Chapter 21: Vihan

# Chapter 21: Vihan

## Kolhapur

Day 7 of the walk. Day 74 of the virus.

I smell Kolhapur before I see it.

Not the smell of death, that smell is everywhere, uniform, the olfactory wallpaper of the new world. This is a different smell, layered underneath: the Panchganga River, its water low and muddy in the April heat, carrying the mineral scent of laterite soil and the organic tang of river weed. The jaggery factories on the outskirts, their chimneys cold but the sweet, burnt-sugar smell embedded in the brickwork, released by the sun's heat. And somewhere, faint, improbable, the smell of kolhapuri misal, the fiery, oily, devastating breakfast dish that is Kolhapur's gift to the world, the smell that means someone is cooking tarri and sprouted moth beans and farsan and the specific red chilli paste that turns a simple dish into an act of aggression against the human palate.

Someone in Kolhapur is making misal.

My legs, which have been protesting since the Panhala ghat descent (eight kilometres of downhill that turned my quads into trembling, unreliable structures), find new energy. I walk faster. The rucksack, which has felt like a boulder for two days, feels lighter. The lathi, which I have been using as a walking stick since Satara, becomes unnecessary; I tuck it under my arm and stride.

"Slow down," says Tanvi behind me. "You are going to fall."

"I can smell misal."

"You can smell hope. Which is biologically identical to misal but nutritionally useless."

"It is not hope. It is cumin and red chilli and hing. Real misal. Someone is cooking."

She catches up. Sniffs. Her eyes narrow, then widen.

"Okay," she concedes. "That is misal."

---

Kolhapur. My city. The city where I was born, where I learned to walk, where I played gully cricket with Shlok and Omi and Tejas in the lane behind our house, where I ate batata vada from the stall near Mahalaxmi Temple every Saturday, where my aaji told me stories about the Peshwas and the Marathas and the independence struggle while feeding me shev-bhaji and aamti-bhat.

The city is damaged but alive. The damage is the same as everywhere, the absence, the emptiness, the specific desolation of streets that should be full and are not. But the alive part, the alive part is different from Pune. In Pune, survival was scattered, hidden, defensive. In Kolhapur, survival is visible.

Flags. Small Indian flags, tricolour, hanging from buildings and lamp posts and makeshift poles. Someone, many someones, has put up flags. The flags are a statement: we are here, this is ours, we have not surrendered. The flags flutter in the April wind, bright and defiant, the saffron and white and green catching the sun.

And people. Not many — but more than I have seen in one place since the shelter. Walking on streets, carrying water, pushing handcarts, sweeping (sweeping!, someone is sweeping a footpath, the act of cleaning a public space in a post-apocalyptic city so absurdly civilised that it makes me want to sit down and cry). Children playing in a compound. An old man reading a newspaper — where did he get a newspaper?, on a bench.

We follow the sound of activity toward the city centre. Toward Rajaram College, the source of the broadcast, the beacon that drew us 230 kilometres through the ghats and the heat and the empty highway.

Rajaram College is a campus in the heart of Kolhapur, near the Rankala Lake, established in 1880 by the Chhatrapati of Kolhapur. The buildings are old, red laterite stone, the colonial architecture of 19th-century educational institutions, high ceilings, arched windows, wide corridors. The campus is walled, gated, large, several acres of buildings, grounds, a library, an auditorium.

A gate is open. People are walking in and out. There are guards — civilian guards, not soldiers, carrying lathis and wearing makeshift armbands marked SURAKSHA SAMITI (Safety Committee). Inside the campus, the activity is dense: a food distribution point near the canteen (the source of the misal smell, a woman is serving misal pav from a massive steel vessel, the ladle rising and falling with the rhythm of a metronome), a medical tent (smaller than Pune's, but staffed — a woman in a white coat, a man with a stethoscope), and what appears to be a school operating in one of the classrooms (children's voices, a teacher's voice, the cadence of a lesson being taught).

I stand at the gate. My legs are shaking — not from exhaustion now, but from something else. From the weight of arriving. From the specific, overwhelming sensation of standing in a place you left and finding it still here, changed but recognisable, damaged but functioning, the essential character of the place, the misal, the flags, the laterite stone, the stubbornness — intact.

"Vihan?"

I turn.

A boy is standing ten metres away, staring at me. He is thin; thinner than I remember, his face narrower, his cheekbones more prominent. He is wearing a t-shirt that says Kolhapur Warriors, the same team, the same logo, the same cheap cotton merchandise that we bought at a match in 2024. His hair is longer than it was, past his ears, curling at the collar. His eyes, dark, wide, disbelieving, are locked on mine.

"Shlok?"

The sound that comes from his throat is not a word. It is the sound that humans make when the impossible becomes real, a choked, strangled noise that is part gasp and part sob and part laugh, the sound of a dam breaking, ten weeks of grief and fear and loneliness and the desperate hope of broadcasting on an AM radio frequency every evening without knowing if anyone was listening,

He runs.

I run.

We collide in the middle of the campus road. His arms wrap around me. Tight, crushing, the embrace of a boy who thought his best friend was dead and has just discovered that he is not. I hold him. He holds me. We stand there, two sixteen-year-old boys, clinging to each other in the courtyard of Rajaram College, in the city of Kolhapur, in the country of India, on a planet that has lost ninety percent of its human population and that has, in this moment, in this specific collision of two bodies, gained something back.

He is crying. I am crying. Neither of us tries to stop. The tears run down our faces and soak into each other's shirts and we do not let go, because letting go would mean acknowledging that this is real, and if it is real then the grief is real too, and the grief is so large that it needs to be held by two people, not one.

"You are alive," he says. His voice is muffled against my shoulder. "You are alive."

"I walked from Pune."

"You walked from," He pulls back. Looks at my face. At the cap on my head, the Kolhapur Warriors cap, the one I took from the flat on Day 14, the one I have worn every day since. "You are wearing the cap."

"I never took it off."

He touches the cap. The brim. The logo. The fabric. His fingers trace the stitching as if confirming that it is real. That the cap is real, that I am real, that the world has produced, against all odds and all probability, the specific miracle of a best friend walking 230 kilometres to find you.

"Come," he says. He grabs my arm. "You have to meet everyone. Omi is here. Tejas is here. And," He hesitates. His face changes, the joy dimming, replaced by something more careful, more guarded. "And your aaji is here."

My heart stops. Restarts.

"Aaji is alive?"

"She is alive. She is — " He pauses again. The guardedness on his face deepens. "She is not well, Vihan. The virus did not take her, but she is eighty-two, and the stress, the grief — she thought you were all dead. Your father, your mother, you. She has not been well."

"Take me to her. Now."

---

Aaji is in a room on the ground floor of the college's humanities building. The room was once a professor's office. Bookshelves line the walls, a desk sits in the corner, the window looks out onto a courtyard where a neem tree stands in full leaf. The room has been converted into a sickroom: a cot, a bedside table with medicines and a glass of water, a chair for the attendant.

She is on the cot. Small, she was always small, five feet nothing, a woman who occupied minimal physical space and maximum emotional space. But now she is smaller. Diminished. The bones of her wrists are visible, the skin papery and loose. Her white hair, which she usually keeps in a neat bun, is spread on the pillow in a thin, wispy halo. Her eyes are closed.

I kneel beside the cot. The floor is cold stone. My knees ache from seven days of walking. I do not care.

"Aaji."

Her eyes open. The eyes have not changed — dark, sharp, carrying the intelligence and the fierceness that have defined her for eighty-two years, the eyes that survived Partition (she was three, she does not remember it, but the survival is in her blood), the eyes that raised four children and buried a husband and ran a household on a municipal clerk's pension and never, never — complained.

She looks at me. The eyes focus. The recognition happens in stages. The face, the cap, the voice. The stages take maybe two seconds but feel like two hours.

"Vihan?"

"Aaji. It is me."

Her hand reaches out. I take it. The skin is paper-thin, the bones fragile underneath, the grip weak but insistent. She pulls me toward her. I lean in. She touches my face. Both hands now, her fingers tracing my cheekbones, my jaw, my forehead, the way a blind person reads a face, confirming through touch what the eyes have already told her.

"Tu alas." You came.

"Ho, aaji. Aaloy." Yes, grandmother. I came.

"Manohar?" My father's name.

I shake my head.

"Kavita?" My mother's name.

I shake my head.

The sound she makes is not a cry. It is deeper than a cry, it is the sound of a woman who has already grieved her son and daughter-in-law as dead and who is now receiving the confirmation, the finality, delivered by her grandson who walked 230 kilometres to deliver it. The sound comes from a place below language, below culture, below the Marathi and the Hindi and the English, from the place where all human beings are the same, the place where loss lives.

I hold her. She holds me. Her small, fragile body shakes against my chest, and I absorb the tremors the way the earth absorbs rain. Silently, completely, taking it in because there is nowhere else for it to go.

"Tu alas," she says again, when the shaking subsides. "Mi vaatlela tu pan gelas." I thought you were gone too.

"Nahi, aaji. Mi ithhe aahe. Mi rahnar." No, grandmother. I am here. I am staying.

She closes her eyes. Her grip on my hand does not loosen. I sit on the cold stone floor beside her cot, holding her hand, and I do not move for a long time.

A neem tree outside the window rustles in the wind. The sounds of the college campus drift in, voices, footsteps, the clatter of utensils from the canteen, the distant laughter of children playing. The sounds of a community. The sounds of survival.

I am home.

Not the home I left, that home is gone, erased, the flat in Aundh where Baba coughed and Aai cried and the mogra bloomed on the balcony. Not the home I built, that home is 230 kilometres north, the school and the shelter and the people who taught me that family is not blood but choice.

This home is different. This home is old and new simultaneously. The city I grew up in, reimagined, rebuilt, populated by survivors instead of seven lakh citizens, functioning on misal and flags and the stubborn refusal of Kolhapuris to accept that the world has ended.

Aaji sleeps. Her breathing is slow, even, the breathing of a woman who has been given the one thing that no medicine can provide: the knowledge that her grandson is alive, that her blood continues, that the line, the unbroken chain of Deshpandes that stretches back through the centuries, has not been severed.

I watch her sleep. I hold her hand.

I am sixteen. I have walked 230 kilometres. I have lost my parents and found my grandmother. I have left one family and returned to another. I have carried a compass, a lathi, a cricket bat, a mangalsutra, a photo, a painting, a register, and the stubborn, irrational belief that tomorrow will be better than today.

Tomorrow will be better than today.

I know this now. Not as a belief. As a fact.

Because I am home.