The mornings after a night like that live in the small, precise things. The kettle hissed on its short borrowed stove; the clinic's lamps clicked on in an unhurried procession; a runner dropped a bundle of letters at my tent flap with hands that trembled less than mine. I learned to measure danger by how the sunlight hit a soldier's helmet, by whether someone laughed without it sounding like a tremor. Life here was a catalog of tiny mercies and hidden alarms.
Shashwat slept when I checked on him at first light. The bandage at his side had been changed, the stitches neat as small promises. His breathing was slow, as if he were trying to savor peace as if it could be rationed. I sat in the stiff plastic chair beside his cot and watched the slow arch of his ribs, the way his beard shadowed the line of his jaw. For a reckless, irreverent second I let myself believe we had crossed some dangerous line and come out the other side.
Then he woke.
His eyes opened with that startled rawness I knew too well—the look of a man walking through fog and suddenly finding himself in a room he'd once called home. He took my face in both hands, and for a moment everything fell still. "Kavya," he whispered, and the syllable warmed whatever winter had been inside me.
The moment lasted until he remembered how to pull the soldier over the man. The memory of a spent battle, the instinct to protect, the ledger of those who'd fallen—all those ledger entries stacked behind his eyes. He tightened his jaw. "You shouldn't be here," he said before the apology could form; the sentence had the brittle clarity of ice breaking.
My hand was still in his, and I did not want to let it go. "I'm here because you let me be," I said. "If you don't want me in the ward, tell me. If you're scared, say the word. But don't push me away because you're afraid."
He looked at me then, really looked, and the look was less armor and more weariness. "I am," he said quietly. "I'm afraid of losing you because I made the world take you away from me before you even had to leave."
The truth lodged itself there between us like a splinter. For a long time I merely listened—to his breathing, to the tapping of monitors, to the soft shuffle of nurses' shoes. There are moments when the body and the mind disagree about what to do next; the body wants to reach out, the mind remembers the ledger and chooses a sterile, strategic withdrawal.
We were not strangers to such contradictions. We had been threading them together into some kind of life for months. That morning I realized how thin the thread had become.
I stayed, of course. I refused him the removal he demanded because love isn't an act you give after being asked to defend it. I had chosen him the way a surgeon chooses to stitch a wound—careful, deliberate, with an acceptance that pain might come. I took notes when the surgeon required them and spoke in calm measured phrases to the orderlies, but whenever the medical talk cleared a space I leaned toward him and said simply, "We will find a way through this."
The first week after his surgery settled into a rhythm of small gestures. I dressed wounds, I taught breathing techniques to soldiers who trembled even in laughter, I sat with men who were good at war and bad at telling their children they'd come home. Shashwat participated when he could—he would stand in the workshop tent and let his voice teach, let his hands show how to make a field splint—but there were tremors beneath the surface. There were nights when he woke screaming a name I'd never heard him say aloud, and he'd flinch away before I could trace the edge of the memory.
Daiwik hovered during those first days the way a tide does when it can no longer hold back. He had been at Shash's side the night of the ambush, and the thing in his eyes that had once been worry had thickened into something harder—protectiveness, yes, but also a hunger I'd become increasingly aware of. He moved through the tents with a steady practicality that made him necessary; he administered meds like someone who understood the shape of the human body the way another man understands a martial map. He would give Shash a dressing in the morning, take my hand at the end of a desperate hour and hold it like an anchor, then slip into the dark corners and make a call I never heard him make.
There was a night midway through the week when the camp was especially thin with sleep. The wind had found a new cruelty and hit the supply canvas so that it chimed like a bell. I had been in the ward till two in the morning, disinfecting instruments and making notes, when I found Daiwik on the steps of the mess, a paper cup of tea trembling in his hands.
"Not sleeping?" I asked, because there is a certain permission given between two people who spend too many nights on call.
He handed me the cup and took a breath. "No," he said. "I can't."
We sat in the powder-blue hush, watching the dark move across the yard like a slow animal. "Tell me," I said.
He told me, poorly at first—then with more clarity, because the truth had, evidently, been burning a hole through him for weeks. He told me how he had felt the night Shash had fallen away from me, about how he'd watched me cry and wanted in that way that makes a man almost cruel: not to break, but to possess. He confessed his guilt for having the thought of taking me while another man still stood between us—he hated himself for it. Then he did something I had not expected. He said, simply, "If anything happens to him, I will not stand in the way."
Those words should have been comfort. Instead they were an incision—sharp and revealing. It taught me exactly where he stood and also how fragile relationships had become around us. There were no simple loyalties here: there were loyalties contorted by fear, by the weight of loss, and by a kind of unspoken competition for what might be left when the battle slowed.
I loved Daiwik; I would never pretend otherwise. He had saved three lives that week and kept his own hands steady even when his insides wanted to break. I also loved Shash. Loving both of them did not make me two people, any more than being a physician made me one. It made me larger in ways I never asked for—capable of holding more grief and more hope than I had thought possible.
The clinic became a stage for such paradoxes. One afternoon a boy—Sepoy Arjun, our "Rookie" who had once called me "Bhabhi" with the protective earnestness of a young soldier—came in limping. He had been on flanking duty when a snowdrift collapsed and pinned his leg against ice. He watched Shash from the corner of the ward as I cleaned his wound. When Shash walked past, the boy saluted with a nervous grin, and the Major returned a salute that contained both militancy and tenderness.
"Kavya-ji," Arjun whispered, later, when his dressing was secured, "thank you for keeping him alive. He's my captain."
His eyes were bright as if he'd seen a miracle. The presence of a young life's faith in Shash made my chest ache with a new kind of devotion. I found myself giving Arjun extra broth, because small mercies were as important as sutures.
The week that followed was mostly muscle memory—a choreography of triage, of bandage changes, of mild arguments about whether someone could be rotated to a less exposed outpost. But something changed midweek that neither of us could have planned for; it was small and immediate, but the consequences unfurled like the slow burn of frost spreading beneath a pane of glass.
A runner arrived carrying official papers: Shash's name on a new set of orders. They were brief, the kind of bureaucratic note that reads like a sentence. The unit would be reassigned in forty-eight hours—frontlines shifted; the ridge needed reinforcement—and Major Shashwat Rajput was to lead a recon element across a narrow pass that was notorious for avalanches and lack of cover. The words on the paper were unadorned by care: deploy, reinforce, hold.
My hands went slick with cold and the paper nearly tore. I felt the room tilt like a person who has been punched. For a second I could not understand why the world insisted on complicity—a man recovering, the surgeon's note saying three more days at closest observation, and command sending him back anyway. I wanted to go to the colonel and tear that paper in pieces.
Shashwat read his orders without reaction at first. He folded the sheet and slipped it into his pocket as if it had always been a part of him. When he looked up, his face was more stoic than I'd seen since the ambush. "They need me," he said.
Of course they needed him. He was the kind of Major that brigades rely on: a steady hand, a competence that other men could map their survival onto. But need and human fragility are not the same thing. The commands of rank do not consider the maps of hearts.
That night, I sat beside him longer than usual. The tent was quiet save for the occasional clink of a spoon on metal. "Why won't you ask for a less exposed post?" I demanded softly.
He turned to me, the Major returning to man his station even against his own grief. "Would you ask me to shirk my duty?" he asked. There was no accusation in it—only the simple, terrible expectation of what it meant to be a Rajput. Duty was a garment stitched into his bones.
"I would ask you to be alive," I said. "I would ask you to stay." My voice cracked on the last word and I pressed my forehead to his shoulder. "If they need you, let them need Daiwik instead this time. He's as good as you."
The name landed like a small betrayal. He laughed once, a short sound edged with pain. "You want him to be the one to bear my absence and your trust?"
"I want something besides this constant fear," I said. "I want you."
He made no promises. He wrapped his arms around me, but the tightness of the embrace did not erase the lines I had come here to smooth. We slept little that night; when we finally did, exhaustion was our only mercy.
At dawn the convoy left. I watched the trucks disappear, shaking the earth like a consumed heartbeat. I felt the hospital shrink to a dot and the dot to a hole in my chest. Letters, I decided, would do the work I could not do; pages would be my bridge.
Over the next day and the one after, I wrote to him until my hand cramped. My letters were small, stubborn things: recipes from my mother's kitchen, the names of stars I promised to teach him, a silly drawing of our grove with lanterns and a sign that read Wait for Me. I sealed each envelope with wax if I could find any, because some rituals matter more than logic.
Daiwik collected the letters himself when runners left camp; sometimes he thumbed through them with an expression that made me both grateful and slightly ashamed. He said nothing of taking shortcuts through his own sorrow. He simply did the work that made him useful.
While he was away, Nandini visited the clinic. She came quiet as a ghost bearing news: Shobha Malhotra's condition had worsened in the city—chemotherapy was underway, and the prognosis was uncertain. My mother's voice came through her message on my satphone like a rope tugged tight. The world beyond the ridge was a place too complex to be contained in my little tent of lanterns and letters.
The news of my mother's worsening created a tug of war in me: the ache to run home, to hold the woman who had ironed my uniforms of youth and read me poems when the sky was gray; and the pull to stay, to stand by the man who'd been shot and told me, in a voice of broken steel, to let him be a soldier. I pressed my palm to the valley of my chest and felt two pulsing lights—each requiring me, each necessary as breath.
I told Shash. He was quiet for a long time, the Major's countenance shifting from duty to something like helpless compassion. "Go," he said finally, and the word was both a permission and a blade. "Go to her. Family must be tended."
To his credit, he did not say go and leave me. He said go, with a concession I neither expected nor demanded. Daiwik volunteered to cover the clinic in my absence; he volunteered before I could ask. He offered to take letters to the forward post, to ensure my voice reached across the snow while my hands were busy holding my mother's.
I left two days later with a satchel of letters, a head full of instructions for the team, and a heart packed hard. At the railhead I watched the land I loved fall away in white and brown stripes. The world became a filmstrip of hopes and orders. I tried not to think of him on that pass; I tried to believe that love—loud, foolish, stubborn—could outpace imbalance and bureaucracy.
On the train, I penned another letter. It was short this time, the kind of note you write when the sound of your own voice feels too loud for the world. I sealed it and, with hands that trembled, placed it in the pocket of my coat—knowing Daiwik would find it, as he always did, and knowing, too, that wherever Shash went, whatever orders bound him, I had chosen to stay with him and with my many loves.
The train rocked me toward the city and toward care that could not be rationed in lanterns and letters. Still, as the landscape slid past, I held the image of Shash's face—wounded but unbowed—in the front of my mind. I would go to my mother, yes. I would sit by her and smuggle in stories of lanterns and a man who had learned to carry his fear like a cloak. But in my sleep I would thread letters through the gaps and pray that when the avalanche of duty finally ran its course, it would leave us both standing to mend the pieces together.