Kavya

There's something vulgar about sunlight on the day you bury someone you love.

I stare at the sun-drenched shamiana flapping gently in the cantonment wind, its cream-colored silk swaying like it's drunk. Plastic chairs scrape against gravel as uniformed men try to make sense of loss in straight lines and salutes. Somewhere near the front, a bugle slices the silence—long, sharp, and final. I flinch.

This is not how grief is supposed to look.

It's neat. Decorated. Smelling of jasmine and brass polish.

Shashwat would've hated it.

He would've smoked through the prayers, muttered something cynical about "hero worship," and rolled his frostbitten thumb over that old silver coin like a talisman. He always said real grief didn't wear medals. Real grief sat quietly on your chest at 3 a.m., tasted like rust and regret.

And yet, here we are. A memorial for a man who isn't even here.

Because the truth is: there was no body.

Just his name etched onto a plaque, his last known coordinates, and a folded national flag sent home in a bulletproof box like some twisted consolation prize.

Major Shashwat Vikram Rajput. 8th Gurkha Rifles. Missing, presumed dead.

My fingers clutch the envelope I've brought—creased at the corners, water-stained from where I held it too long. It's his handwriting on the front. All caps. Angled. Controlled rage in cursive form. It had arrived a week after the Army declared him MIA, tucked inside a dog-eared journal he must've kept hidden in his rucksack. No address. No date. Just one line on the first page:

If I die before you read this, burn every word. Except the ones you remember.

I couldn't burn it. I tried.

God, I tried.

"Ma'am?"

The voice startles me. A young officer—Captain-something—stands beside me, awkward in his condolence tone.

"Would you like to speak a few words before the wreath-laying begins?"

I look past him, toward the crowd gathered under the shade. Colonels and cadets, widows and wives. Daiwik stands stiffly near the podium, jaw locked. He hasn't looked at me all morning. Not since he arrived with Nandini—his sister, my colleague, and the woman who once slept with the man I'm mourning.

You see why I didn't sit with the family.

I nod silently at the captain. He steps back, relieved.

I walk up alone.

No script. No speech.

Just the hum of wind and memory.

"My name is Dr. Kavya Malhotra. Clinical psychologist. I've spent most of my adult life trying to understand grief," I begin, voice steady despite the tremble inside me. "But I never understood it the way I did the day I realized I was waiting for a man who'd never come home."

A pause. They expect tears. I don't give them that. Not yet.

"I met Major Shashwat Rajput two years ago, during a PTSD workshop for returning officers. He was late. Belligerent. Frostbitten. And furious that I even existed."

A low ripple of polite laughter, though it isn't funny.

"He called therapy 'mental gymnastics' and told me soldiers don't need shrinks. I told him emotional numbness isn't bravery. He called me a civilian know-it-all with a savior complex."

I exhale sharply. "We fought. A lot. But somewhere between those arguments, we started... listening. To each other."

My voice cracks.

"He never gave me promises. He gave me silence. And in that silence, I found something louder than love."

There it is. That jagged thing in my throat. I reach for the paper in my pocket but don't unfold it.

Instead, I whisper, "There are men who die once, and then there are men like Shashwat, who die a little every time they see their country bleed. He carried every loss inside him like shrapnel. And still... he kept going."

I look toward the wreaths, toward the flame that crackles softly in the brass bowl.

"Major Rajput wasn't a hero because he died. He was a hero because he lived despite wanting not to."

A long silence.

Then, I step down.

I do not wait for applause. I do not look at Daiwik. I just walk until the voices blur and the earth feels real under my boots.

Later, I find myself near the barrack garden—behind the officer's mess. It's quiet. Only the sound of dry leaves scratching against flagstones. I sink onto a stone bench, my back protesting from hours of upright decorum. My palms ache from clenching.

This is where we kissed once. Just once.

Where he had pressed his scarred fingers to my cheek like he wasn't sure if I was real. Where he whispered, "If you're a hallucination, don't go. Let me rot with you."

He had frostbite then. His fingertips were numb.

Mine still remember the shape of his sadness.

"Thought you'd be here," a voice says.

I don't turn around. "You always find me when I don't want to be found, DK."

Captain Daiwik Khanna walks up, shoulders squared, eyes rimmed red. "That was a beautiful eulogy."

"I didn't write it for you."

"I know."

He sits beside me but doesn't touch me. We've stopped pretending that comfort means proximity.

"You hate me now, don't you?" he asks softly.

I finally look at him. His glasses are fogged, his stethoscope looped in his pocket like an apology. "Hate you?" I scoff. "I envy you."

That stuns him. "Why?"

"Because you got to say goodbye. I got a package and a silence so loud it's still ringing."

"I didn't know he'd—"

"Stop lying," I snap, voice cold. "You knew. You always knew. You're the one who stitched him up after that LoC ambush. You watched him bleed and still let him go back."

Daiwik's voice breaks. "He begged me, Kavya. Begged. Said he had to finish it."

"And what did you say?"

He exhales. "I told him... if he came back, I'd make sure you were waiting."

I laugh. It's not a kind sound. "Well, you failed."

"No," he whispers. "He failed us."

That night, I dream of Siachen.

Of ice melting into skin, of dog tags rusting in blood. In the dream, Shashwat is standing in his olive-green uniform, barefoot, eyes hollow. He doesn't speak.

He just hands me the silver coin.

And walks into the blizzard.

By the time I stepped out into the dim hallway of the officers' mess, the light had changed—golden no more, just tired and sepia, like the last pages of a burned book.

Captain Daiwik had disappeared. I didn't go looking for him.
Instead, I followed the distant murmur of footsteps and fell into a quiet rhythm of my own. The air smelled of wet pine, melting snow, and smoke that clung too long to memory.

I found Colonel Vikram Rajput standing under the war memorial arch, a glass of rum in his hand like always.
He was polishing a medal—not his son's, but his own. I wondered how many times he'd done this ritual: touch the past to numb the present.

"You didn't wear black," he said without looking up.

"I didn't think I had to."

"You didn't," he muttered, pausing. "He hated black. Said it swallowed color."

I stood silently, unsure what to say to a man who had buried two sons.

He finally turned. His face was lined with more than time—it bore trenches of loss that had been carved without mercy. One of Shashwat's storm-gray eyes stared back at me from his left socket. The resemblance was haunting.

"I don't cry at funerals," he said, voice sharp, "but today I couldn't stop."

My throat tightened. "He would've hated this service."

"He would've hated how many people claimed to know him." The colonel pulled something from his coat pocket and held it out. "He wanted you to have this. Told me once... if he didn't come back."

It was a coin. Tarnished, old, frostbitten.
The edges were warped like they'd been clenched in a dying man's fist. The ridges bit into my skin when I touched it. It wasn't just a keepsake. It was a wound pressed into metal.

"He carried it into Siachen. Called it his lucky coin," the Colonel said. "Gave it to Rishi before his last op. We found it in Shashwat's pocket when they brought the body down."

My fingers closed around the metal, cold and stubborn like memory.

"Rishi died at nineteen. Shashwat was twenty-three when he stopped smiling," he said. "He wore silence like a second skin after that."

I nodded, blinking fast.

"I made them both into soldiers," he said hoarsely. "And then I survived them."

He didn't wait for my comfort. Just placed a folded, yellowed page on the bench beside me and walked away.

I waited until he was gone before I unfolded the sheet.

A crayon drawing.
Shaky letters: "My Papa is brave. My Bhaiya is my hero."
Three stick figures under a brown mountain, with a sky colored in jagged blue strokes.
The smallest figure had a red scarf. Shashwat must've been seven or eight.

That's when I broke.

Not dramatically.
Not sobbing.

Just... quietly.

Like breath that doesn't realize it's leaving the body until it's gone.

Later, I sat on the back steps of the barracks, where Shashwat used to sit on Sundays, scribbling notes in that tattered leather journal he never let me read.

He used to say: "Kavya, some thoughts aren't meant to survive sunlight."

But I remember one night, during a temporary ceasefire lull, when he was restless. The snow hadn't fallen yet, and the stars looked like bullet holes in the sky.

We'd sat in near-darkness, drinking chai brewed too bitter by an overzealous jawan. I had teased him for his frown, asked him if he ever wrote anything happy.

He passed me a paper napkin.

A single line scrawled in pencil:

"Even the mountains bend when they break enough."

He'd snatched it back before I could read it twice.

That was the night he told me about Rishi.

"He was the funny one," Shashwat had said, voice flat. "Didn't want to join the army. Wanted to be a musician. Played tabla like it was his heartbeat."

I'd stared at him, waiting.

"He died in Kupwara. Got hit by a sniper while rescuing an injured boy."
His voice had cracked at the end, barely.

I'd reached for his hand. He'd let me hold it—just that once.

"I told myself I'd never love anything fragile again," he'd whispered. "Then you happened."

Back in the present, I heard footsteps behind me. A familiar perfume—jasmine and sarcasm.

"Nandini," I murmured without turning.

"You always did like the dramatic angles."

She sat beside me without invitation. "Lit a candle for him," she said. "Not that it matters now. Ashes don't feel warmth."

Her eyes were sharper than her tone. She never softened grief; she sliced through it.

"I didn't come for your comfort," I said.

"Didn't expect you did."

We stared out at the darkened training grounds.

After a long silence, she spoke again. "You know he kissed you like he owed you his breath?"

My shoulders tensed.

"Don't look at me like that. I'm not trying to take him back. I already did, once—before you ever knew his name."

My heartbeat slowed to a crawl.

"You were with him?"

"Briefly. Back when we were both stationed in Leh. It didn't last," she said, plucking at the peeling paint on the bench. "He left before I could fall deeper. Then came the glacier. Then came you."

I swallowed hard. "Why tell me now?"

"Because ghosts don't like secrets. And because you deserve to know—he wasn't perfect."

"I already knew that," I whispered. "And I still stayed."

Nandini nodded. "Then maybe you're braver than any of us."

She stood, brushing imaginary snow off her jeans.

"Kavya," she said softly, "he loved you in ways that scared him. That's why he kept trying to die before he could disappoint you."

Later that night, back in my apartment, I sat cross-legged on the floor with Shashwat's journal on my lap. I hadn't opened it in months. I was afraid of what it might contain.

This time, I didn't hesitate.

I turned to the final page. One he'd marked with a corner fold.

"If I return, let me be enough. If I don't, remember me less as a soldier, more as the man who bled in silence beside you."

Tears slipped past my defenses.

That line didn't sound like goodbye. It sounded like surrender.

I closed the journal and pressed it to my chest.

He never said "I love you" out loud.

But somehow... I'd always heard it anyway.