Chapter 8: Vihan

# Chapter 8: Vihan

## Bahar

Day 14. Two weeks since the world ended. Two weeks since Shirke Sir ripped up my doodle and I wished for a disease to shut the school down. The universe, it turns out, has a vicious sense of humour.

Tanvi and I have settled into something that resembles a life. Not a good life. Not even a tolerable life. But a life. With rhythms, with purpose, with the small daily decisions that separate survival from waiting-to-die.

Morning: wake, wash, cook. Tanvi makes breakfast. She has elevated our menu beyond my dal-rice-khichdi rotation — she makes upma from the rava she found in the kitchen storeroom, sheera on mornings when we need something sweet, thaalipeeth from a multi-grain flour mix that she created by grinding together rice, wheat, and the bajra she found in a sack labeled Sports Day Prizes 2025 (apparently the school gave bags of millet as prizes, which is either progressive health-consciousness or extreme cheapness).

Afternoon: work. We have divided responsibilities. Tanvi handles security and infrastructure — the gates, the tripwires, the boarding of windows, the rationing of diesel. I handle inventory, water management, and, my newest responsibility — reconnaissance.

The reconnaissance started on Day 11, when Tanvi pointed out that we knew nothing about what was happening beyond a two-hundred-metre radius of the school. We did not know if there were other survivors nearby. We did not know if the virus was still spreading. We did not know if any form of authority still existed. Police, military, municipal corporation. We were operating blind.

"We need information," she had said, standing at the terrace railing, looking out at the dark city. "Information is the difference between survival and accident."

So I started going out. Short trips at first. Down Karve Road to the Karve statue, then back. Then longer: to the Parvati Hill footpath, to the Deccan Gymkhana junction, to FC Road. Always in the early morning, when the light was grey and the heat manageable and the chances of encountering other survivors (or threats) were, theoretically, lower.

---

Today's trip is the longest yet. I am going to the flat.

Tanvi argued against it. She argued with the clinical efficiency of someone who has already lost her family and recognises the symptoms of denial in someone who has not yet accepted the same.

"She told you not to come back."

"I know."

"She told you because she knew what was going to happen, and she did not want you to see it."

"I know."

"So why are you going?"

I did not have a rational answer. The rational answer was: Because I need to know. Because the not-knowing is worse than the knowing. Because every night, when I close my eyes, I see two possibilities, Aai alive, recovering, waiting for me; and Aai dead, lying in the flat, alone, the mogra blooming on the balcony above her, and the two possibilities are tearing me apart.

I said: "Because I have to."

Tanvi looked at me for a long time. Then she packed my bag with two bottles of water, four Parle-G biscuits, and the Swiss knife. "Be back before dark. If you are not back by sunset, I am locking the gate and not opening it until morning."

"You would lock me out?"

"I would. Because if something happened to you, it happened after dark, and after dark is when the worst things happen. So be back before dark."

I did not argue. She was right.

---

This walk from Kothrud to Aundh takes fifty minutes. I know this because I counted steps for the first ten minutes (six hundred and twelve), got bored, and started counting the cars instead. The cars are everywhere. Parked, abandoned, some with doors open, some with engines dead, some with their hazard lights still blinking (the batteries slowly dying, the click-click-click of the indicators the only mechanical heartbeat left in the city).

I walk through University Circle. The woman on the wall is gone. I do not know where she went. I do not know if she is alive.

I walk through the campus. The university is a ghost, the buildings that should be full of students and professors and admin staff are dark and silent. A banner still hangs across the main road: SPPU Annual Cultural Festival, March 22-24, 2026. The festival did not happen. The festival will never happen.

I walk through Aundh. My neighbourhood. Past the Medipoint clinic (door still shattered, interior trashed). Past the chai stall (shut, the cutting glasses now coated in a film of dust). Past the auto-rickshaw that was stopped in the middle of the road (still there, the dark stain on the seat now dried to a brown crust).

And then I am at my building. The gate is open. The electromagnetic lock still dead. The compound is empty. The watchman's dog is gone. The children's play area, with its rusted slides and swings, sits abandoned, the seats of the swings still swaying slightly in the wind as if moved by ghosts.

I climb three flights. My footsteps echo in the stairwell. The building smells. The smell is stronger here, concentrated, the sweet-rotten smell of biology's final process, seeping from under closed doors on every floor.

I reach our door. Flat 302. The brass Shri nameplate that Aai insisted on. I put my hand on the handle.

My heart is beating so hard that I can hear it. Not feel it, hear it, a wet, fast drumming in my ears that competes with the silence of the stairwell. My hand is shaking. My mouth is dry.

I push the door open.

---

The flat is dark. The curtains are drawn. the curtains that Aai moved from the living room to cover the bedroom door, the curtains that I last saw her standing behind, one hand on the door frame, raising her hand to say goodbye.

This smell is here. I will not describe it in detail. It is the smell that I have been smelling across the city for two weeks, but here, in this flat, in this space that smells (that should smell) of Ujala detergent and mogra and Bru coffee and the ghost of mutton rassa, the smell is personal. The smell is not a city dying. The smell is my family.

I pull the N95 mask tighter over my face. It helps. Barely.

The living room is unchanged. The sofa where Aai slept. The TV that no longer works. The Bluetooth speaker, silent. The table where we ate Baba's birthday dinner, the tablecloth still bearing the red-brown stain of rassa that splashed when I threw my spoon.

I walk to the bedroom, Baba's bedroom. I push the curtain aside. The smell intensifies. I breathe through my mouth. The white sheet is still there, still covering the form on the bed. The brass diya has burned out, a crust of solidified oil around the wick. The room is exactly as I left it, ten days ago, except that time has done its work, and the work is visible in the shape under the sheet, the shape that is slightly different, slightly less, as if the body is retreating into itself.

I do not lift the sheet. I cannot.

I close the curtain. I walk to the living room.

And then I see her.

Aai is on the sofa. Lying on her side, facing the wall, in the same position she was in when she lay down to sleep on the night I left. She is wearing the same salwar kameez. The blue one with white flowers, her favourite, the one she wore to parent-teacher meetings because it was professional but not stuffy. Her hands are folded under her cheek, the way she always slept, the way I have seen her sleep a thousand times on Sunday afternoons, on the sofa, with the fan on and Arijit playing softly and Baba reading the paper in the chair beside her.

But the fan is not on. And Arijit is not playing. And Baba is not in the chair.

And Aai is not sleeping.

I know this before I touch her. I know it from the stillness. Not the stillness of sleep, which has movement in it, the micro-twitches of eyelids and fingers and the rise-fall of breathing, but the absolute stillness of something that has stopped. The stillness of a clock that is no longer ticking. The stillness of a sentence that has ended.

Her skin, when I touch her hand, is cold. Not cool — cold. The kind of cold that has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with absence. The warmth that was Kavita Deshpande, the warmth that made poha on Saturday mornings and corrected board papers until midnight and kissed me on the cheek even when I dodged and pressed her mangalsutra into my palm and said mazha raja — that warmth is gone.

I kneel beside the sofa. I hold her hand. I hold it for a long time. I do not know how long, because time has stopped meaning what it used to mean, and the watch on her wrist (the Titan Raga with the rose-gold band that Baba gave her for their fifteenth anniversary) has stopped at 2:47, and I do not know if that is AM or PM or which day, and it does not matter, because 2:47 is the time that her heart stopped and the rest is detail.

I cry. Quietly, this time. Not the ugly, heaving sobs from before. These tears are slow, steady, the kind that come when the shock has already passed and what is left is the long, flat aftermath. The understanding that this is real, and permanent, and that no amount of crying will change the fact that I am sixteen years old and both my parents are dead.

---

I do not leave immediately. I cannot.

I go to my room. My Spiderman bed. The ceiling fan that does not spin. The window facing the water tank. Everything is the same. My books on the shelf. My BGMI gaming headset on the desk. This Kolhapur Warriors cap hanging on the door hook.

I take the cap. I put it on my head. It smells of my room, of my life, of the boy I was two weeks ago who hated his school and missed his friends and could not have imagined, in his most catastrophic doodle, what was coming.

I take one more thing: the photo from the hallway wall. A family photo. Baba, Aai, me. Taken at the Dagdusheth temple on Ganesh Chaturthi, 2024. We are standing in front of the decorated idol, the lights and flowers behind us, all three of us smiling. I was fourteen in the photo. Baba's arm is around my shoulder. Aai is holding a modak in one hand and her phone in the other, trying to take a selfie that Baba ultimately took for her because your arms are too short, Kavita.

I put the photo in my bag. I zip it shut.

Then I do one more thing. The hardest thing.

I find a bedsheet, a clean one, from the linen cupboard. I carry it to the living room. I unfold it. I place it over Aai, the way I placed a sheet over Baba ten days ago, gently, carefully, as if she can feel it, as if the weight of the cotton on her skin matters, as if anything I do now matters.

The fabric settles over her face. Clings to her features. The outline of her nose. Her forehead. The jaw that I inherited.

I find matches. I light the remaining diya in the bedroom. There is still oil, still wick. The flame catches. I carry the diya to the living room. I place it on the table beside the sofa.

I fold my hands. I do not know the prayers. But I speak anyway. Not to God. To her.

"Thank you, Aai. For the poha. For the masks. For the addresses. For the mangalsutra. For making me leave when I did not want to leave. For saving my life."

I pause.

"I will not come back again. You asked me not to. I am keeping my promise."

I open the door. I step into the stairwell. I close the door.

I do not look back.

---

The walk back to the school takes longer. The bag is heavier. Not physically, but in every other way. The cap on my head, the photo in my bag, the knowledge that I am now carrying. The knowledge that every building I pass contains its own version of what I just saw. Families. Covered in sheets. Alone.

I arrive at the school gate at four PM. Tanvi is on the terrace. I can see her silhouette against the sky, watching for me. When she sees me approach, she disappears, and by the time I reach the gate, she is there, opening it, looking at my face.

She does not ask. She reads it in my eyes, the way Aai used to read me, the way anyone who has lived through loss can read it in someone who has just arrived there.

She steps aside. I walk in. The gate closes behind me.

In the kitchen, she has made chai. Real chai, she found a stash of Wagh Bakri tea in the staff room, and the school has powdered milk (the kind used for the mid-day meal, not great, but functional). The chai is hot, sweet (too sweet, she used extra sugar), and as I wrap my hands around the steel glass and feel the warmth seep into my palms, I think about Aai's hands on my hands in the kitchen, the morning she told me the virus was killing half the people it touched.

I drink the chai. Tanvi sits across from me, silent, her own glass untouched.

"Both of them?" she asks finally.

"Both of them."

She nods. She does not say I'm sorry or It'll be okay or any of the things that people say when they do not know what to say. She just nods. Because she knows. Because she has been where I am. Because she sat on this kitchen floor four days ago and told me about her grandmother, her brother, her mother, and her voice did not break because it had already broken.

"Drink your chai," I say.

She drinks her chai.

We sit in the kitchen until the sun goes down and the generator kicks off and the school falls into darkness, and neither of us speaks, and the silence is not empty. It is full, full of everything we have lost, full of the names and faces and voices that we carry, full of the weight of being alive when so many are not.

Tanvi lights a candle. The flame flickers. Shadows dance on the kitchen walls.

"Tomorrow," she says.

"Tomorrow," I agree.

Tomorrow we will wake. We will cook. We will check the gates, fill the water, run the generator. We will survive another day.

That is all. That is everything.