Chapter 15: Vihan

# Chapter 15: Vihan

## Samaj

Life at the shelter has a texture that life at the school did not. The school was survival — raw, unmediated, the daily business of not dying. The shelter is society — the messy, complicated, sometimes infuriating business of living alongside other people.

Twenty-eight people in a community hall. Twenty-eight people with twenty-eight sets of habits, preferences, grievances, and traumas. Twenty-eight people who, six weeks ago, were strangers, and who are now expected to share meals, space, latrines, and the collective anxiety of an uncertain future.

It is, in other words, exactly like a housing society. Except the stakes are higher and the amenities are worse.

---

Day 48. I am assigned to the garden team.

This surprises nobody. Sudhir Kaka, during his first council meeting, mentioned our garden at the school, and Dr. Pallavi immediately identified me as the boy who grows things. The garden team consists of me, a retired professor of Sanskrit named Govind Joshi (no relation to Dr. Pallavi), and Preeti Deshpande (the schoolteacher who runs the kitchen and who, it turns out, grew up on a farm in Sangli).

The shelter's garden is larger than ours — twenty metres by fifteen, occupying the corner of the compound that gets the most sun. It has been operational since Day 15, and the results are already visible: rows of spinach, their dark green leaves spreading across the soil. Methi, feathery and fragrant. Coriander, bright and prolific. Bottle gourd vines climbing a bamboo trellis. And, the pride of the garden — a row of tomato plants, bearing small green fruits that Preeti watches with the intensity of a mother watching a child's first steps.

"Two more weeks," she says, squeezing a tomato gently between thumb and forefinger. "Maybe three. Then we have tomatoes."

"Fresh tomatoes," I say, and the anticipation in my own voice surprises me. Fresh vegetables. The last fresh vegetable I ate was an onion, weeks ago. My body has been running on dal and rice and whatever vitamins remain in the expired multitablets from the medical store. The thought of biting into a tomato, the skin splitting, the juice running, the sharp, acidic sweetness of it, makes my mouth water with an urgency that borders on embarrassing.

Govind Kaka, the Sanskrit professor, works the garden with the methodical patience of a man who has spent his career studying texts written three thousand years ago and who therefore has a generous relationship with time. He weeds by hand, kneeling on the red-brown soil, his arthritic fingers pulling out each weed individually, examining it, sometimes murmuring to it in Sanskrit before discarding it.

"You talk to the weeds?" I ask him on my first morning.

"I talk to everything in the garden. The plants, the soil, the earthworms, the weeds. It is my belief that living things respond to attention, even if they do not understand the words."

"That is, " I search for a polite word.

"Eccentric? Yes. But I am a seventy-year-old Sanskrit professor who has survived a pandemic that killed most of humanity. I am entitled to eccentricity." He pulls a weed, holds it up. "This is lamboo ghas. Bermuda grass. It is very persistent. It will grow through concrete if you let it." He tosses it onto the weed pile. "Admirable, in a way. If humans had the persistence of Bermuda grass, we would already be rebuilding."

I like Govind Kaka. I like him the way I liked P.L. Deshpande's essays. For the warmth, the precision, the ability to find meaning in small things. In a world that has lost most of its meaning, the small meanings are the ones that matter.

---

Day 50. Seven weeks since the virus.

I go back to the school.

Not to stay — to tend the garden. Our potatoes need water, and no one has watered them in five days. Tanvi comes with me, because Tanvi will not let me go anywhere alone, and because she wants to check the caches.

The walk is familiar now. We take the route through the lanes, avoiding Karve Road, moving quickly and quietly. The streets have changed in the days since we left. More overgrown, the weeds pushing through cracks in the pavement, the bougainvillea spreading over compound walls with the exuberance of a plant that has been freed from pruning. Nature is reclaiming Pune, one crack at a time.

The school is undisturbed. The side gate is as we left it. The compound is silent. We enter through the gate, and I feel the specific relief of returning to a place that was once your whole world. The relief of seeing it still standing, still there, still holding the shape of the life you lived in it.

The garden is alive. The potatoes have grown — the plants are taller, bushier, their leaves reaching and spreading. The onions are tall and green. The tomato seedlings are sturdy, no longer fragile. And, I kneel beside the third bed, my heart accelerating — the mogra has sprouted.

Two tiny green shoots, barely a centimetre tall, pushing through the red-brown soil. The mogra seeds that I planted on Day 21, the seeds that I bought from the nursery because I am my mother's son, have germinated. They are alive. They will grow. They will bloom. They will smell like the love that stays.

I water everything. Four trips to the terrace, four buckets down three flights. My arms burn. My blisters (now calluses. The skin has toughened, adapted, evolved) grip the bucket handle without complaint.

Tanvi checks the caches. All intact. She replenishes the water bottles in each cache and adds a packet of glucose biscuits that she brought from the shelter.

We leave at noon. Lock the gate. Walk back.

"You are smiling," says Tanvi.

"The mogra sprouted."

She looks at me. Her expression is unreadable. Somewhere between amusement and something softer, something she does not name.

"You care about a flower more than the potatoes."

"The potatoes feed the body. The mogra feeds something else."

She considers this. Then: "My grandmother would have liked you."

---

Day 53. The shelter develops friction.

It starts with the rations. Nikhil Godbole — the IT professional who handles logistics, announces at the council meeting that rations need to be reduced. The latest supply run found less than expected. The kirana shops in the immediate radius are running dry — not looted, but emptied, the residual effect of forty-five days of scavenging by our group and, presumably, by others.

"We need to cut from 300 grams of rice per person to 250," Nikhil says. He presents the data on the whiteboard. Supply levels, consumption rates, projected depletion dates. His presentation style is pure Infosys: structured, data-driven, emotionless. "At 250 grams, we extend our supply by twelve days. At 200 grams, by twenty-four days."

"Two hundred grams is starvation," says Hemant Patil, the ex-army man. "I have seen soldiers on 200-gram rations. They cannot function."

"Then 250. But even 250 is not sustainable beyond six weeks without new supply sources."

The room shifts. The discomfort is palpable — not the discomfort of the virus or the raids or the empty streets, but the specifically human discomfort of scarcity, of realizing that there is not enough and that decisions must be made about who gets how much.

A woman I have not spoken to before — Sunanda, mid-forties, a former caterer, speaks up. "Some of us work harder than others. The people on supply runs, the people digging the garden, the guards — they burn more energy. They should get more food."

"That is not fair," says another voice. Rashmi Sawant, the former corporator. "We agreed on equal rations. Equal means equal."

"Equal means the people who carry heavy loads all day get the same as the people who sit in the council room and keep minutes?"

"I do not sit and keep minutes. I manage governance, which; "

"Governance? We are twenty-eight people in a community hall. What governance?"

A argument escalates. Voices rise. Hemant Patil's bass cuts through the noise, "Enough!", and the room quiets, but the tension remains, humming like a live wire.

Dr. Pallavi stands. "We will maintain equal rations at 250 grams. No exceptions. If anyone is doing heavy physical work, they will receive a supplementary portion of dal. Fifty grams extra. Nikhil, adjust the projections."

The compromise satisfies nobody and therefore works. The meeting ends with everyone slightly disgruntled, which, as Rashmi Sawant notes in her minutes, is the hallmark of functional democracy.

---

The ration conflict reveals something that I had not fully understood: communities are not just groups of people who agree. Communities are groups of people who disagree and find ways to keep disagreeing without falling apart. The disagreement is not a failure; it is the mechanism. The friction is the engine.

Baba understood this, I think. He was a middle manager at Persistent Systems, a man whose entire career was managing disagreement, mediating between developers who wanted more time and clients who wanted less, between quality and deadline, between the possible and the demanded. He once told me, on a rare evening when he was in a philosophical mood and had consumed two glasses of Old Monk:

"Vihan, do you know what my job really is? It is not managing software. It is managing egos. Software does what you tell it. Egos do what they want. My job is to make twenty egos want the same thing, or at least convince them that they do."

I did not understand then. I understand now. Dr. Pallavi is doing Baba's job. Managing egos, managing scarcity, managing the impossibly complex calculus of keeping twenty-eight traumatized people pointed in the same direction.

---

Day 55. I find a radio.

Not a radio in the modern sense. Not a phone app, not a Spotify playlist, not a Bluetooth speaker. A radio in the original sense: a transistor, battery-powered, the kind that my aaji in Kolhapur kept on the kitchen shelf and tuned to All India Radio every morning for the news and the bhakti sangeet programme.

I find it in a drawer in the council room, buried under papers and old registers. A Philips transistor, grey plastic, the antenna telescoping out with a satisfying click. Two AA batteries in the compartment. Duracell, still charged.

I turn it on. Static. The hiss and crackle of empty frequencies, the sound of a communication infrastructure that has collapsed. I scan the dial. Slowly, carefully, the way aaji used to scan, turning the tuning wheel millimetre by millimetre, listening for voices in the noise.

Nothing on FM. The FM stations, Radio Mirchi, Red FM, Big FM, are dead, their transmitters silent, their RJs and their Bollywood playlists and their traffic updates and their cheesy morning shows dissolved into static.

I switch to AM. More static. More nothing.

Then, faint, buried under layers of hiss and atmospheric interference, a voice. Human. Speaking Hindi.

I hold my breath. I adjust the tuning wheel. The voice clarifies, rises out of the static like a diver surfacing from water.

...yeh All India Radio hai, Delhi se prasar... desh ke sabhi nagarikon ko suchit kiya jaata hai ki kendriya sarkar ki emergency operations... abhi bhi karyarat hain... Maharashtra, Gujarat, aur Karnataka mein relief camps sthapit kiye ja rahe hain... Pune mein, Shivajinagar mein ek relief camp sthapit kiya gaya hai... sabhi jivit nagarikon se anurodh hai ki woh relief camp mein aayein... bhojaan, paani, aur chikitsa suvidha uplabdh hai... yeh sandesh har do ghante mein dohraya jayega...

I replay the words in my head. Relief camp. Shivajinagar. Food, water, medical facilities. Government. Still operational.

My hands are shaking. Not from fear, from something else. From the sound of a human voice on the radio, speaking with authority, using the bureaucratic Hindi of government announcements, the language of suchit kiya jaata hai and anurodh hai, the language that means someone, somewhere, is still in charge.

I run to Dr. Pallavi.

---

The radio changes everything.

Not the physical reality — we still have the same food, the same water, the same walls. But the psychological reality shifts like tectonic plates. The knowledge that there is a government, however diminished, however overwhelmed — still operating, still broadcasting, still establishing relief camps, is the difference between being lost and being found.

The council meeting that evening is the most energised I have seen. The radio sits on the table, the tinny voice of All India Radio filling the room every two hours with the same message: relief camp, Shivajinagar, food, water, medical facilities.

"We should go," says Nikhil. "If the government has resources, food, medicine, we should access them."

"We should not all go," says Hemant Patil. "We send a scouting party. Three people, maximum. They go to Shivajinagar, assess the relief camp, report back. If it is legitimate, we decide next steps."

"And if it is a trap?" says Tanvi. Everyone looks at her. "Government announcements on loop? Food and water and medical facilities? It sounds perfect. Too perfect."

"You think the government is trapping people?" says Nikhil, incredulous.

"I think that anyone can set up a radio transmitter. I think that Salim's group could easily play a recorded message on a loop to lure survivors to a location where they can be raided or recruited. I think that paranoia has kept us alive this long and I am not about to stop now."

This room falls silent. Tanvi's paranoia, once an outlier, now a respected voice, has planted the seed of doubt.

"She has a point," says Hemant. "We send a scouting party. Three people. Armed. With a fallback plan. They go, they observe, they do not enter unless they are certain it is legitimate."

Dr. Pallavi nods. "Agreed. Who goes?"

"I go," says Hemant. "I know Shivajinagar. I know what a military relief operation looks like."

"I go," I say. I do not know why I say it. The word leaves my mouth before my brain approves it, propelled by something that is not bravery but proximity. The radio is in my hands, the voice was heard by my ears, and the connection between the broadcast and the scouting feels personal, inevitable.

Tanvi looks at me. Her expression says: I expected this, you idiot.

"Then I go too," she says.

Three scouts. The ex-army subedar, the sixteen-year-old boy, and the seventeen-year-old girl who thinks like a general.

We leave at dawn.