death."

"Contact with the wrong people is also death," says Tanvi. "Fast death."

"I know. That is why I am not suggesting we walk up and introduce ourselves. I am suggesting reconnaissance. Two people. Go south. Find the fire. Observe from a distance. See who they are, how many, what they have. If they look dangerous, we leave. If they look like us — survivors, not raiders — we consider an approach."

Tanvi chews her lip. "And if they see us observing?"

"We run. We are good at running."

Gaurav speaks. "The probability analysis supports contact. Isolated small groups have a significantly lower survival rate than networked groups. Historical precedent, every post-disaster scenario, from Partition to the 2004 tsunami, shows that communities form because communities survive. Individuals do not."

"This is not a probability textbook," says Tanvi.

"No. It is a probability reality. And the reality is that five people cannot survive indefinitely. We need more people, more resources, more redundancy. If someone gets sick, who treats them? If someone is injured, who carries them? If the Bolero group comes back with fifteen men instead of eight, who fights?"

Tanvi is quiet for a long time. The candle flame wavers. A moth circles it, drawn by the light, risking everything.

"Fine," she says. "Tomorrow. You and me, Vihan. Nobody else. We go, we look, we come back. No contact unless I say so."

"Agreed."

"And if it is the Bolero people?"

"Then we come back and we start planning to leave Kothrud entirely."

She nods. The meeting ends.

---

Day 44. The reconnaissance.

We leave at dawn. Tanvi and me. She carries the Swiss knife and a hockey stick. I carry the cricket bat and two water bottles. We wear the N95 masks — not for the virus anymore (we are clearly immune, or we would be dead by now), but for the smell. The smell, six weeks in, has become the defining sensory feature of the city. It is everywhere: sweet, thick, inescapable. The smell of seven million decomposing bodies, processed by sun and heat and rain and bacteria and the indifferent chemistry of biology's endgame.

We head south from the school, following lanes that Tanvi has mapped. The route avoids Karve Road — too exposed, too open, too likely to be watched. Instead, we move through residential areas: Erandwane, Prabhat Road, the lanes behind MIT College. The lanes are narrow, tree-lined, shaded by the old Pune canopy, neem, peepal, gulmohar, rain tree — that has survived the collapse of the species that planted it.

The walk takes an hour. The smoke column grows larger as we approach, rising from a cluster of buildings near the Rajaram Bridge area. The area where Karve Road crosses the Mutha River, where the old Kothrud meets the new Kothrud, where the mandirs and wadas of the past sit beside the glass-fronted coaching classes and real estate offices of the present.

We reach a vantage point: the rooftop of a three-storey residential building, accessed through a stairwell whose door was never locked. From here, we can see the source of the smoke.

It is a compound. A large one — maybe half an acre, surrounded by a concrete wall topped with glass shards (the old-school Indian security measure, predating electric fences and CCTV). Inside the compound: a two-storey building (looks institutional, a school? a community hall?), several smaller structures, an open area where the fire burns in a large metal drum, and — I count, squinting against the morning sun, people.

Seventeen. No, eighteen. No — twenty, at least. Men and women, moving through the compound with the purposeful rhythm of a community that has established routines. Some are cooking, I can see a kitchen setup near the fire drum, pots steaming, someone stirring. Some are carrying water in buckets. Two men are standing at the compound gate, holding — I lean forward, trying to see, cricket bats. Guards.

"They are organized," Tanvi whispers.

"More organized than us."

"Different from the Bolero group. The Bolero group was mobile, aggressive, male. This is mixed, I see women, I see what looks like a child. And they have guards, but the guards are at the gate, defensive. Not patrolling, not looking for people to raid. Just, guarding."

"Like us."

"Like us. But bigger."

We watch for two hours. In those two hours, I observe: a man tending what appears to be a garden in the corner of the compound (I can see green rows, plants, the unmistakable geometry of cultivation). A woman hanging laundry on a line strung between two structures. A man on the roof of the main building, doing what we do. watching, scanning, a lookout. Two children playing in the open area, running, their laughter carrying faintly across the distance.

Children. Laughing. The sound is so unexpected, so jarringly normal, that it takes me a moment to process it. I have not heard a child laugh in six weeks. The sound is like a crack in a dam. Small, irrelevant in isolation, but suggesting that behind it is an enormous pressure of normalcy waiting to break through.

"We should make contact," I say.

Tanvi is quiet. She is watching the compound, her eyes moving systematically, the gate, the walls, the guards, the rooftop lookout, the cooking area, the garden. She is running her threat assessment, her paranoia protocol, her internal checklist of danger signals.

"I do not see weapons beyond the cricket bats," she says finally. "I do not see vehicles. No Boleros, no Scorpios. The wall is defensive, not aggressive. The guards are stationary. The women and children are relaxed. Nobody is cowering, nobody is being coerced."

"So?"

"So — it looks safe. But looks are not guarantees."

"Nothing is a guarantee anymore."

She turns to me. Her eyes — brown, sharp, carrying the weight of the things she has seen in the six weeks since the world ended — meet mine.

"Okay," she says. "We go. But slowly. We approach the gate. We identify ourselves. We offer something — information, maybe, about supply routes, about the kirana shops. And if, at any point, anything feels wrong, the way someone looks at us, the way someone moves — we leave. No argument. We leave."

"Agreed."

We climb down from the roof. We walk toward the compound.

The distance, two hundred metres, feels like two hundred kilometres. Every step carries the weight of a decision that could save us or end us. Tanvi walks beside me, the hockey stick at her side, her jaw set. I carry the cricket bat, the willow grip damp with sweat.

At fifty metres, the rooftop lookout spots us. He shouts. The two guards at the gate turn.

At thirty metres, one of the guards steps forward. He is young; maybe twenty-five, dark-skinned, bearded, wearing a checked lungi and a t-shirt that says COEP Mindspark 2024. He holds the cricket bat across his body, horizontal, blocking but not threatening.

"Stop there," he calls. "Who are you?"

I stop. Tanvi stops beside me.

"My name is Vihan Deshpande," I call back. "I am from Aundh. We are five survivors, living in Saraswati Vidya Mandir on Karve Road. We saw your smoke and came to investigate."

The guard studies us. His eyes move from my face to the cricket bat in my hand to Tanvi's hockey stick. He assesses. Calculates. The same calculation that every survivor makes when encountering another survivor: threat or ally?

"Five?" he says. "Only five?"

"Three more back at the school. Two teenagers, one older man."

"And you came here with cricket bats?"

"We came here not knowing what we would find."

That pause. The guard looks over his shoulder at someone inside the compound. The rooftop lookout has come down and is now standing behind the gate. Words are exchanged. Low, rapid. I catch fragments: ...just kids... said Saraswati Vidya... five only...

The guard turns back. "Put the bats down. Both of you."

I look at Tanvi. She meets my eyes. Nods, barely, the movement almost invisible.

We put the bats down. The cricket bat and the hockey stick lie on the road between us and the gate, symbols of the weapons we were willing to carry and the trust we are willing to extend.

This guard steps aside. The gate opens.

A woman emerges. She is maybe forty, tall, with grey-streaked hair pulled back in a bun. She wears a cotton kurta over salwar, simple, practical. Her face is weathered, lined, but her eyes are sharp and warm and carry the specific authority of someone who has been making decisions for other people long before the virus made it necessary.

"I am Dr. Pallavi Joshi," she says. "I am, was, a general practitioner. I now run this shelter. You said you are survivors from Karve Road?"

"Yes."

"And you have been surviving on your own? Five of you?"

"Yes."

She looks at us. At the cricket bat and the hockey stick on the ground. At our N95 masks. At the rucksacks on our backs. At the wariness in our eyes and the hope we are trying to hide behind it.

Then she smiles. It is the first adult smile I have seen since Aai. The first smile from a grown-up that is not tinged with panic or grief or the specific rictus of someone pretending that things are fine when they are not. It is a real smile. Tired, yes. Worn, yes. But real.

"Come in," she says. "You must be hungry."

We walk through the gate. Into the compound. Into the community.

And for the first time in six weeks, I feel something that I had forgotten existed. Something that lives in the same body as grief and fear but occupies a different chamber, a chamber that has been locked and sealed and now cracks open, letting light spill in through the fractures.

Hope.

Tentative. Fragile. Easily broken.

But there.