Chapter 9: Vihan

# Chapter 9: Vihan

## Naye Log

Day 18. The school has a population of three.

The third person arrived yesterday, a man, maybe fifty, who walked up to the gate at dusk and stood there, swaying, looking at the building with the dazed expression of someone who has been walking for a very long time and has forgotten why.

Tanvi saw him first. She was on the terrace, doing her evening watch. The ritual she has established of scanning the streets as the sun goes down, noting any movement, any lights, any sign that the world beyond our school walls still has a pulse. She came down the stairs fast, her chappals slapping the concrete, and found me in the kitchen.

"Someone at the gate."

"Man or woman?"

"Man. Old. Looks exhausted."

"Armed?"

"I cannot tell. He is just standing there."

We went to the gate together. The man was on the other side, his fingers wrapped around the bars, his face pressed between them. He was thin. Not skinny-thin but collapsed-thin, the kind of thin that happens when a body has been burning muscle for fuel because there is nothing else left to burn. His clothes were filthy. A once-white shirt, now grey-brown with sweat and road dust. Trousers that may have been formal at some point but were now torn at one knee. Chappals held together with what appeared to be electrical tape.

His eyes were clear. Not fevered, not glassy, not bloodshot. Clear and brown and exhausted.

"Please," he said. His voice was hoarse, cracked. "I have not eaten in three days."

I looked at his hands. They gripped the bars and nothing else. I looked at his eyes. They looked at me and nothing else.

"Open the gate," I said to Tanvi.

She hesitated. One second. Two. Then she unlatched it.

---

His name is Sudhir Gokhale. He is fifty-three. He was an accountant at a firm in Deccan Gymkhana. One of those small chartered accountancy firms that occupy the first floor of old Pune buildings and handle the tax returns of local businesses and the annual audits of housing societies.

He tells us his story over khichdi and chai, sitting in the kitchen, eating with the same desperate speed that Tanvi ate on her first day. His wife, Leela, died on Day 3. His son, who works, worked, in Hyderabad for TCS, has not been reachable since the networks went down. His daughter is in Canada, studying at the University of Toronto. He does not know if Canada has been affected. He does not know if she is alive.

"The last message I received from her was a WhatsApp voice note," he says, holding his chai glass with both hands, the warmth of it seeming to steady him. "She said, Baba, we are hearing about some virus in India. Are you okay? That was eleven days ago. I replied. I do not know if it was delivered."

The voice note. The undelivered reply. The unanswered question. I think of Shlok's voice note that never finished downloading on my phone. The grey ticks. The silence.

"How did you find us?" Tanvi asks.

"I have been walking. Since Leela, " He pauses. Swallows. "Since Leela passed, I could not stay in the flat. I have been moving from place to place. Sleeping in cars, in shops, wherever I could find shelter. I saw your lights two nights ago, from the main road. I was too weak to walk here then. I rested. Walked again today."

"You walked from Deccan?"

"From Deccan, yes. It is maybe three kilometres. But three kilometres takes four hours when you have not eaten in three days and your legs feel like they are made of chana dal."

I almost smile at this. Sudhir Kaka — I have already started thinking of him as Kaka, the Marathi honorific for an uncle, because he is the right age and the right temperament and because calling a fifty-three-year-old man by his first name feels wrong in a way that transcends the apocalypse — has a dry, self-deprecating humour that surfaces despite everything.

"You can stay," I say. "We have food. We have water. We have space."

He looks at me. Then at Tanvi. His eyes are wet.

"Thank you," he says. "I did not think, I was not sure if anyone would,"

"Eat your khichdi, Kaka," says Tanvi. "We can talk later."

He eats. The gratitude on his face is not the gratitude of a polite gesture. It is the gratitude of a man who had genuinely accepted the probability of starving to death and has just been told that he will not.

---

Sudhir Kaka turns out to be useful in ways I did not anticipate. He is an accountant, which means he thinks in systems, in numbers, in ledgers. Within two days of arriving, he has created an inventory spreadsheet, handwritten, on the back of a school register, because we have no computers, that tracks every item we have: kilos of rice remaining, litres of diesel, litres of water in the tank (estimated based on tank dimensions and daily consumption), candles, matches, medicines, everything.

"You are consuming approximately 400 grams of rice per person per day," he tells us on his second morning, sitting at a desk in the staff room that he has claimed as his office, the register open before him, a stubby pencil in his hand. "With three people, that is 1.2 kilos per day. You have approximately 47 kilos remaining. That gives us 39 days of rice."

"Thirty-nine days," I repeat.

"Plus the dal, the atta, the oil. In total, if we maintain current rations, we have food for approximately fifty-five to sixty days. Two months."

"And then?"

"And then we need more food." He taps the pencil on the register. "We should start looking now. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. Other survivors, if there are others, will be thinking the same thing."

Tanvi nods. She has been saying this since Day 10. "The D-Marts and Big Bazaars are already looted. But there are smaller shops, kirana stores, grocery shops in residential areas, that people might have missed."

"Or we grow food," says Sudhir Kaka.

Tanvi and I look at him.

"The school has a garden," he says. "I saw it this morning — a patch of land behind the sports ground. The soil looks decent. March is planting season for several vegetables — tomatoes, chillies, onions, spinach. If we start now, we could have a harvest in six to eight weeks."

"Do we have seeds?" I ask.

"We have potatoes that are sprouting. We have onions that are sprouting. Plant those, and in two months you have more potatoes and more onions. As for seeds. We look. Every kirana store, every nursery, every garden. Seeds are small and light. People running for their lives do not grab seed packets."

That accountant, it turns out, also knows how to farm. Or at least, he knows the theory. He grew up on a farm in Satara district, before his father sold the land and moved the family to Pune for education, the eternal Maharashtrian migration from soil to office.

"My father always said that the one skill that matters is the skill of growing food," Sudhir Kaka says. "Everything else, accounting, engineering, IT, is built on top of that. Remove the food, and all the spreadsheets in the world will not save you."

His father was right. We are three people in a school with sixty days of food, and the knowledge that food can be grown is suddenly more valuable than any degree from any university.

---

We start the garden on Day 20.

This patch behind the sports ground is approximately ten metres by ten metres; a hundred square metres of Pune earth, red-brown, clay-heavy, the kind of soil that bakes hard in the sun and turns to mud in the rain. Sudhir Kaka examines it with the critical eye of a man who has handled soil before.

"Needs work," he says. "But it is workable. We need to break it up, add organic matter, create beds."

"What organic matter?"

"Compost. Food waste. Leaves. The school grounds are full of fallen leaves. neem, peepal, gulmohar. We collect them, pile them, let them decompose. In the meantime, we dig."

We dig. With the school's gardening tools — two spades, a khurpi (the small hand-tool for weeding), and a pickaxe that takes two of us to swing, we spend four hours breaking the baked earth. The work is brutal. The sun beats down — Pune in late March, the temperature touching 37 degrees by noon, the air dry and hot and carrying the dust of the unpaved sports ground. Blisters form on my palms within the first hour, angry red welts that burst and weep and sting every time I grip the spade handle.

Tanvi works beside me, silent and efficient. She digs with a rhythm that suggests she has done physical labour before — maybe at her uncle's workshop, maybe somewhere else. She does not complain about the heat or the blisters. She just digs.

Sudhir Kaka directs. He cannot dig, his arms are too thin, his body too depleted from three days without food, but he walks the perimeter, points out where the beds should go, explains the spacing, the depth, the orientation. "Beds running north-south, so they get maximum sun. Each bed one metre wide, with paths between them so you can reach the centre without stepping on the soil. The soil does not like being stepped on."

By sunset, we have three beds prepared. The soil is rough, clumpy, but broken. Tomorrow we will plant.

---

Day 21. The planting.

We cut the sprouting potatoes into chunks. Each chunk containing at least one eye, the small bud from which a new plant will grow. Six potatoes become eighteen pieces. Eighteen pieces go into the first bed, buried ten centimetres deep, spaced thirty centimetres apart.

The sprouting onions, five of them, their green shoots already reaching for light, go into the second bed. Sudhir Kaka shows us how to separate the bulbs gently, how to plant them root-side down, how to water them without flooding.

The third bed remains empty, waiting for seeds we do not yet have.

"We water in the evening," says Sudhir Kaka. "Not in the morning. The sun will evaporate the water before the roots can drink. Evening water stays in the soil overnight. The plants drink while they sleep."

"Plants sleep?" says Tanvi.

"Everything sleeps. Even accountants."

I carry water from the terrace tank, down three flights, across the corridor, out the back door, to the garden. Four trips. Sixteen litres. My shoulders burn, my back aches, and the blisters on my palms scream with every grip on the bucket handle. But when the water darkens the soil, and the tiny green shoots of the onion plantings stand upright in their new beds, glistening with moisture, I feel something that has been absent for three weeks.

Neither happiness nor hope Something more practical. The feeling that an investment has been made. That the future, however uncertain, has been acknowledged. That we have placed something in the ground and asked it to grow, and the asking is itself an act of faith in tomorrow.

---

Day 23. Two new arrivals.

They come together, a brother and sister, Gaurav and Maitreyi Kulkarni. Gaurav is nineteen, a second-year B.Tech student at COEP (the engineering college that Baba always wanted me to attend). Maitreyi is fifteen, a Class 10 student at a school in Shivajinagar. They are from a joint family in Sadashiv Peth, the old Pune neighbourhood, the peths that are the city's historical heart, the narrow lanes and wadas and mandirs that existed before the IT parks and the malls and the glass towers of Hinjewadi.

Their entire family, parents, grandparents, an uncle and aunt, three cousins, is dead. All of them. The virus tore through their wada like a fire through dry grass, starting with the grandfather (who was 78 and diabetic and stood no chance) and ending with the youngest cousin (who was eight and should have stood every chance but did not).

Gaurav and Maitreyi survived. They do not know why. They showed no symptoms. They were exposed, they lived in the same house, breathed the same air, ate from the same kitchen, but the virus passed them over, the way a flood passes over a hilltop, and they are left standing while everything around them is submerged.

"We think it is genetic," Gaurav says. He is tall, thin, with wire-rimmed glasses that sit slightly crooked on his nose — one arm of the frame is bent, and he has not bothered to fix it. His voice is precise, analytical — the voice of an engineering student who is trying to process the unprocessable by turning it into a problem set. "Some people are immune. Maybe five to ten percent of the population, based on what I have observed. The virus does not affect them at all."

"Based on what you have observed?" Tanvi asks, an eyebrow raised.

"I have been keeping notes." He pulls a small notebook from his back pocket. The pages are dense with handwriting, observations, dates, tallies. "In our lane alone, fifty-three people lived. Forty-eight are dead or missing. Five survived, me, Maitreyi, and three others who left before I could talk to them. That is a 9.4% survival rate."

"That matches the global estimates," Sudhir Kaka says from his desk. "The WHO, before the WHO went silent, was estimating an 85-95% mortality rate among the infected, with approximately 10-15% of the population appearing to be naturally immune."

"Wait," I say. "If ten to fifteen percent of Pune's population is immune, that is. "

"Seven lakh to ten lakh people," Gaurav finishes. "Theoretically. Out of seven million. But many of the immune will die anyway; from starvation, from violence, from accidents, from other diseases that a collapsed healthcare system cannot treat. The actual number of survivors six months from now will be much lower."

"How much lower?" Maitreyi asks. She has been quiet until now. a small, dark-haired girl who sits with her knees drawn to her chest and watches everything with eyes that are too old for fifteen. She reminds me of myself two weeks ago, sitting on the Spiderman bed, staring at the ceiling fan, trying to understand.

"I do not know," says Gaurav. "But we are better off here than alone. Five is better than two."

Five. We are five now. Two teenagers (Tanvi and me), one younger teenager (Maitreyi), one engineering student (Gaurav), and one accountant (Sudhir Kaka). Five people in a school designed for four hundred.

That school is becoming something. I do not have a word for it yet, not a community, not a family, not a camp. Something in between. Something that exists because the alternative is dying alone, and dying alone is the one thing that every human being, in every era, in every catastrophe, refuses to accept.

Tanvi assigns rooms. Gaurav takes the maths classroom (he says the whiteboards are useful for calculations). Maitreyi takes the art room (I show her my charcoal drawings; she studies them in silence, then picks up a brush and starts painting, and does not stop for three hours). Sudhir Kaka stays in the staff room.

The inventory is updated. The food calculation is revised. Fifty-five days for three becomes thirty-three days for five.

Thirty-three days. The number is a wall, and it is approaching.

"We need to find more food," says Sudhir Kaka, tapping his pencil on the register.

Everyone nods. Everyone knows.

Tomorrow, we go hunting. Not for animals. For groceries.

The last grocery run of the old world begins.