The air at Siachen is thin enough to make prayer sound like a dare. It pulls at the throat and leaves the rest of you feeling strangely honest. Today the sky is a hard blue—no cloud softening its sentences—and the names on the wall catch the light like small, stubborn coins. I can find him by sound and by the memory of where my fingers want to rest: the place in my chest that still remembers his rhythm.
People say time softens things. They are liars or optimists. Time changes the shape of sorrow; it dresses it in habits and calls the costume "life." It did that to me. It wrapped my grief in routines—tea before rounds, a stack of veterans' files on my desk, a garden that refused to be ornamental—and called the package "continuing." Under the label, the thing inside was still as sharp as ever.
I come here every year. Not because I owe it to the headlines, nor for the medals tucked into folders, but because this is where the world has put the memory of men like him into stone, and because sometimes a body of stone needs conversation. Stones can be stubborn interlocutors; you speak to them and they reply by keeping silence. The silence is answer enough. It tells you that others have come before you with the same small, irrational necessities: to name, to ripple, to insist that a life was not a rumor.
I am older now—older than I imagined when he first wrote to me from a ridge and called my voice "oxygen." My hair is silver in the places the sun has found it, a halo I refuse to surrender to fashion. My hands have the small creases of someone who has sown stitches: sutures on soldiers, hems on saris, notebook margins filled with names. My face keeps the map of years—crow's-feet like little fissures where laughter and weeping meet. When children I treat at the clinic ask what it was like to love a soldier, I tell them the truth: it was a life with more waiting than ordinary people imagine, and yet the waits were made bearable by the tiny mercies—letters, a carefully wrapped cup of tea, the soft way he would press his thumb to the corner of a page.
I still carry his handwriting. The paper is brittle at the edges; the ink has softened in the places where rain or tears once visited. On my fingers, the nick in the pendant's rim is a souvenir. I clasp it now and then as if the metal will answer me. It never does. He wrote once, in that cramped, stubborn way he had: Do not make me a monument. Live. I kept that like an order, because he gave me no better kind of command.
Today, there is wind. It comes off the glacier like a living thing and lays itself over the names—our names—so that the letters look like they might move. I stand at the wall and trace the familiar loops until my finger finds his. The stone is cold. It remembers the time, which is to say it remembers nothing, and that non-remembering is what gives me the freedom to name what I choose.
"Shash," I say, quietly, as if calling his name might pull him out of the air. "I kept you from becoming someone else's headline."
There is a tiny, absurd satisfaction in saying that aloud. For years after the leak—after the way reporters had rushed to name him missing and then dead before I had been told anything—I learned to use paperwork like a small weapon. I dragged logs and receipts into rooms of men who preferred quiet power to public consequences. I asked awkward questions. I sat opposite officers and journalists with forms and with stubbornness and, slowly, made them answer. I insisted on names, on signatures, on chain-of-custody, until the idea of "reporting first" lost some of its charm under the weight of accountability.
It did not make the loss any smaller. It simply made the story truer, which mattered to a person who kept his letters under cotton and called me his oxygen. Truth in that case was not an ethical abstraction; it was a loyalty. I had promised, to him in his lifetimes and to myself in the dark hours, that I would not allow his life to be compressed into a tidy civic monument that erases the mess, the contradictions, the petty humor. I wanted his death to be accurate, not fashionable.
Daiwik married me the winter after the funeral. We were young enough to pretend marriage could be a single, decisive medicine for grief and old enough to know it was a daily negotiation. He bore my fury with the kind of generosity that is learned rather than innate. He gave up the secrets; he rewired his impulses; he used his hands the way a man uses instruments—precise, patient. There were awkward evenings, long silences, apologies that landed like small stones and eventually settled into a bridge. He never tried to trade the truth for comfort again. He read my letters when I could not, he sat in the clinic through nights of fever and nightmares, and he taught me how to let someone else carry the weight sometimes.
We grew old together, in the sensible way people who are not dying feel toward life. He grew kinder, and his laugh grew softer. He surprised me with cups of tea when my hands hurt from long sutures; he argued with me over the men in our clinic and insisted they deserved both tenderness and strictness. We made a life that honored both the soldier I had loved and the man I had married.
He is gone now—the world takes and gives in strange currency—but not because of the ridge. He left quietly, folding himself into a small illness that doctors find clever names for and other people find unsteadying. His last night, he whispered my name, and I felt the warm press of his hand—smaller, thinner—and I kept my promise to hold his. He asked me, with the same gravity that had once made him ask for secrecy, to be loud for him now. It is ironic how often those who ask to be silent during war ask the living to be loud after.
Nandini is a constant. She never left my life; she only reconfigured herself. We have become a certain kind of family—odd, deliberate, threaded with shared culpability and affection. She still brings me the worst coffee when she knows I have important paperwork; she still laughs at jokes that are not actually funny. She took on an administrative role in a veterans' center and now runs trainings about trauma and ethics. She writes me letters sometimes in the old way: brisk, honest, with a small apology tucked in the margins. The confession that wrecked us—her affair with him, the silence she kept—became a weather we learned to live in. We spoke through that weather until the clouds thinned.
Sepoy Arjun stood at my bedside the day we folded Daiwik's scarf into a small envelope for his funeral. He had become something like what he always wanted to be: a man who could hold other men's fear and refuse to be brittle. He visits the clinic now with a steady hand and a habit of leaving the kettle on the counter so I can make chai without asking. He jokes about being the family's permanent "annoyance" keeper—the one who refuses to tidy boots properly. I like that.
People ask me if I regret marrying, if I feel like I betrayed anyone—if I abandoned Shash's memory in exchange for a quieter life. Regret is not a single poor thing to be measured. It is a companion that sits in your lap and sometimes bites your thumb when you are not looking. I loved him for the way he loved me—raw, irresolvable, heroic in the way that made light out of danger—and I loved Daiwik because he chose, day after day, to be present. They were different kinds of love and, in their difference, they taught me how to be whole in pieces.
There were battles, of course. Aditya Rathore's name did not fade from the boards. Men with ambition and polished shoes find ways to slip stories into the teeth of events. He paid a price—not a punishment theatrical enough for the kind of cruelty he performed, but enough that his career, which prized speed and headlines, was less buoyant afterwards. Truth requires patience. It requires persistence. It requires the petty rituals people find boring: subpoenas, petitions, signatures, formal complaints. I learned to like that slow weather. There is dignity in paperwork when the alternative is perfidious glamour.
I have taught veterans how to speak. My clinic became a small place for the loud and the quiet to both be valid. We keep memory clean not by washing it of its grit but by recognizing every outline: the absurd bravado, the private jokes, the times a man we loved was frightfully ordinary. I keep a shelf in the clinic for relics—not monuments but objects: his silver map pendant, a pair of gloves that never fit anyone perfectly, a childish sketch he once made of a grove with two lanterns. I label them with the owners' names and a line of biography and a warning: Do not fold into headline; remember as human. Students laugh at the dramatics. Old soldiers understand.
People come to this memorial to lay cold flowers, to read names aloud, to hear the hollow sound of a bugle. They talk about duty and about sacrifice. I listen, and sometimes I correct them gently. "He was not only a hero," I tell them. "He was also a man who would steal sugar from the mess and frown at bad tea." They look surprised—as if to be human is somehow a demotion from worth. It is not. It is the only thing that matters.
Today, a young woman from a university visits the memorial and comes up behind me. She has the eager look of those who have not yet learned how grief becomes a fabric you wear. She asks about him—about Shash—and I tell her, because it is the simplest ethical thing to hand over: He loved poorly and bravely. He asked for silence for reasons he believed in. He taught me to live when I wanted to be a shrine. She writes notes like someone making an offering.
"Did he ask you to wait?" she asks, in a voice that carries a little too much hope for the living.
"No," I say. "He asked me not to."
There is a bitter, lovely humor in that exchange. The young woman wants to pin a moral on his life: wait, keep faith, stay. My life is less about moral absolutes and more about the stubborn, daily work of choosing to be present. I am tired, yes. Sometimes lonelier than I can describe. But I have learned that love's truest work is not in the grand gestures but in the mundane: remembering birthdays, checking in when the night feels too long, teaching a man how to breathe again so he can keep living.
I place a small offering at his name today—a thin strip of ribbon, the scent of jasmine. I do it because ritual matters. I do it because I like to show up both for myself and because I owe something to him, to Daiwik, to those who gave their hours and breath and, sometimes, their lives. I whisper into the wind the sentence I said when I was younger and braver and when the world was louder and less patient:
"I kept you. I kept your truth."
The wind takes it and folds it somewhere among stones and air. Sometimes I imagine it carries the words to him the way a courier carries a letter across ridges. Other times I imagine the wind is a dull, indifferent agent that simply rearranges dust. Both images are true. Both are useful. Both make the earth retain the shape of your voice a little longer.
I have become, in a way I neither sought nor resisted, the archivist of his life. I kept the papers. I taught others how to read them. I refused the elegant narrative the world wanted to cast him in. In doing that work, I saved something: not him—no, death does not yield—but the way people will remember him. I did not let him be flattened into a tidy story because he had been so gloriously untidy in life.
People ask me if the "don't wait" line he left was cruel. They ask if telling me to move on was selfish. Maybe it was. Maybe all the men who live in extremes believe that asking someone to live is the same as asking them to let go. But his words did not require that I forget. They required that I not live suspended, waiting for return like some stranded bird. It was not cruelty; it was a command wrought from the particular love and fear of a soldier who understood the ledger of duty. He wanted me to be more than a memory.
So I kept living. I married, I taught, I organized, I built a small home that smelled of good tea and dish soap. I watched people fall in love, and I watched them leave. I buried friends and wept. The pendant is still with me, dulled and familiar, and I sometimes press it to my mouth and talk into metal as if it could carry messages that only he knows how to translate.
There are nights—lonely ones—when I go through the letters. I read his handwriting until the script looks like a map of muscle memory. Once, in the dark, I held one of his poems—the one he never sent—and read it aloud until the moonlight answered me with something that felt like approval. I keep the letters not as a shrine but as a conversation. They remind me how brave a man could be and how blind; they teach me to be both compassionate and uncompromising.
At the end of the day, I walk away from the wall with the same small resolve that has kept me moving for decades: the world will make its monuments and its tidy lines. I will make my own memorial, one that is lived and argued and unashamedly messy. I will tell the real stories when someone asks. I will laugh at petty things and insist that the men who meant so much be remembered as people who also stole sugar and loved badly.
I walk down the steps and feel the thin air catch at the hem of my coat. The young woman watches me go and calls, "Thank you," as if gratitude could hold what I carry. I nod. The wind catches at my scarf and tugs the corners like a playful hand.
Before I leave, I turn once more to the wall. I whisper, not because silence is respectful but because whispering keeps intimacy intact in a world that prefers spectacle.
"Shash," I say. "I did not wait. I married, I taught, I loved, I got angry, I filed the forms you could not. I kept your letters and I kept your name honest. I'll be loud when needed. And when the wind asks me for a name, I'll give you yours with a laugh and a curse and a cup of bad tea."
I press my palm to the cool stone and feel something like both rupture and mending. The stone does not shift. It never will. But it holds the shape of my hand for the briefest moment, and for my purposes that is enough.
As I walk away, the wind gathers the scrap of ribbon and lifts it, and I watch it go—small, bright, carried along a path only wind knows. I do not ask it to bring me answers. I only ask it to carry my words the way the world carries facts: imperfectly and with the possibility of return.
Back at the clinic, Sepoy Arjun will be waiting with the kettle on. Nandini will bring dreadful coffee and apologies pretending to be practical. Daiwik's photograph sits on my desk, smaller now than his living presence ever was, and sometimes I imagine his thumb brushes the page and says, gently, well done.
Sometimes people call me brave. Sometimes they call me stubborn. I answer when I can: "I am what I had to become." Brave is too tidy a word. Stubborn is closer to the truth. I am stubborn enough to keep the papers, to keep the letters, to keep the messiness, to keep the people. And in that stubbornness there is a kind of tenderness I learned the hard way: it is the day-by-day decision to be loud with love rather than to hide it in silence.
When the sun begins to dip like someone pulling down a sleeve, I take the long road home, feeling the slight ache in my knees and the steady beat in my chest. I untie the scarf at my throat and press my hand, a little idly, to the pendant. It is cool, then warm. I smile, a small thing with no flags, no headlines, only the private, stubborn insistence that a life—any life—be remembered with truth.
And as the wind gathers and the night presses close, I whisper one last thing into the dark, for him and for anyone who still thinks a life can be cleanly folded into a headline.
"Be happy," I tell the wind. "Don't wait."