There are moments when sound becomes an instrument of grief—an innocuous clink of a cup, the rustle of a newspaper, the thin ring of a mobile phone—and all of it arranges itself into a litany you cannot unhear. Today the instrument is a radio in the mess tent, a voice that straps a name to a fact, and the fact tastes like metal and old snow.
I'm in the clinic when it happens, bent over a clipboard, cataloguing intake forms. A sepoy hums a bad film song under his breath; Sepoy Arjun jokes with the orderly about the mess cook's insistence on extra chili. The small, fragile happiness of normal service is doing its best to hold together around us. Outside, ropes of fog curl over sandbags like smoke. I breathe in the antiseptic and the breath of the stove, telling myself the day will pass the way other days have—stitches, cups of tea, the slow paperwork of human repair.
The radio blips at the mess tent; no one expects anything but routine. A voice—flat, official—read the morning's communique and then something else: a news feed. I'm walking to consult a soldier about a panic attack when the reporter's voice cuts across the air like a tracer.
"...in breaking military news, sources indicate that Major Shashwat Rajput of the 8th Gurkha Rifles is reported missing in action following an operation near Dead Man's Pass. Confirmation pending. Families have been notified..."
The words land with a slight delay in my chest. Missing in action. Not dead. Not dead yet. But the way the speaker reads it—slow, measured, final—carries a weight I cannot shake. The intake sheet slips from my fingers, a quiet sound that seems absurd in the sudden stillness. A hundred small movements halt: spoons clink less loudly, the humming stops, a soldier's laugh evaporates.
Daiwik is there before I realize I've been breathing. He always is. He moves with a kind of economy born of training and of nights spent watching monitors. His face is the color of paper left too long in wind. He crosses the tent without fanfare and drops into the chair opposite me, palms white against the armrests.
"Did you hear?" he asks, though the words are redundant. We both heard. The radio doesn't lie; it simply repeats what someone in an office far from here decided to say into a microphone. What it does not tell us are the faces that made that decision, the motives, the leak that fed the reporter's ear.
"I heard," I say. My voice sounds like gravel. "They said 'missing in action.'"
He looks away, and the movement is the first small fracture I notice. For months I've been counting the way he looks at my hands; tonight the look is different—farther and more guarded. He clears his throat. "They said confirmation pending. We should be cautious."
Cautious. It is always the preferred word in officialdom. It is the cloth they use to wrap bad news before passing it to the next person. Cautious is a filter for human terror. I feel the word like a frostbite on my tongue.
"I'll go to the operations tent," I say, without thinking. If this is true—if this becomes true—then the place for me is with men who will speak the language of maps and losses. The place for me is where the truth is honed into something I can hold and treat, not just an announcement over a radio.
Daiwik's hand catches mine, quick and firm. "Kavya—"
"Please," I say, the plea a small, hopeless thing. "Let me go."
He nods, but his jaw tightens. He cannot meet my eyes. I realize in that moment that the man who saved me in an ambush months ago is stewarding something else now: a secret that sits like a stone inside his chest. He is carrying it because—God help him—he thinks it will protect me.
At the operations tent, the colonel's face is a country map of stern lines. Colonel Vikram Rajput stands like a cliff—uncharted in his grief, reserved in a way only a man who has already paid for his son's uniform can be. He does not move the way officers do toward a woman with claim on his son; he moves toward me the way he moves toward orders—slow, with the deliberation of a man who has placed too many lives on scales.
"Kavya," he says, and the name is both comfort and accusation. "Sit." He points to a chair as if we are discussing supply lines, not a son. "There's been a leak."
"Leak?" The word arrives as a small echo. I have been trying to keep the word leak small, to make it a technicality, but the colonel's mouth is lined with old desert winds; he knows the temperature of such things.
"Yes." His voice is low. "A private news feed picked up an internal report. The chain of command has yet to finalize statements. There's a lot of chatter. We asked for discretion. Someone—someone in the forward operations staff—has been... indiscreet."
My chest tightens. Indiscreet is the word they use when they want to be more polite than guilty.
"Who?" I don't realize I say it aloud. The room is small. Even the dust seems to listen.
He meets my gaze. "Aditya Rathore's division has had access to mission status. He is a man who likes to be first at the gate and first in print. We suspect he fed the line."
The colonel does not need to say why. Ambition in uniform can be as lethal as any enemy missile: it plays with men's lives when it suits a narrative, when the feed of publicity feeds a career. Aditya Rathore. I have seen him at briefings—slick hair, hands like oilcloth, eyes that catalog people as trophies. He is a man who loves trophies that glitter; a dead hero, tragically framed, is a trophy that wins voters and medals and the kind of praise that polishes a career.
"Why leak now?" I whisper. "What does he gain?"
The colonel's voice is a railroad: "Visibility. Control. The ability to shift blame if the operation fails. To make himself the answer to a problem he has already decided he can solve."
It is a cold calculus. It is also cruelty. I can feel bile rising in my throat. People like Aditya do not care about the quiet grief of a woman with letters pressed beneath her shirt; they care about the story they can craft. They will frame a man's absence into a storyline of heroism or incompetence, whichever serves their ascent.
Outside, a runner arrives in a flurry—mud on boots, breath blasting the air. He hands in a small printout: a wire from a civilian agency, the headline still warm. "Major Shashwat Rajput—MIA." The print sits heavy in my palm. I look down at the black letters as if they have become an accusation leveled at the world: How could you let this happen?
Word moves in a way warrooms don't always anticipate. A leak is a wound that bleeds into waiting rooms. Before noon, a correspondent is at the outer gate, polite, with a badge that smells of coffee and ink. He wants the story. He wants the picture that will make his morning. He calls the line at the command tent and leaves a message for the public relations officer. Lines multiply. The dish in the mess tent that once sang our little songs now carries a voice that will speak across cities: a man missing, a grieving base, the public's right to know.
I think of the letters in my satchel—the ones he wrote with frost-cracked handwriting, the poems he burned, the unsent notes that were the private architecture of our promise. If I set the satchel down now in a place where a reporter might see, the world might read what I read: a man gentle and cruel both, a soldier and a lover, and all those contradictions would make for an intoxicating headline.
Daiwik steers me back into the clinic as if he could shield me in the cadence of triage. I protest only softly. "I need to speak to him," I say. "To anyone who can tell me he is alive."
Daiwik swallows. "No," he says, and the word is brittle. "No one can confirm. There's nothing to confirm." His eyes find mine. There is something in them that reads like guilt. "I... I'll try and get more."
He moves like a man trying to thread a map through his own grief. I watch him go and feel an old, private fear flare: if Daiwik is holding something back, what could it be? The thought is a cold iron in my palm. I have learned to read people; his hands tremble in ways that were not there before. He has been saving me with small, ordinary kindnesses for months. If he is now hiding the truth, it is because he is trying to protect me or protect himself—or both.
The hours lengthen. The clinic is a theatre of whispered condolences. Soldiers come, as they always do, looking for treatments that will pull them from the edge: antiseptic for a wound, a practiced breathing pattern to quiet panic—none of it touches the invisible wound that is being carved in the mess tent with anchors of rumor. Sepoy Arjun arrives, eyes hollow but brave. He salutes me—awkward, youthful, armored with the naïveté of devotion.
"Kavya-ji," he says. "Is he—do you know?"
I kneel so my face is closer to his. In his youth he believes in clear answers; my job is to teach him ambiguity without breaking his belief. "Not yet," I say. "We don't know yet." I tuck a blanket around his shoulders, because the soldiers need small comforts even as they wait for shrines to rise.
Word comes in fits. A family from another unit arrives at the tent in stunned silence. A father, stooped, asks about transport and relief—about what happens when the man who belonged to a dozen maps stops being on one of them. I answer mechanically: paperwork, lists, the channels of notification. I feel like I am speaking from the other side of glass.
Meanwhile, in the next tent, Aditya Rathore makes a phone call with the comfortable air of a man who has placed his name where it will glow. His voice carries faintly through the canvas, smug and sharp. He does not intend for me to hear him; perhaps he does not expect that the air will be thin enough here to carry secrets like birds. He says something about being "first," about "a story that will run tomorrow," about "taking the lead on the public brief." There's a quick laugh that is entirely without shame.
I could have confronted him then. I could have walked across the yard and spat the truth in front of him—the ugly truth that lives are not plot devices for his career. But the colonel's presence is a ring that narrows conversations; I know the consequences of public scenes. I also know that scenes staged in anger do not bring men back. So I choose to hold the outrage in my mouth and let it simmer.
Instead I go to the grove. The cherry trees stand like a judge and jury; their leafless branches are a network of small shadows. I sit at the stump and take out his last letter from my pocket, the careful loop of ink and the marginal note he had scratched in the dark: Find me in the shapes of foxes. If you must worry, worry with fury and not silence. I read it once, then again, tasting his handwriting like a benediction. The paper trembles under my fingers.
Nandini finds me there. She sits without fuss, like a woman who knows the architecture of calamity and carries a toolkit for it. "They'll make a story," she says plainly, as if stating the weather. "And it will shape what people feel. That's what ragged men like Rathore play with."
"Why would he do that?" I ask. Betrayal begins to feel like a weather condition; I have to ask it of the air as if the air might answer.
"Because he's a man who believes in a straight line," she answers. "He likes narratives with clean endings. A missing man is a neat arc. It allows him to be the man who will put him in the ground, metaphorically or otherwise. Power likes stories that end with someone's applause."
We both laugh, ugly and sharp. Power, we agree, will never be the same thing as mercy.
That evening the press has a field microphone at the perimeter. The reporter's face is lit by the camera's red eye. When he asks for interviews, soldiers balk. The colonel releases a terse statement: We are investigating reports of missing personnel. No further comment until families have been officially notified. It is the statement of an institution that moves slowly to avoid errors that would make it complicit.
But the leak has done its work. Voices in the city will broadcast that a hero is missing. Families will read and hurt. A narrative has been birthed. An absence has been made public, clothed in the currency of headlines. It will be difficult now to unmake the public story into the private truth.
Back in the clinic, I gather the letters and place them in a small wooden box under the couch. Aditya's triumph, a creature with teeth and press credentials, has made a dent in the evening's sky. I am aware of the fragility of the paper in my hands. Small things: a coin, a pressed map, a poem—are all that remains of a life that cannot be folded into neat reports.
Daiwik comes in later, his eyes rimmed in red. He does not bring news; he brings a steadiness. He sits with me in the quiet and passes me the tea I don't notice I need. He says, finally, "I called the operations officer. He said they're trying to get confirmations. It's messy. But Kavya—" His voice breaks on the name. "I think—" He doesn't finish, because there is a hazard in finishing sentences in war: they harden into orders.
"What do you think?" I ask.
"That it's possible this was coordinated," he murmurs. "To shape the narrative. To force our hand." He looks at me, searching for an answer he knows I cannot give. "If it's true—if the leak is real—they'll be playing chess with human pieces."
I think of Rathore's smile, the knife edge of his ambition. It is a small thing but it legitimizes fear. If the leak was intentional, it was weaponized reputation. The purpose is not only to be first but to set the terms of what the public will feel when the night proves cruel.
Night arrives like a snare. I go to the small altar we've made in the grove and light a candle. The little flame jerks in the wind and begins to settle. I place my fingertips against the wax and feel heat and an entire civilization of promises. I whisper into the dark—not a prayer so much as a command: Come back. Come back whole. Return to my hands so I can hold you and stitch you and teach you how to laugh again.
The grove answers only with snow and a small, dogged silence. I go to bed with the radio's scrape in my head: Major Shashwat Rajput—MIA. The three letters loop like an indictment. Lying awake, I envision the lie that might have been seeded: an officer's ambition writ large, a leak that turns life into image. I feel fury at the man who would weaponize story and at the system that let him. I feel helpless in the way you feel when the only weapon in your hand is a pen and a promise.
Before sleep, I write. Not letters to him—those will come in the morning—but a list of small things I will do if the rumor becomes fact: tend Sepoy Arjun, man the clinic, demand transparency, not let grief be co-opted. I press the list to the box that holds his letters, as if the paper can be an anchor against the storm.
Outside, the camp sleeps in fits: watch shifts, the mechanical clunk of tents, a distant wind that sounds like someone turning a page. Inside, I imagine a man on a ridge, not missing but misplaced, or perhaps far more deliberately hidden. The thought that someone might have taken the story and crafted a lie around him—Aditya's lie—burns in my mind. If that is true, then the next days will not be only about loss; they will be about how we reclaim the truth from men who make stories for a living.
I do not know the shape of the next morning, but I know this: I will not let his story become someone else's headline without answering with my own. Letters will travel. People who treasure truth will turn up names. I will make myself a noise: a voice in the static. If the world insists on telling us the story as a tragedy, then I will make the story also one of stubborn love—demanding, loud, unflinching.
For tonight, though, all I can do is wait and write and keep the box of his letters against my heart. The radio has given the world a narrative; the only control I have now is what I do with the paper that bears his handwriting. I fold one of his poems into my palm and whisper it aloud.
"I carve your name in my breath," I say. And I refuse to stop carving until he's back under the cherry trees, where the lanterns will still burn for us.