I had learned, the hard way, how the world stores bad news: in small envelopes, in the quick angle of a hand, in the way someone clears their throat before they say a name. That morning the sky was glass—unforgiving, all light. The grove looked brittle under fresh frost, each lantern a tiny reluctant star. I had not slept; sleep had become a transaction for other people. I kept returning to the same stupid ritual: reading his letters as if they were talismans, pressing the paper to my face until the ink smelled like him.
Daiwik found me at the stump, without fanfare. He moved like a man who had been walking a corridor in the dark and had finally reached a door he could no longer avoid opening. The thermos he carried was lukewarm and useless against the shape of the thing he held in his chest.
"It's time," he said before I could ask anything. The words were not a sentence; they were a place to which many sentences pointed. "They sent him out this morning. A patrol. A reconnaissance in force."
I felt my fingers go cold around the paper he had left me the night before, the one with the small cramped Forgive me. The note had been both balm and blade; it had lingered like a riddle on my tongue. "He left?" I asked and tried to make my voice steady.
"He volunteered," Daiwik said. There it was: volunteered. I had seen that word before in reports that polished injury into heroism. Volunteering is noble-sounding. Volunteering is also a decision that can be used tidy by those who write citations.
My heart folded in that instant into a very small thing. I knew, in a way that had no language for nuance, that he often chose to go where things were hardest. It was who he was—fault and beauty braided into the same tendon. But knowing does not dilute the ache. It only rearranges it.
"Was it necessary?" I asked.
Daiwik looked at me like someone trying to measure a storm. "They needed his leadership on a narrow pass. The intelligence said there were pockets of enemy scouts probing the line. He said he'd go with a recon element to seal the route."
"Why not someone else?" The question was naive. I already knew the answer: because he was Major Rajput. Because men trust him. Because the army is a machine that keeps asking the same men to be sacrificial in new shapes.
He swallowed. "He said he would rather go than risk men who were younger. He thought his experience—in those conditions—would reduce casualties."
I thought of the boy Sepoy Arjun and the way his eyes glittered when he spoke of Shash as a captain who did not only give orders but stayed in the cold with them. The thought of that boy walking past me because his Captain chose to walk away with the danger as a cloak made my stomach turn.
Daiwik bent his head. "I tried to stop him."
"You tried?" The words were absurd because the truth is you can't stop a man who has already decided how he will be. The interview we had conducted with him the night he returned—the way he'd spoken about duty and silence—was not simply training; it was the grammar he used to write himself brave.
"I argued with him," he said. "I said take a safer route. I said your men need you to rotate. He looked at me, like he always does when he's fighting an internal war, and said: 'If I smoke them with presence, they will follow. If they see my absence, they will panic.'"
"Was he confident?" I asked. I wanted a word I could anchor: confidence, fear, recklessness.
"He was resolved," Daiwik said. "Resolved in a way that was... quiet. I saw him that morning—it was like watching a man recite his vows. He kissed the pendant before he left. He said, 'If I go, I go like this—carrying what I must.'"
That image lodged inside me: him, fingers worrying the silver map pendant until the metal shone in his palm, the nick I'd made there a small signature of us. He had always found ways to fold the personal into the professional until the two were indistinguishable.
They left at dawn. I watched the convoy until the tail lights became a washed-out thread across white. The radio in camp hummed like a distant animal. I tried to busy myself with the clinic, with the men, with small mercies—mending frostbitten toes, teaching breathing techniques to a young corporal who shook every time mortar thundered. Work is a savior and a lie: it keeps you moving so you do not suffocate beneath the gravity of waiting.
Then the call came.
It was a runner at first—bursting into the clinic with the kind of breathless news that makes your hands go cold—and then a voice on the satphone that felt too official to be gentle. Colonel Rajput's tone carried the weight of someone who had practiced a grief like a speech. I listened to the phrase as if it were something to be parsed: "engaged with enemy contact," "remains recovered," "identification pending."
Identification pending. The words are practiced, deliberate, supposed to cushion families from the shape of truth. But the radio had already made its language into headline. There was another pulse in the mess tent, a static of reporters testing a leash.
Daiwik found me again before I could become untethered by panic. He came with two men from the operations team, mud on their boots, their faces paper-thin from lack of sleep. He did not shoot me sympathetic glances; he simply said, "They recovered a body during clearance. They brought it in. The frontline suggests it's him. We're moving to the med bay."
The world pooled and went still like a pond freezing. I wanted to argue the bureaucratic grammar—identification pending; wait for DNA—but there are moments in life when waiting is a cruelty and action a defiance. I went.
The med bay smelled like antiseptic and something that would not be captured with medicine: the hush that comes before a verdict. They kept him in a curtained enclosure, to preserve dignity, to keep the press from seeing what we would soon have to own. When the sanitary curtain drew back and I saw him—lying like a man who had been peeled of life and left with the fragile shell—I felt the smallness of the world redefine itself.
He was not how I had last seen him alive: eyes alert, voice rough with apology. He was still, the bandages pale, a line of dried blood at the temple smudged like a moth's wing. The pendant was still at his throat. I wanted to touch it, to make sure metal was real under my fingers.
I had to step back. The medics spoke in soft tones, giving me the procedural speech: "We will need you to verify visual ID. We'll do the involvement of forensic if you consent." The colonel stood at the doorway, his face a stone that had been wet with salt. He did not look away.
Daiwik was already there. His face had the hollow look of a man who had been to a place he could not forget. He shook his head once, a tiny movement that meant both apology and confession.
"Is this him?" The words were a small plea.
"Yes," I said, because I knew the nick on the pendant, the map's gouge where my fingers had once caught. It was proof and grief all in one. The room seemed to lie down around me. My throat felt like a dried riverbed.
They asked me then if I wanted to see him properly: remove the bandage, confirm the face. They offered the formalities because even war obeys ritual. My head held the image of his living eyes, the sarcastic half-smile he used when he wanted to be exasperating. I moved forward like a sleepwalker.
I lifted the bandage. The wound at his side was cruelly clean in the way that a bullet or shrapnel can be: a hole with edges that refused to sew back life. There were other bruises, the scatter of impact. His face held the draught of someone who had given away everything to keep others able to breathe. I pressed the pads of my fingers against his wrist. No pulse.
A sound escaped me—something between a cry and a broken laugh. I had been preparing for this possibility for so long that in a strange, dreadful way the body now accepted the fact as a medical diagnosis, an entry in a ledger. But the heart does not stop being personal when medicine classifies it; it transmutes the absurdity into a deep, animal sorrow.
Daiwik's shoulders shook. He folded into himself. For a long moment neither of us spoke. The medics took him, then; there are protocols even for corpses: a formal tagging, a sealing, a transfer to forensics. The colonel stood and saluted—his salute for his son had the peculiar reclamation of both father and officer. I felt the world constrict into the smallness of a folded flag.
They asked me for what to do next—death notification, family, funeral rites—and the questions were precise and brutal. Names to call, a next of kin to reach. How do you give someone's life over to forms? How do you fold a human being into a ceremony?
I made the calls I needed to, because a body in the tent demands action and the world is cruelly efficient at turning mourning into process. Sepoy Arjun came, eyes red, and saluted in a way that made muscle memory and loyalty look like prayer. Nandini held me like a sister could hold another who had been bereft.
But there was one motion none of them could perform for me: to reconcile the man I loved with the way the world had been allowed to make him into a headline days ago before I could know he lived. Rage rose then—not the hot kind but a dull, persistent grief that hardened into resolve. The leak that made him missing had been arrogance made into a story. Now the story had returned, all too final.
They let me sit with him alone for a while, the official protocol softened by human compassion. I sat on the ward stool and read his handwriting out loud to his folded hands, because it felt like the only thing I still had the right to do. I read the shame of his unsent poetry, the small domestic promises, the line he'd inked after a night of frost: You are my oxygen. My voice broke and yet the words stood like tiny pillars, stubborn with truth.
Daiwik sat on the floor beside me, his head bowed, hands clasped. He kept saying, in a voice shredded by sleep and guilt: "I told them. I told them the truth. I failed you. I failed him." The cadence of his confession sounded like a litany of a man who needed to be absolved.
"You did what you thought was right," I said, because there is grace even in betrayal. I had learned that in clinics: people do terrible things when they think they are saving someone else. It does not excuse them; it humanizes them. I needed to humanize him, and perhaps that softened the being I could be.
"Forgive me," Daiwik said, voice small. "Forgive me for the silence."
Forgiveness is not a single act; it is a landscape one walks through over years. I could not grant it then; I could not fully deny it. Instead I pressed my hand flat against his knuckles in a gesture that meant both a promise to reckon and a refusal to be cruel without cause. A second later I rested my forehead on the cold bandage covering what had once been warm flesh, and let myself finally cry in a sound so deep it felt like it might be the last thing I needed to do.
They prepared the body for the final courier, for the formal rites that would follow: the folding of the flag, the presentation of medals, the careful placement of the pendant against his heart. There is something ritualistic about soldier death—ceremony that both honors and sanitizes, a way to make a man into a symbol. I thought of his poem that said not to make him a monument; irony is a cruel companion.
The funeral was held soon after things were processed—no long, slow wakes, because the world had to keep moving. Families gathered; the colonel stood with the stiff dignity of a man who has known this country's costs. Sepoy Arjun wept openly. Nandini read a passage that made my chest ache with both memory and rage. Daiwik stood at the edge, the man who had both kept secrets and who now did more than anyone to tell the truth. He had a look on him like someone who had listened to the whole continent of consequences and chosen to be honest about them.
They folded the flag with practiced hands, and Colonel Rajput presented it to me like an offering and like a question. "For the family," he said, voice breaking. I took it—it was a weight and a relief at once. In that cloth I felt the traces of him: the grease my fingers had once found on his collar, the sleep lines on his cheek. The flag was both mine and not mine; it represented a life the state would now narrate.
People said things—about bravery, about sacrifice, about the duty that men like him wore like second skins. The radio reporters read official lines that had been scrubbed of mess, of dirt, of the messy truth that people like Aditya like to smooth. I listened and felt the bile of injustice rise: the city had been given a tidy story once—"MIA"—and then that story had found its fatal punctuation. The public would parade a grief that had been netted by others; the private grief would remain, raw and monstrous, in my bones.
That night, after the tent quieted and the last of the officers had gone to paperwork and to sleep, Daiwik and I sat in the grove. The lanterns swung slowly. The wind moved like a hand through the bare branches. He reached into his pocket and produced something small: a scrap of paper folded thin.
He pushed it into my palm. "I found this on him," he said.
I unfolded it with fingers that trembled—not because I feared what it held but because the act of opening words from him had become a liturgy. The handwriting across the page was cramped and smaller than his usual loops—he had written in haste or in a pocket or under pressure. The lines read, broken and tender:
If you ever have to bury me with words, bury me with truth. Do not let them make me a fable. Live. Live fully. Be angry. Be loud. Be stubborn. Don't wait for me.
The last line had a little smudge where his thumb had perhaps run unwillingly across the ink. I pressed the paper to my face and felt the rawness in my chest untangle into a kind of obedient grief.
Daiwik sat down heavily beside me. "He asked me to give this to you," he said. "If anything... he asked me to tell you not to wait."
I let the paper fall into my palm and, for the first time since the med bay, I felt something like a map re-inked in me. The mercy of a man who had both protected a mission and protected a lie lay on that scrap. It was forgiveness and command, apology and instruction. He had meant to shield me; he had also wanted me to live the way he felt unable to guarantee for himself.
We sat in the cold until dawn came like a slow, forgiving hand. The world would now set about telling us what this meant—papers, press lines, honors—but under that machinery there was a private ledger that I would carry: the small scrap of his handwriting, the pendant's nick, the memory of his voice apologizing for a silence that had cost everything.
I folded the note into my journal and put it where his letters lived. Outside, the mountains held their patient indifference. Men in uniforms walked away and returned to schedules. I wrapped my shawl tight, more against the world's small cruelties than the wind, and whispered the only vow I had at that moment: I will be loud enough for both of us.