They fold a life like they fold a flag: methodically, with a reverence that feels oddly mechanical, fingers trained to make neat, ceremonial triangles out of everything that once moved and breathed. I watched them do it—Colonel Rajput's hands steady at the center of the ritual—because there was nothing else to do and because I wanted to see how the world chose to compress a man into geometry.
The morning was sharp with cold. A thin braid of smoke rose from the cook tent and caught the sunlight, and everything else seemed to be arranged around it as if the camp itself had been taught how to hold its breath. People drifted into the clearing: officers with their faces practiced into stoicism, medics with eyes too tired to lie, Sepoy Arjun with a face that had been hollowed out by too many nights. They gathered like constellations around a single point: the place where the service would script meaning out of loss.
I walked beside the stretcher because there was a logic to being near the thing you loved until they told you to step back. The body had been prepared again for ceremony—washed, dressed, the clean lines of a uniform laid out like an argument about what to honor. I felt absurdly aware of garments: how fabric can be slid over bone and suddenly make an absence look like purpose.
Colonel Rajput met me before anyone else. He wore the stillness of a man who had learned to stand in public sorrow. His voice, when he used it, was the old cadence of command softened by a tiredness that had become human.
"Kavya," he said, and there was no fanfare. "I thought of stopping the service for a private farewell, but then I thought it proper he be honored by all who swore by him."
"I wanted him small," I said—an absurd, flaring truth. "I wanted the private of him and not the pageantry."
He nodded. "I know. I wanted him to come home without brass and without a map." Then, after a breath, as if deciding to cross a line he had kept fenced for years, he asked, "Will you accept this?"
When he held out the folded flag—sharp edges, the cloth creased into a triangle that seemed, in the light, almost too ceremonious for a poor heart—I took it. The weight of it was heavier than I expected. It felt like a ledger with an inscription that read both praise and demand.
The chaplain's voice was small and measured; words about duty and sacrifice and the sanctity of service rolled across the clearing with the resolute sound of folk who have to make such words into comfort. I listened partly to hear what the state would say about the man I loved—how it would translate his life into a tidy public grammar—and partly to find the private truth tucked inside those official lines.
Sepoy Arjun stood at the front, a small, solid shape. He had not been able to stop crying since the med bay; his grief had the honest edges of youth. He saluted stiffly, and when his face angled toward me there was something like a child's faith in it.
"Bhabhi," he said later, when the formalities blurred and the air felt too thin for more ceremony, "he told us to look after you. He said you're family."
His small, fierce eyes held me in a way that was both comfort and charge. I rested my hand on his shoulder because he needed the proof that someone would keep his promise. He did not need that proof to be elaborate; he needed it to be real. I promised him, quietly, that I would watch for him.
Nandini read something she had written—short lines about a man who loved and was loved in messy, imperfect ways. She did not offer absolution, but she offered truth. She told the crowd, in words blunt and kind, that Shash had asked for silence at times because he believed secrecy would preserve lives. That confession landed like a stone, and then she added, without shame, that the cost of those silences had been paid by the ones who loved him most.
People around me murmured in the way crowds murmur at a tide. Some accepted, some recoiled. There are always those who prefer tidy narratives—heroes folded like banners, villains easy to name. I had spent weeks arguing for slow truth, for paper and chain of custody and for names to be owned. Here, under the sun and among the khaki, the world performed its rites. And yet the little human acts—Arjun's salute, Nandini's reading, Daiwik at the edge with hands folded like a supplicant—were the parts I kept in my pocket.
After the formal rituals—the firing party, the bugle's thin, righteous notes—I found myself alone with the flag and the Colonel. People drifted away; grief in public has a schedule and a clock, and most of the camp returned to small duties as if continuity could be a medicine. I wanted, selfishly, to break the schedule and keep him with me a little longer, but ritual has its ways, and I let it move us.
"Tell me one thing," I said to Colonel Rajput when the last of the photographers had wandered off. "Tell me something of him that you don't say at parades."
He was quiet for a long moment, as if organizing a truth into a sentence hurt him. "He used to steal sugar from the mess," he said at last, and the sound of it made both of us laugh, small and surprised. "Said officers should have a sweet tooth like anyone else."
That laugh was absurd and tender; it was relief like a crack in the morning glass. "He had a ridiculous thing where he read the sky like a book," Colonel Rajput added, softer. "When storms were coming, he'd hum as if he could drive them off."
Those small images—sugar crumbs and hums against storms—were the private coordinates I wanted. They were not banners; they were detail. They made him a person in the way I needed him to stay a person and not a headline.
People asked me to say a few words. Public speaking is not a skill I keep in reserve; my work trained me to make sentences plain. Standing before those faces, with the flag heavy against my palms, I discovered that what I could say was not a long speech but a precise obligation.
"I will not make him a monument," I said, and the sentence surprised me by its clarity. "He asked me not to. I will keep him in memory, not in marble. I will remember his smell, his hands, the way he hated bad tea. I will remember that he loved badly and bravely. That is how I will honor him." My voice wavered, but the saying had an authority I did not pretend to own; it came from the small scrap of handwriting he'd left me: don't make me a monument.
When the crowd thinned, Colonel Rajput took me aside and pressed his palm to the small of my back with a father's worn affection. "I was hard on him," he said suddenly, with a bluntness that sounded like confession. "I thought sons were meant to be sharper than the world requires. I told him once—" He hesitated. "I told him once that tears did not become men. I was wrong. He taught me that part of being a man is being allowed not to be made of stone. I am sorry."
Something loosens in a person when an old authority offers forgiveness for mistakes made in the name of duty. I said the small, honest thing I could: "He was more than a soldier to me. He was human. He taught me mercy in small doses."
The Colonel nodded as if relieved. "If you need anything—medals to be sorted, notices to be read—tell me. I will sign whatever paperwork needs signing. He was my son whether he wore rank or not."
There is a tenderness in old men that has nothing to do with uniform: it is the humility accumulated by ritual grief. For a moment I allowed myself to see him as a father who had been proud and wrong and was trying to make amends in the only language he had.
Later, when the crowds had shuffled away and I was left in the quiet with the flag laid on my lap, Sepoy Arjun came and sat beside me. He had mud on his boots and a look in his eyes like a soldier who was learning, early and brutally, what love costs.
"He used to tell us stories," Arjun said softly. "When he camped with us he'd say: 'If I go, do something annoying with my boots so I know someone remembers my bad habits.' I kept thinking I would later. I don't know how to be annoying now."
"You can start with little things," I said. "Leave his plate on the table without washing it. Put his name in the silly nicknames list. Keep his boots where a dog can chew them." We both had a small laugh that felt ridiculous and tender.
"You will be with us?" Arjun asked, looking at me the way he had at the funeral when he promised to watch over me.
"Yes," I said. "Not as a soldier. As family." The word settled like a promise between us, heavier than any flag.
Nandini sat with me after, her hands wrapped around a small, steaming cup. She had a look of exhausted resolution. "I have been selfish," she said simply. "In keeping things, in thinking my silence was some kind of sacrifice. It wasn't. It was cowardice in a librarian's robes."
"I understand why you did it," I told her. "I also understand why it hurt. We are not absolved by intent."
She leaned forward and took my hand. "I will do whatever you need to let the truth be what it is. I will stand with you as the documents are processed, as people make mistakes public and as we hold them to account."
There is a peculiar comfort in friendship that takes the shape of labor. Nandini meant practical help, not sentimental platitudes. That was precisely what I needed. We would face paper and procedure and grit together.
Daiwik arrived at the clearing finally, boots caked with the muck of the road. His eyes were a furnace of contrition and exhaustion. He approached like a man who had rehearsed humility. He did not attempt to fill silences with speeches. Instead he sat, and we sat, and his presence was a steady, human thing.
"I will do the things we promised," he said quietly. "I will be the person I should have been—no secrecy, no making the choice for you. I will stand by you in public and in private. I will care for the men who loved him."
"I don't know yet what I will do with you," I said. "I don't know whether forgiveness is immediate or earned. But I know this: the truth we chased needs tending. If you want to stay, do it with honesty. Do not make decisions for me again."
He closed his eyes and nodded, and in that small motion there was humility. The kind that must be shown in repeated acts rather than declared in grand gestures.
At the edge of the clearing, when the ritual instruments had been packed and the bugle faded to a memory, a young lieutenant handed me a small sealed envelope marked with official insignia. Inside were documents—formal statements, the forensic report I had demanded weeks ago, the audit summary showing the path of the leak. They were bureaucratic and precise. They were also proof that the world could be made to answer, sometimes, if you asked loudly and with paper.
I did not want vengeance; I wanted truth and accountability. The report showed discrepancies—the administrative node log that had been used by Rathore's cell to extract a report, the contractor number, the forwarding that created a headline before family notification. The language was careful, but the direction was merciless.
I folded the documents back into their envelope as if they were consoling objects. Paper feels both like scalpel and salve. I would use it to make a case, to sit in hearings, to ensure that the men who had turned human life into copy for a morning had to answer. That was the practical thing I could do, and practical things have a way of quieting the jagged edges of sorrow.
When evening came, the grove was empty and moonlit. I walked there alone because the place had become a ledger of us. Lanterns, long cold now, threw soft discs on the ground. I took the folded flag with me and set it on the stump. I pressed my forehead to the cloth and spoke aloud in a voice that shook.
"I will keep you," I said. "Not as a statue, not as a headline. In recipes, in the way I arrange books on my shelf, in the way I teach men to breathe. I will call you by your ridiculous names and swear at your bad tea. I will be angry at the small cruelties that hide in uniforms. I will tell the truth when the world tries to dress your absence for its own appetite."
The wind shifted and a small, dry leaf brushed my cheek like a fingertip. It felt, absurdly, like permission.
I could not promise I would not be lonely. I could not promise the ache would lessen on a schedule. I could promise, however, this: that I would not let his story be written only by men who preferred headlines to human detail. I would tend the papers, the evidence, the facts. And I would tend the small domestic precisions of memory—the coffee mugs, the nick in the pendant, the way he hummed when rain was near.
As I walked back to the camp to join the men who would be my family now—Daiwik, Nandini, Sepoy Arjun, the Colonel—I folded the flag inward again in my mind and placed it where it could not be stolen: inside the particular, stubborn archive of the heart.
When I reached the tent, I sat by the small lamp and opened his letters, one by one. The lines were both balm and knife. Under them, the sentence he had asked me to carve into action shone with old clarity: Be happy. Don't wait.
I set the folded flag on the table beside me and, for the first time since his body had been carried into our world as an absence and a headline, I whispered: "I won't."