I had thought hospitals were built to make the world quieter—the slow sigh of respirators, the measured footsteps, the ritual of rounds that turned panic into procedure. Yet the city ward where my mother lay felt loud in ways I hadn't expected: alarms that hummed with the possibility of endings, nurses' radios whispering in a language of tasks, the soft mechanical click as chemo pumps counted down their last drops. At night the machines became lullabies and threats all at once. I sat at her bedside and read to her from the rash of paperbacks she'd insisted on keeping despite the smell of antiseptic and medicine: Neruda, snippets of Tagore, a battered copy of Rilke that smelled like home.
She slept with her hand folded over the sheet, thin and mapped with veins. Sometimes she would wake and grip my wrist like a tether to the world outside—the world of lectures and students and my childhood apartments, of monsoon windows and chai steeped too long. "You must marry someone who comes home," she told me once, whispering the old refrain the way someone repeats scripture. I laughed then, a brittle sound, and said, "What if I marry a man who comes home covered in medals?" That got a half-smile, and then she would turn her face away from the light.
That morning a runner from the clinic had brought a satphone message. Daiwik's name would flash, and I learned to brace myself before I answered, as if a sternum could be bent around whatever news the northern wind carried. He spoke with the measured cadence of someone trying to keep a boat steady in stormy seas.
"She's stable this morning," he said. "Shobha's counts are holding. The docs want you to stay a few days more."
"Okay," I murmured. My thumb traced the raised emblem on the satphone where Shash's letters usually rested in my coat pocket. There was a comfort to anything that bore his handwriting; even the scratch of his pen anchored me. "How's camp?"
Daiwik hesitated, as if every pause were a splinter. "Quiet," he said finally. "Mostly paperwork and rounds. Shash called yesterday—said the pass is worse than they'd briefed. They expect wind shear tonight."
Wind shear. The words made a small, cold hollow in my stomach. I pictured him hunched against the ridge, helmet canted, the dark creases around his eyes carved by fatigue. I tried to summon one of his letters: I carve your name in my breath. It felt like a talisman and a threat, all at once. "Send him my love," I said, voice small. "Tell him to be careful."
"I told him," Daiwik replied. "He smiled and—" his voice snagged on something and he moved on, "—he said he'd be back soon."
The line clicked and went quiet. There are things the line cannot bear and those are the places men like us fill with small silences.
The city blurred past my windows that day: buses hissing, a boy calling for mangoes, the ever-present grind of a place that never quite slept. Nandini swung by the ward in the afternoon, bringing coffee that tasted both of hospital and gossip. She sat across from my mother and, with her habitual bluntness, asked the questions I failed to voice.
"How are you holding, Kavya?" she asked, not really bothering to keep the clinical distance.
I laughed once, a dry little sound. "Like a woman with two lives to keep. One is here and fragile. The other is... fatter with danger every day."
She studied my face and nodded. "You know he's stubborn," she said. "He thinks he's a mountain. Mountains fall too, sometimes." Her eyes softened. "I'll take point with the clinic while you're with Shobha. Daiwik will call me through, and I'll flag anything urgent."
I wanted to thank her, but the words lodged like uncried tears. "Tell him I wrote a recipe," I said instead, because who doesn't need parathas when the wind is trying to carve you into a name on a roster? "And that I'll be home next week."
Nandini squeezed my shoulder and left, her white coat flaring like a small flag in the corridor. The hospital's hum resumed its gentle pressure around us. I read to my mother about the sea for an hour, then the mountains for another, choosing images I thought would bring peace: gulls, distant rain, bread rising in a pan. She listened and sometimes the corners of her mouth lifted like a small light being lit.
That night I could not stop thinking about the pass. The news feeds had become more frequent and more fractured: a courier here, an alert there, a rumor that a platoon had sighted movement below a ribbon of slope. I write rumor like the plague because in war rumor is as infectious and as lethal.
At two a.m., my phone buzzed again—Daiwik. I answered, voice brittle.
"The ridge reported enemy probes," he said without preface. "They probed the forward wire for two hours. Shash called about an hour ago; he sounded tired." There was a tremor in his voice that I'd stopped ignoring. "They've tightened patrol rotations. I'm increasing watch schedules at the clinic."
"Is he safe?" My voice felt small in the huge dark of the hospital corridors.
"He sounded okay." He paused. "But Kavya... they're expecting an operation in 48 hours. Your letters—they boost morale. Keep sending them."
I pictured him reading my scribbles by lantern light: my bad drawings of the cherry grove, the recipe for chai he never wanted to admit he loved, a pressed corner of the poem he once mouthed under his breath. How fragile those comforts were, how ridiculous, how necessary.
I wrote that night until my hand ached. I wrote about the city's potholes and the smell of dal at the stall near my mother's building. I wrote of small, mundane things because the human heart, when stretched across distance, prefers ordinary anchors. I sealed letters with small marks—the smudge of my thumb, a quick heart doodle—and handed them to the runner who promised to get them north with the morning supply convoy.
Leaving the hospital was like stepping back into a different atmosphere. The city's noise seemed louder, more insistent. I walked the streets as if searching for something I could not name—maybe a sign that the world would tilt back into ordinary life when I returned.
Two days later, at the ward's window, the satphone buzzed again. This time it was Nandini, breathless with a kind of quiet alarm. "Kavya," she said. "You should sit down."
"What is it?"
"An engagement proposition came today," she said, and then immediately caught herself at the shape of the phrase—faded Indian formality clashing with modern catastrophe. "Not to you. To Daiwik. He—he proposed to a peace of certainty, I think. He asked me to remind you he proposed to someone—he proposed to stability. He asked if you would possibly consider—"
I laughed, sharp and ugly. There was a clatter of plates on the other end and a muffled, almost embarrassed silence. "What are you talking about?"
Nandini's voice turned clinical, efficient—her way of buying time to arrange her thoughts. "He asked if we could consider arranging leave windows, rotations. He's trying to build a path for people to be safe. It came out wrong." She sighed. "He's fragile."
Fragile. The word made a hollow sound in my chest. It was not marriage he was proposing. It was contingency: a route that might one day hold both relief and a shadow. I pictured Daiwik in the mess tent, offering more than tea: offering himself as both healer and anchor. I pictured the look he gave me the night Shash had woken—equal parts love and a man's hunger to be needed.
"I get it," I said finally, feeling the words like a blade. "Tell him thank you. Tell him I'll be home soon." I did not want to lie. I did not want to make promises I could not keep. But there are social niceties that act as taut ropes in storms; sometimes we must tie them to stay upright.
After we hung up, I felt the walls of my chest close in. My mother slept for an hour and then woke to ask for some water. I sat and fanned her hand and felt the years settle between us, a map folded into itself. How many maps could one life hold? How much room did a person have for more than one kind of love, for more than one kind of duty?
Late that night I dreamed a short, brittle dream: Shash on the ridge, lanterns like stars draped around him, and Daiwik on the rim below, calling up with a secret that was at once proposal and plea. Between them I stood, suspended like a line strung between two poles, worried the cord might fray.
I woke with the taste of iron in my mouth and the knowledge that decisions were not mine alone to make. To love is to act, sometimes with courage and sometimes with compromise. I had chosen to love a soldier. I had chosen to be a hand he could hold. In choosing I had also chosen the company of men who would stand at my door to protect, to plead, and to plan. All of them hoped for the same thing: that their world would allow them to keep the people they loved.
On my third morning in the city, I received a runner's packet at dawn: packets of letters stacked like small bricks. The top envelope bore Shash's neat hand. I ripped it open with both impatience and prayer.
My Kavya, he had written in the cramped script I knew so well, the winds are worse than the forecast and the men are tired. We took a knock last night; a man lost his boots and nearly his life to a crevasse. I think of you with every step. Come back when you can. The grove is yours to tend until I return. —S
His words were both a comfort and a recalibration of fear. He had seen the crevasse; he had seen men fall. He had sent the sentence about the grove like a command and a promise. I folded the letter and pressed it to my lips. Somewhere out there a ridge cut the sky and men kept watch on its teeth.
I sat in a small tea shop near the hospital and wrote back on a scrap of the clinic's stationery: Thanks for the fox story you sent last month, I wrote. He would laugh at how many questions I have for him. Bring the fox home if you can. Bring yourself home.
I sealed the note and handed it to the runner, watching as it vanished into the city's fog. And then I sat down and breathed.
The war, even at a distance, collects small pieces of us like a scavenger. It takes sleep, pieces of laughter, and sometimes the steady hands we take for granted. I had gone to the city to hold my mother's palm as the machines hummed their slow measures, but part of me had stayed under lanterns with him and with the men who learned to say my name as a kind of prayer.
The next day I packed a small bag. The doctors at the ward had given my mother a window of stability and, with it, permission to leave. I kissed her forehead and promised to return. I took a set of letters in my satchel, enough to last a week, and a small, ridiculous thing: the silver map pendant that had hung in the clinic, which I slipped into the pocket nearest my heart.
As the train carried me back north, the plains stretched like a page with lines of wire. Each mile felt like a sentence building toward an unknown chapter. I read Shash's letter again and smoothed it with my thumb. Men travel because duty calls; women wait because the heart thinks itself brave. I had been both traveler and anchor. Now I was traveling back to the place where those two might meet or break.
When I stepped off the train at the base station and climbed into the cold air that smelled of iron and pine, I felt the familiar squeeze of anticipation. There are times when returning is more dangerous than leaving: the heart remembers what it has given away. I wrapped my scarf tight and thought of the grove, of lanterns and letters, of Daiwik's quiet proposals for certainty, and of Shash's stubborn vow to be a mountain. Between them I carried my own stubbornness: the refusal to be erased by fear.
There would be news waiting at the clinic, there would be faces I recognized and ones I did not. There would be the continuing calculus of loyalty and love, and a thousand small choices that would bend the arc of the rest of our lives. I walked through the flap of the tent like someone entering a negotiation, a treaty to be signed in small acts of care.
And in my pocket, the pendant warmed against my skin—an iron talisman in a world that required both courage and the dangerous, counterintuitive grace of staying.