Chapter 7: Vihan

# Chapter 7: Vihan

## Tanvi

She drinks three glasses of water in under a minute. I watch her throat move. The swallowing fast, desperate, the gulps audible in the silent kitchen. Water runs down her chin and she does not wipe it. She finishes the third glass, sets it on the counter, and breathes.

"More?"

"In a minute. If I drink any more right now I will throw up."

She sits on the kitchen floor. I sit across from her, my back against the rice sacks. Between us: the blue gas flame of the stove, heating a pot of khichdi that I started when I heard her voice at the gate.

Tanvi Bhosale. Seventeen. From Warje — the other side of Karve Road, maybe two kilometres from here. She was a commerce student at Symbiosis College, first year. She lived with her mother, her grandmother, and her younger brother, Harsh (the name makes me flinch, because Harsh is also the name of someone in Pune who is probably dead, but I do not say this). Her father left when she was nine — not died, not disappeared, just left, walked out one morning with a suitcase and a ticket to Dubai and a promise to send money that arrived three times and then stopped.

She tells me all of this in the first twenty minutes, sitting on the kitchen floor, the words pouring out of her the way the water poured into her — fast, urgent, as if speaking is a biological need that has been unmet for too long.

"My grandmother was the first," she says. She is looking at the floor, not at me. Her voice is steady, factual, the voice of a person who has already processed the grief and is now simply reporting it. "Tuesday. She started coughing Monday night. By Tuesday evening, she could not breathe. My mother tried to get her to Bharati Hospital, but the roads, you know how the roads were."

I know.

"She died in the auto-rickshaw. The auto-wallah just. Pulled over and told us to get out. He was coughing too. He probably did not survive the night."

"I am sorry."

"My brother was next. Wednesday morning. He was eleven." Her voice does not break. It has already broken, at some earlier point, and what I am hearing is the version that came after, the version that is held together not by strength but by the absence of anything left to break. "My mother, she got sick Wednesday night. She told me to leave. I did not want to leave. She made me."

"Same as my Aai."

Tanvi looks up. "Your mother made you leave too?"

"Yes. She was coughing. She told me to come here; she teaches at this school."

"Your mother is a teacher here?"

"Biology."

Something shifts in Tanvi's face. Not a smile, it is too soon for smiles, but a recognition. "My mother always said that teachers were the strongest people she knew. Because they spent all day giving, and nobody ever thought to give back."

I do not know what to say to this. I stir the khichdi.

"When did you leave?" I ask.

"Thursday. I walked. I had nowhere to go — our flat in Warje is a one-bedroom, and with three dead people in it, " She stops. Swallows. "I could not stay. I walked toward Kothrud because I remembered there was a hospital here, Sahyadri, and I thought maybe — "

"The hospitals are done."

"I know. I found out when I got there. The parking lot was, " She shakes her head. "I do not want to describe it. After that, I just walked. Slept in a park near Law College on Thursday night. Found a kirana shop that had been broken into, took some biscuits and water. Walked more. Slept behind the Parvati temple on Friday night. And then this morning, I saw the lights. Your generator."

"The generator saved you."

"The generator saved me." She pauses. "How long have you been here?"

"Seven days."

"Alone?"

"Alone."

She looks around the kitchen. At the bags of rice, the stove, the clean thali on the counter. At the order I have imposed on this small space. the supplies arranged, the cooking area tidy, the water bucket in the corner. She sees the effort. The survival.

"You have done well," she says. It is not a compliment. It is an observation, stated with the same factual tone she used to describe her family's deaths. "Most people would have fallen apart."

"I did fall apart. I just, also cooked."

The khichdi is ready. I ladle it into two plates. Add a spoonful of ghee to each — the ghee melting into the hot rice and dal, pooling golden on the surface. I hand her a plate.

She eats the way she drank. fast, mechanical, the spoon moving from plate to mouth in a rhythm that is about fuel, not pleasure. She finishes before I am halfway through mine.

"More?"

She nods. I give her my plate.

She eats that too. Then she puts the empty plate down, draws her knees to her chest, and for the first time, her composure cracks. Not fully, not the messy, ugly crying that I did on my Spiderman bed the night Baba coughed blood. Just a single tear, sliding down her left cheek, catching the light from the kitchen window.

She wipes it with the back of her hand. "Sorry."

"Do not apologize."

"I have not eaten in two days."

"I know."

"Can I stay here? I will help. I can cook, I am better at it than my mother was, actually. I can clean. I can, "

"Yes. You can stay."

The word comes out before I think about it. Before I calculate the food supply (halved now, two to three months instead of five), the water (still sufficient. the tank is large), the space (the school has twenty classrooms; she can have her pick). The calculation does not matter. What matters is that she is here, and I was alone, and now I am not alone, and the not-alone is worth more than an extra two months of dal.

"Thank you," she says. And then, quieter: "I was starting to think I was the last person alive."

"So was I."

---

We establish a routine within two days. It is not discussed or negotiated. It forms organically, the way routines always do between people who share a space and a silence and a grief.

Tanvi takes the classroom next to mine, the chemistry room, which she chooses because it has a working sink (the school's internal plumbing still functions, drawing from the terrace tank through gravity) and because she finds a box of jasmine incense sticks in one of the drawers, and the smell reminds her of her grandmother.

She is better at cooking than I am. Not slightly better, dramatically better. On her first morning, she makes poha that tastes almost like Aai's, the mustard seeds perfectly popped, the peanuts roasted to the exact shade of gold, the lemon squeezed at the exact right moment, the coriander (she found some growing wild in the school garden, a miracle of neglect) chopped fine and scattered on top.

"Where did you learn this?" I ask, my mouth full.

"My grandmother. She used to say that a Maharashtrian woman who cannot make poha is like a car without wheels. Technically still a car, but what is the point?"

I laugh. The sound surprises both of us.

She is also practical in ways that I am not. While I spent my first week reading Pu La Deshpande and drawing charcoal portraits, Tanvi spends her first two days fortifying the school. She finds the caretaker's tools in a shed, hammer, nails, a saw, wire, rope, and uses them to secure the gates. She nails boards across the ground-floor windows. She creates a tripwire at the side gate using fishing line she finds in the sports equipment room (the school has a fishing club, apparently, though who fishes in landlocked Pune is a mystery neither of us solves).

"Why the tripwire?" I ask.

"Because we are two teenagers in a building full of food and water. If someone finds out, they will try to take it."

"You think people would, "

"I know they would. I saw a man beat another man with a cricket bat outside Sahyadri Hospital over a bottle of Bisleri. On Wednesday. While the second man's wife screamed."

I do not argue. I help her finish the tripwire.

---

On her third day, Tanvi finds the school's medical room. It is on the ground floor, next to the principal's office — a small room with a cot, a first-aid box, and a glass-fronted cabinet containing bottles of Dettol, cotton wool, bandages, Crocin, ORS packets, and, a find that makes Tanvi's eyes widen — a box of N95 masks.

"We should wear these outside," she says. "Not because the virus is airborne, I mean, it probably is, but because the bodies..." She trails off.

I understand. The smell. The city's new smell, the one that has been building for a week, the sweet-rotten smell that drifts through the windows when the wind changes direction. The smell of decomposition, of a city of seven million producing dead bodies faster than nature can process them.

We wear the masks when we go to the terrace. The terrace has become our observatory. Every evening, as the sun sets over Parvati Hill, we climb up and look at the city. Count the lights. Track the changes. On the first evening together, I count eighteen lights visible from the terrace. The next evening, fifteen. Then twelve. Then nine.

"The generators are running out of fuel," Tanvi says. "Or the people running them are dying."

"Or both."

"We need to think about fuel too. How much diesel do we have?"

"Half a drum. Fifty litres, maybe. At four hours a day, the generator uses about two litres. So. Twenty-five days."

"And then?"

"And then we have no electricity."

She chews her lip. "We need to find more diesel."

"From where?"

"There are cars on every street. Most of them are diesel. We siphon."

I stare at her. "You know how to siphon fuel?"

"My uncle, my father's brother, before he also disappeared, had a mechanic workshop in Sinhagad Road. I used to spend summers there. I can siphon fuel, change a tyre, and hotwire a Maruti Alto."

"You can hotwire a car?"

"A Maruti Alto. Specifically. The older models. The new ones have immobilisers."

I am, I realise, in the presence of someone who is significantly more prepared for the apocalypse than I am. My survival skills consist of: making bad khichdi, starting a generator after four attempts, and drawing charcoal portraits. Tanvi's consist of: cooking, construction, medical knowledge, and car theft.

"We make a good team," I say.

"We make a necessary team," she corrects. "Good would mean we are doing this by choice."

---

Fuel run happens on Day 10. My tenth day at the school, Tanvi's third.

We leave at dawn, when the light is grey and soft and the heat has not yet built. We carry empty jerrycans from the generator shed — two each, five-litre capacity. We wear N95 masks. Tanvi carries the Swiss knife. I carry a length of pipe that she found in the plumbing supplies — rubber, one-inch diameter, ideal for siphoning.

The school gate creaks as we open it. The sound is loud in the morning silence. We both freeze, listen. Nothing. The street is empty.

Karve Road is a graveyard of vehicles. Cars parked at angles — some on the road, some on the footpath, some half-on, half-off. Two-wheelers toppled on their sides. A PMPML bus sits at a bus stop, its doors open, its interior visible through the dusty windows — seats empty, a few bags and water bottles on the floor, evidence of passengers who disembarked and never returned.

We pass bodies. I will not describe them. Tanvi does not look at them. She walks with purpose, scanning the vehicles, looking for diesels. She can tell by sight; the badge on the back, the exhaust pipe diameter, the engine sound (though no engines are running). She taps a grey Tata Nexon.

"This one. Diesel."

She opens the fuel cap — the car is unlocked, the key still in the ignition. She feeds the rubber pipe into the tank, puts the other end to the jerrycan, and, using a technique that involves creating a vacuum with her mouth on the pipe and then quickly redirecting the flow — the diesel begins to pour. The smell is sharp, chemical, and in the morning air it is almost welcome, a human smell in a world that is losing its humanity.

We fill all four jerrycans from three cars. Twenty litres total. Another ten days of generator time.

Walking back to the school, the jerrycans heavy in our hands, the diesel sloshing with each step, Tanvi says: "We should do this regularly. Once a week. There is enough fuel in the cars on this road alone to last us a year."

"A year." The word hangs between us.

"Do you think this will last a year?"

I do not know. I do not know how long a pandemic lasts when there are no hospitals, no doctors, no government response, no vaccine, no treatment. I do not know if the virus will burn itself out when it runs out of hosts, or if it will mutate, or if it will simply kill everyone and leave the crows and the stray dogs and the mogra plants to inherit the city.

"I do not know," I say.

"Neither do I," says Tanvi. "So we plan for a year. And if it is less, we will have extra diesel."

I nod. The logic is sound. The logic is also terrifying; planning for a year of this, a year of empty streets and dead phones and dal-rice and diesel runs and counting the lights on the skyline and watching them go out, one by one, like stars dying.

But we carry the diesel back to the school. We pour it into the drum. The drum is now three-quarters full. We have bought ourselves time.

Time. The only currency that still matters.