Chapter 6: Vihan

# Chapter 6: Vihan

## Saraswati Vidya Mandir

A first night in the school is the longest night of my life.

Not because anything happens. Nothing happens. That is precisely the problem — nothing happens, and the nothing is deafening, a roar of silence that presses against my eardrums with the insistence of a hand clamped over my mouth.

I find a classroom on the first floor. Aai's biology lab, because it feels closest to her, because the faint smell of formaldehyde and the posters of the digestive system on the walls are a version of home that I can tolerate. I push two benches together, lay my hoodie on top as a makeshift mattress, and curl up with my Wildcraft bag as a pillow.

This ceiling fan does not spin. No electricity. The generator is in the back compound, and I have not yet figured out how to start it. That is tomorrow's problem. Tonight's problem is simpler and more devastating: how to lie still in the dark while your mind replays the image of your father's yellowish-grey face under a white sheet, and the sound of your mother's first cough, and the words Do not come back. Whatever happens.

I do not sleep until the sky begins to lighten — that specific Pune pre-dawn, when the eastern horizon turns from black to deep blue to the colour of weak chai, and the first crows begin their shift. By then, exhaustion has won the argument with grief, and I slide into a sleep that is not rest but surrender.

---

I wake to heat. The sun has been pouring through the lab windows for hours, the windows face east, and by nine AM the room is a furnace, the benches hot to the touch, the air thick and still. My t-shirt is soaked. My mouth tastes of copper and dehydration.

Water first. I drink half a bottle, one of the three I brought, and force myself to stop. Three litres. If I drink a litre a day, I have three days. After that, the terrace tank.

I sit up. Swing my legs off the bench. Look around the biology lab as if seeing it for the first time. The skeleton in the corner. The plastic teaching skeleton that every biology lab in India has, the one that students named Ramu or Pintu or, in Aai's school, Shirke Sir (a coincidence that makes me almost smile, almost). The charts on the walls: photosynthesis, cell division, the human circulatory system, the periodic table (wrong room, but someone pinned it here and nobody moved it). The microscopes in the glass cabinet, lined up like soldiers.

And on Aai's desk, at the front of the room: a framed photograph. I walk to it. Pick it up.

The photo is from last year's annual day. Aai in a green sari, standing with her Class 10 students, all of them in school uniforms, all of them grinning. She is in the centre, shorter than most of the kids, beaming with the specific pride of a teacher who has gotten thirty teenagers through their board exams and considers this a greater achievement than anything the corporate world could offer.

I put the photo down. Face-first on the desk, screen-down, the way I put my phone on the kitchen floor yesterday. Too many faces looking at me.

---

The generator takes me two hours to figure out.

It is a Kirloskar diesel genset, the kind that runs on diesel fuel and makes a sound like a tractor starting in a temple compound. The generator room is behind the science block, exactly where Aai said. A small, corrugated-tin shed with a padlock that I break open using a rock and twelve minutes of increasingly frustrated bashing.

Inside: the generator, a fifty-litre diesel drum (half full), and a laminated instruction sheet tacked to the wall. The sheet is faded, the lamination peeling at the corners, and the instructions are in English so technical that they might as well be in Klingon. But I am a sixteen-year-old who has assembled a PC from YouTube tutorials and fixed Aai's mixer grinder with a screwdriver and Google. I can figure this out.

Step one: check oil level. I find the dipstick, pull it out, wipe it on my jeans, re-insert, pull out again. The oil is black and thick, coating the stick to the correct level. Good.

Step two: check fuel. The diesel drum has a hand pump attached. I pump diesel into the generator's tank until it overflows slightly, the sharp, petroleum smell of diesel mixing with the morning air.

Step three: set the choke. The choke lever is stiff. I yank it to the ON position, feel it click.

Step four: pull the starter cord. I wrap my fingers around the handle, the plastic handle, cracked from years of use, plant my feet, and pull.

Nothing.

I pull again. Harder. My shoulder screams.

Nothing.

I pull a third time, putting my entire body into it, leaning back like I am starting an outboard motor on a fishing boat in some action film.

The engine coughs. Sputters. Dies.

Fourth pull. The engine coughs, sputters, catches. And roars to life with a sound that shatters the silence of the empty school like a firecracker in a library. The entire shed vibrates. The tin walls rattle. The sound is enormous, mechanical, alive, and standing there with diesel on my hands and sweat on my face, I feel something that I have not felt in days.

Power. Not metaphorical power, not emotional power — literal, electrical power, flowing from this grumbling machine through the cables that snake out of the shed and into the school building.

I run inside. The corridor lights flicker, then hold. In the biology lab, the ceiling fan begins to spin; slowly at first, then faster, the blades cutting through the stagnant air with a whir that sounds like rescue. In the staff room, a fluorescent tube clicks on.

I stand in the corridor and let the fan-cooled air wash over me. The relief is physical, visceral, a full-body exhale.

Then I go to the kitchen. The storeroom is exactly as Aai described — bags of rice, sacks of toor dal, jerrycans of kachi ghani oil, packets of salt and turmeric. There is also a bag of onions (some sprouting), a box of potatoes (some green), and, a discovery that makes my heart leap — a ten-kilo tin of Amul ghee.

Ghee. The Maharashtrian survival essential. The substance that transforms plain dal-rice from food into bhaat, that turns dry roti into something that tastes like forgiveness, that is simultaneously cooking fat, medicine (every grandmother's cure for everything from dry skin to existential despair), and emergency lamp fuel.

I inventory everything. Make a list on the back of a register page I find in the staff room:

- Rice: ~50 kg - Dal: ~20 kg - Oil: ~10 litres - Ghee: ~10 kg - Salt: 5 kg - Turmeric: 2 kg - Onions: ~8 kg (some bad) - Potatoes: ~5 kg - Sugar: 3 kg - Tea (loose): 1 kg - Atta (wheat flour): ~10 kg

Plus what I brought: 2.5 kg rice, 1 kg dal, Maggi, biscuits, butter.

At minimal rations, one meal a day, small portions, this is enough food for one person for three to four months. Maybe five if I stretch it.

Five months. The number sits in my mind like a promise and a threat simultaneously.

---

I spend the afternoon making the school livable. I pick a classroom on the first floor, not the biology lab (too many memories), but the one next door, the physics room, which has fewer windows and stays cooler. I drag in a sleeping mat from the store room, the type used for yoga classes, thin foam, blue, smelling of dust and rubber. I set up a cooking station in the kitchen: the gas stove works (the school has a commercial LPG cylinder, the kind restaurants use, the kind that lasts forever), and I find pots, pans, ladles, plates, and glasses in the cupboards.

I cook my first solo meal. Dal and rice. The dal is better this time — I figure out the tadka through pure trial and error: heat oil in a small pan, throw in mustard seeds (they pop and splutter and nearly blind me), add cumin, add dried red chillies, add hing (the smell is catastrophic, a nasal assault of sulphur and garlic that makes me gag, but Aai uses it in everything so I push through), and pour the smoking mixture into the boiled dal.

The sizzle. The eruption of steam. The immediate transformation of bland, yellow liquid into something aromatic, something that smells like a kitchen, like a home, like the act of living rather than merely surviving.

I eat sitting on the kitchen floor, cross-legged, the steel thali on my lap. The dal is too salty. The rice is too soft. But I eat every grain, and when I am done, I wash the thali with water from my bottle (the terrace tank is tomorrow's exploration), and I place it upside down on the counter to dry, and the small domesticity of this act, washing a plate, placing it to dry, is the most comforting thing that has happened to me in five days.

---

As the sun sets, I climb to the terrace. The school is three stories, and the terrace offers a view of Karve Road in one direction and the Parvati Hill temple in the other. From up here, I can see Pune spreading in all directions. the city that is my reluctant home, the city that eight months ago I hated and four days ago I was learning to tolerate and now I am standing on a school terrace watching die.

The city is dark. Not the complete darkness of a power outage — scattered lights dot the landscape, generators and inverters and solar panels keeping isolated pockets alive. But the aggregate darkness is overwhelming. The skyline that should be ablaze, the Hinjewadi IT towers, the Magarpatta glass buildings, the commercial strips of FC Road and JM Road — is mostly black. The traffic signals that should be cycling through their colours are dead. The streetlights are off.

And the silence. From up here, the silence of a city of seven million people is the loudest thing I have ever heard. No traffic. No horns. No PMPML buses rumbling along Karve Road. No auto-rickshaw engines sputtering. No music from shops. No arguments from the sabzi mandi. No temple bells. No call to prayer. No school bells. Nothing.

I check the water tank. It is a large concrete tank, the kind that sits on every Indian building's terrace. Rectangular, maybe 5,000 litres capacity. I lift the concrete lid. The water inside is dark, still, reflecting the first stars. I dip my hand in. Cool. Not cold, but not warm either. I cup my palm and bring it to my lips. The water tastes of concrete and time, but it is water, and it is here, and I do not need to ration my bottles anymore.

I sit on the terrace wall. Legs dangling over the edge, three stories above the empty street. The March night air is warm, carrying the scent of dust and something floral, raat rani, maybe, the night-blooming jasmine that grows in every Pune garden and perfumes the air after sunset with a sweetness that feels cruel in a dying city.

My phone is dead. It died this afternoon, the last 4% draining while I was trying to start the generator. The screen went black mid-sentence. I was writing a text to Shlok that I knew would never send, a text that said Bhai, Baba gela. Aai bimaar aahe. Mala madat havi. The text sits somewhere in the phone's memory, unsent, undelivered, a message in a bottle that will never reach the ocean.

I look at the sky. Without light pollution, the stars are extraordinary. The Milky Way is visible. A pale, glittering river across the sky, the kind of sky that Kolhapur had on clear nights when Baba would take me to the terrace of our old house and point out Orion's Belt and the Big Dipper and tell me that the light I was seeing had traveled for thousands of years just to reach my eyes.

"Vihan, that star, the one there, see?, that star might already be dead. The light is still traveling, but the source is gone. You are seeing a ghost."

I am seeing ghosts.

I sit on the terrace until the stars blur, until I cannot tell if the blurring is from tears or exhaustion, and then I climb back down to the physics classroom, lie on the blue foam mat, pull my hoodie over my face to block out the moonlight that streams through the window, and I sleep.

---

The days begin to find a rhythm.

Wake at dawn. The crows are my alarm clock; their 5 AM shift change, the cawing that every Indian knows and that nobody loves but that I am now grateful for because it means the world still has at least one species that gives a damn about punctuality.

Water: Climb to the terrace. Fill a bucket from the tank. Carry it down three flights. Wash my face, brush my teeth (I forgot a toothbrush; I use a neem twig from the tree by the side gate, the way my aaji in Kolhapur does).

Food: Cook one meal. Dal-rice with whatever variation I can manage, sometimes I add potato, sometimes onion, sometimes both. I am learning. On the fourth day, I figure out how to make khichdi, the rice-and-dal comfort food that Aai used to make when I was sick, boiled together with turmeric and ghee. It is not as good as hers. Nothing will ever be as good as hers. But it is warm and it is mine.

Generator: I run it for four hours a day — two in the morning, two in the evening. Enough to charge the phones (I found two Nokia phones in the staff room drawers, old models, their batteries still holding charge — no SIM cards, no network, but the flashlight function works). Enough to run the fans during the worst of the afternoon heat. Enough to remind myself that electricity exists.

Rest of the day: I explore. Not the city. I am not ready for the city, not ready for the empty streets and the stray dogs and the forms on footpaths. I explore the school.

In the library, I find books. Hundreds of them. Most are textbooks, NCERT, Balbharati, reference guides for competitive exams, but there is a shelf of fiction in the corner. Marathi novels: P.L. Deshpande's Vyakti Ani Valli, V.S. Khandekar's Yayati, Bhalchandra Nemade's Kosala. English novels: R.K. Narayan, Ruskin Bond, Amitav Ghosh. A few surprises: a battered copy of The Kite Runner with someone's name on the inside cover (Snehal Jagtap, Class 9B, 2019), a dog-eared Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in Hindi translation.

I start reading. Not because I want to, because the silence is too heavy without something to fill it, and music is not an option (dead phone, no speakers), and talking to myself has a shelf life of about thirty minutes before it starts feeling clinical.

I read Vyakti Ani Valli first. The essays are warm, funny, sharp. Pu La's observations about Maharashtrian life are so precise that they make me laugh out loud in the empty library, the sound of my own laughter startling me, echoing off the shelves, returning to me like the laugh of a stranger.

On the fifth day, I find the school's art room. Inside: paints, brushes, canvas boards, charcoal sticks, sketch pads. I pick up a charcoal stick. I have not drawn since Shirke Sir ripped up my doodle. Was that really only ten days ago? It feels like a previous life.

I draw. Not doodles this time. I draw Baba — from memory, from the photo on my dead phone that I can no longer see but that is burned into my brain. His face at the ISL match, grinning, the Persistent Systems polo shirt, the Pune FC scarf around his neck. I draw Aai, in her green sari, surrounded by students, beaming. I draw Shlok, Omi, Tejas — in the Rajaram canteen, fighting over the last batata vada.

The drawings are not good. The proportions are off, the shading crude, the faces slightly wrong. Close enough to be recognizable, not close enough to be real. But the act of drawing them, of giving them form on paper, of making them exist in a world where they might not exist anymore, is the thing that keeps me tethered.

I pin the drawings to the physics classroom wall. My family. My friends. My gallery of people who might be ghosts, whose light might still be traveling even though the source is gone.

On the seventh day, I hear something.

Neither coughing nor sirens Not the silence that has become my constant companion.

A voice. Human. Coming from outside the school gate.

"Hello? Is someone in there? I saw the lights. Hello?"

I freeze. My hand tightens around the charcoal stick. Aai's words echo: Not everyone will be kind. Watch their eyes. Watch their hands.

I walk to the window. Look down at the side gate.

A girl. My age, maybe a year older. Dark hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. A backpack on her shoulders. She is looking up at the school building, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand.

In her other hand: nothing. No weapon. No threat. Just a water bottle, nearly empty, catching the light.

She sees me at the window. Our eyes meet.

"Hey!" she shouts. "Are you alive up there?"

I am. Barely. But I am.

"Yeah," I shout back. "I am alive."

"Can I come in? I have not had water in two days."

I look at her hands. Empty. I look at her eyes. They are not scanning, not calculating, not looking behind me. They are looking at me with the simple, desperate directness of a person who needs help.

I go downstairs. I open the gate.

"I am Vihan," I say.

"Tanvi," she says. "Do you have water? I am about to pass out."

I have water. I have food. I have a school with a generator and a terrace tank and bags of rice and a library full of books and a gallery of charcoal drawings pinned to a classroom wall.

I have, it turns out, exactly what another human being needs right now.

"Come in," I say. "I will get you water."

She steps through the gate. And for the first time in seven days, I am not alone.