The morning of the wedding arrived like a rumor — quiet at first, then impossible to ignore. Light bled through the sheer curtain of my bedroom like a shy confession. I lay still a long time, feeling the ragged shape of sleep peel off me in thin layers. Outside, the city was awake and polite, as if nothing monstrous had happened in the high places and the radio had not once rewritten my life.
A wedding is a strange kind of violence. It demands you file your grief into a neat envelope and present it like a gift. It asks you to be visible in a way sorrow resists. For weeks I'd told myself ceremonies could be containers for both celebration and mourning. Now, standing in the soft yellow of morning, I felt those containers thin as paper.
Daiwik was already up when I staggered into the small sitting room of the flat we'd been using for the preparations. He was calm in the way he had grown since the audit — steadier, more careful with his hands. He had a cup of tea waiting for me on the table, and for a moment I wanted nothing more than to take it and drink until the edges of my world softened.
"You're quiet," he said, watching me like someone who was measuring the weight of what I didn't say.
"That's because I'm practicing," I said, an old, bitter joke that meant: I'm learning how to make myself small for the crowd. He laughed, softly, the sound a small, private thing between us, and I hated him for the comfort connected to it.
"You don't have to do this for me," he said before I could reach for the label of sacrifice that had been dangling over our heads like bad weather. "If you don't want to—"
"I know you think I owe you something," I cut in, and the words came out sharper than intended. "But we both know this isn't something you earned by being loyal. It's something we are doing because the world asks for tidy answers."
He flinched, not sure whether I had accused him or us. "I didn't ask you to do this for me. I asked because I want to be with you. I promised to stand in truth. I will do whatever makes you feel safe."
Outside, the car honked in a polite, impatient way. Guests were arriving. There would be food and flowers and photographs and the kind of smiling that lines the mouths of people who do not have to go home at night and rename a photograph as the only thing that remains of someone.
I allowed the woman from the wedding shop to fuss with the hem of my saree, to pin the pleats so that they sat like a line of obedient waves. My hands shook when they adjusted the silver map pendant at my throat; I kept feeling its cold, familiar weight as if my fingers could anchor something that could otherwise slip through the world's fingers. The pendant had been returned as evidence, then returned again as a possession I refused to relinquish. It lay there close to my sternum, a pebble compass.
Colonel Rajput visited in a kind of official way — present but reserved — a man who manages the public face of loss with the same muscle he used to polish medals. He had come to offer me what assistance he could: an army officer's blessing thinly disguised as paternal guilt. "You don't have to go through with this if your heart isn't in it," he said, once he thought no microphones monitored the room. The private words between us were less public than the rest of the day; they were the most honest.
"It's not for you to decide," I told him. "Nor for me to do it for anyone else."
Of course, the politics of grief are never just private. There were delegations and condolences, and people whose eyes slid across my face like accountants — checking numbers, noting duty done, interest recorded. Sepoy Arjun arrived early, hat clutched in his hands, eyes disturbingly red for a man so young. He was earnest enough to make me ache. He saluted in a way that placed our small world into the larger machinery of loyalty, and for a second I wanted to tell him not to be brave for me.
Nandini arrived with a purposefully neutral face and twenty small ministrations: lipstick that wouldn't smear, a bindi that stuck like a punctuation to my forehead. She sat with me while the makeup woman worked and whispered uselessly sensible things, the kind of counsel that comes from someone who has seen the human body in ways most people avoid.
"You know it's okay if you change your mind," she said, the words soft. She meant it as a kindness, but part of me heard the echo — the life she had almost stolen from me in confession. We had been through the salvage and the confession and the thin, fragile re-weaving. There had been no simple wound in any of it.
When the florist arrived with a last-minute bouquet — wild jasmine threaded with sprigs of marigold — I found my fingers moving almost of their own accord. I arranged the flowers and then placed a single small blossom inside my saree, beneath the pendant, as if the plant could perfume the air with a memory that was not only of him.
News photographers were respectful at first; they had been coached by the colonel to give space. But the press is hungry and polite until it is ravenous. I moved like someone who had been practicing being a face for a decade — eyes attentive, laugh a fraction too bright, voice a measured instrument. Daiwik's hand brushed mine between rituals, a tether I could not let go of even if I wanted to.
The ceremony was to be modest — not a parade but not a private hush either. A few elders, a tidy set of friends, the priests with their practiced liturgy. It felt all wrong to perform formulas when the truth undergirding them had been ripped to shreds by the last few weeks. Yet there is also a power in ritual — it gives permission to the community to be what it must be: reverent, organized, forgiving.
As guests took their places and the priest began the opening chants, a runner slipped into the side hall and handed me an envelope. I did not recognize the courier. He avoided my gaze and left quickly, as if the handoff were a thing that should not be witnessed. The envelope was thick, the paper soft with travel. The script on the front was a hand I knew like the ridges on my palm.
My throat closed the way it does when a bad memory tries to become a single, quick syllable. I slid my thumb over the stamp and felt the press of ink as if it were a pulse. A letter at this hour meant one of two things: it was either a kindness from someone who loved me and could not stand to be far, or it was a cruelty — a message timed to force a choice.
I excused myself from the line of guests with a practice bow and the kind of small smile that keeps the world from noticing how urgent your legs have suddenly become. The inner room where I opened the envelope smelled faintly of incense from the altar. The paper slid open in my fingers, and the handwriting inside made my chest do that animal thing again.
It was his handwriting. The loops were tighter than they used to be, the ink a little smeared as if written with cold fingers. He had written in his usual stoic economy, and yet even his small economy could clutch at a heart.
Kavya,
If this reaches you on a day I knew you would dress like a queen, know I wanted that for you — even when I was a man who lived in ridges and maps. I am sorry I asked you to be small for the sake of my fears.
Do not make me the reason you stay still. I have been selfish in asking silence; I was trying to buy safety with absence and I was clumsy and cruel and a coward. Forgive me for the part of me that could not reconcile love with orders.
Here is what I want you to do: live. Find a way to be loud in the world. Laugh like someone who belongs to morning. If you marry, marry for sun and for someone who brings you tea in the morning and returns every night. If you don't marry, then make sure your life is full of people who insist you breathe. Be not a monument, but a person who keeps living. I loved you in a way that would have broken the world to hold. Do not wait for me; be impatient with your own fears.
Be happy. Don't wait.
—S
The paper slipped from my fingers. For a heartbeat I could not hear the priest's voice, the chanting gliding across the courtyard like a knife. The words had the power to both free and bind me. They were a benediction and a command, an ancient armor with a crack down the center that let the wind wield itself without shame. He had asked me — in the only way a soldier who knows how to die could ask — to go on living.
I pressed the page to my chest as if I could make the letter into a living thing. It was not the first time he had told me to live. He had left me smaller notes, sketches, and the poetry he never sent. But the timing of this one — on the morning I was to be married — felt like either mercy or cruelty. Which would I allow it to be?
Daiwik stood in the doorway when I re-entered the ceremony. He did not look surprised to see me rattle; he had expected a runner. His face held the taut patience of a man who has been made to wait. He stepped forward and took my hand when prayer ended, and the contact was both gentle and necessary. I felt a small earthquake beneath my feet: his palm warm, my fingers cool.
The vows were a sequence of small, exact words. When the priest spoke about duty and fidelity and the sacrament of living as one, something in me recoiled. I kept hearing Shash's handwriting say Be happy. Don't wait. It was as if two separate voices were writing the authoring of my life at once, tugging the page between them.
Daiwik's promise was simple and fine. He promised to be present, to come home, to honor my work and my grief. His voice quavered only once, the moment his eyes found mine and I saw the toll of the last months in the corners. There is a sort of holiness in his promise — not because it erases what happened, but because it is made in the aftermath of confession and effort. He had told the truth in the inquiry, baring the secret he had held. He had brought names to light. Now he asked me for my life in return.
At the exchange of rings, my hand shook as I slipped the thin band onto his finger. The metal was small and warm, a precise instrument of commitment. It did not bind me to forgetting; it was merely a new fact in my life. The priests chanted as if their syllables could stitch a seam around the newly formed family. I tried to answer to their rhythm.
After the ceremony, there were photographs. Cameras clicked with the polite zeal of those who document history. People smiled, and I smiled back with the trained grace of someone who knows how to make faces for the world. But smiles, like armor, hide more than they reveal.
Later, when guests had drifted and the last of the elders had been served and sent away, Daiwik and I sat in a corner of the hall. Somebody put a platter of sweet rice in front of us and the steam rose like a small blessing. He reached for my hand — a different kind of tether now; not secrecy but a shared decision. I could feel his relief and his fear both. He had wanted this not to be a consolation prize but a life. I had wanted it to be a life because I was exhausted and because part of me wanted to be saved from the relentless solitude Shash's death had opened up.
"You read it," he said quietly. He did not sound angry; he sounded like a man who had been given a truth he could not rearrange.
"I did," I said.
He closed his eyes a moment, exhaling. "He wanted you not to wait," he said, as if reading the line back to me aloud gave it permission to exist. "I think it was his truest wish. He loved you enough to set you free, even if he kept you in silence while he tried to protect something he believed in."
"I don't know if it's freedom when you were left to grieve in public before being told he lived," I said. The voice that came sounded small and oddly prosecutorial. "He wrote 'Don't wait,' and yet he arranged for the world to write my grief for me. Which of those hands guides me now?"
Daiwik did not answer immediately. He understood the question better than anyone; after all, he had been the one between the silence and the reveal. "I can only promise what I have been doing," he said finally. "I will be honest. I will be present. I will not repeat that mistake."
There are promises you take because they sound like hope. There are promises you make because you want the world to settle into a shape that will keep you alive. I took his hand. I allowed, for the first time since his funeral, a small light in the corner of my chest to warm.
That night, when the guests had left and the hall had been swept of confetti and leftover platters, I folded Shash's letter and placed it beside my journal. The penlight caught the ink as if the words were a small constellation that only I could consult. There were things in me that would always be with him: the cadence of his laugh, the way he tucked his chin when he was unsure, the stubborn way he pressed his palm over mine when the ground shook with the news of another casualty.
Daiwik slept in the next room, and for the first time since I had begun to love, I was married as someone whose heart had been shaped by two people. Not fair. Not neat. But life rarely is.
I lay awake long into the night, feeling the new ring on my finger like a small, human anchor. Shash's letter lay against my palm when I reached for it. The words haunted and freed in the same breath. Be happy. Don't wait. It was a command and a benediction, a soldier's final attempt to shape the woman he loved into a living person rather than a shrine.
In the morning, when the first light came and Daiwik made me tea and the everyday duties of a clinic and a home and a life called me forward, I felt, strangely, both grief and a quiet permission. I could honor the man who had carved my name into his breath by keeping breathing. I could accept Daiwik's hand with the awareness that love does not unmake the past. It gathers it like thread and tries to sew something new.
Outside, the city hustled on. Somewhere, Sepoy Arjun practiced a rifle drill with the kind of devotion that becomes discipline. Nandini texted to check if I'd eaten sweet rice and reminded me, with that ruthless affection she keeps for my good, to rest. Colonel Rajput came by later to sign a small stack of forms — medals and rites — the bureaucrat's way of honoring a life.
When I finally stepped out into the day, the pendant warmed against my chest. It was a small, heavy thing, proof of both a love and an order. I had followed instructions from a man who had left me darkness and illumination in equal measure. I had married another man who had brought me light in different language.
The wedding would be written up in the morning papers as it always is — lines about courage and moving forward and the dignity of those who serve. Some will call it a story of resilience. Others will note the tragedy beneath, perhaps with an oblique line about sacrifice.
I do not know what the future holds. All I have is the letter in my pocket and the ring on my finger and a promise I made to myself by reading his handwriting aloud that night: I will not stop living because a man asked me to be brave. I will not become a monument. I will be loud enough for both of the men who shaped me — the one who carved my name into breath and the one who now stands ready to help me build a life that honors both grief and quotidian joy.
For now, I will go to the clinic and check the roster and see Sepoy Arjun for his wound and teach another soldier to breathe like a person who expects to return home. Small acts, perhaps. But these are the things that keep a life stitched. And if Shash were looking down like the letter suggests he might — a fanciful image given how the world actually works — I would want him to know that I heard him and that I chose to exist in the light he had asked me to seek.
I do not know if he forgave himself. I don't know if I can forgive Daiwik, or if I should. I only know that for today I will keep living. That is what he asked me to do. That is why I married — not to escape grief, but to give it a home inside a continuing life.