The radio in the mess tent had a way of turning ordinary mornings into long, slow collapses. It would blurt out schedules, ration changes, the weather—small things that had always kept us floating. That morning it carried a different freight, and I heard the words as if through water: ...confirmation received... remains recovered... fatality confirmed...
For a moment I thought my ears had betrayed me. I was in the intake tent, stapling a patient's file, when the voice rolled across the canvas and something in the world rearranged itself. The pen slipped from my fingers and skittered across the table. The thin metal sound of the stapler echoed like a far-off bell.
"MIA is now KIA," someone said behind me, as if the three-letter acronym could be folded and repacked like laundry. The sentence had the flat cadence of men who deliver orders and not the tremor of those who deliver sorrow.
I did not move at first. The clinical part of me catalogued possibilities—miscommunication, propaganda, error—and the other part of me, the one that held his letters in a pocket close to my heart, remembered every promise. I felt, in a single, ridiculous instant, the absurd arithmetic of it: how many times had I read his name this week? How many times had I counted his stamps, smoothed the crease of paper that smelled faintly of gun oil and pine? The world, which used to be an array of small certainties—tea, tape, bandages—split into before and after.
"Kavya?" Lieutenant Singh's voice hovered near my shoulder. He was saying my name the way people say a diagnosis. "You okay?"
I could not answer. I folded the file back into the drawer, hands shaking. When I finally turned, there was Daiwik standing at the tent flap, the pale dusk of dawn still clinging to his boots. His face had the tired, old look of someone who had been carrying a secret and could no longer pretend it was light.
"They've... updated the feed," he said, as if this phrase could be an anchor. "The press ran it. Command is—" He stopped, swallowing the rest.
"Who confirmed?" I demanded. The question had a hard edge. In my head I ran through names: operations officer, forward commander, some press liaison with clean shoes and a manicured pen. Surely there had been a mistake.
Daiwik's jaw flexed the way it did when he restrained a confession. "There was a report from the forward patrol. They recovered remains during clearing operations. Identification is pending but... the line says Major Rajput's unit took the brunt."
Identification pending. Two words designed to cushion an implosion. I wanted him to say there was confusion, that it was a clerical error, that a radio technician with a bad connection had mangled the line. I wanted anything other than the low, certain tone that now sat in the tent like a bruise.
"Show me," I said, the words a demand and a plea braided together. "Take me to the operations tent."
Daiwik hesitated. Even in the best of us there are protocols. Even in the fiercest of loves, there are procedures to be performed, channels to be followed. He looked at me with a weariness that made his features look younger and older at once.
"Kavya—" He began.
"Please," I said again, and the single syllable broke something in both of us. He folded; he moved with the efficiency of someone who has learned to make hard choices quickly. We walked the short distance in a silence wet with cold.
The operations tent smelled of maps and coffee and a bureaucracy pretending to be a heartbeat. Colonel Rajput sat behind the fold of his command table, hands on a mug of tea gone cold. He did not look at me at first; his gaze was on the map spread like a pale continent across the canvas. The colonel's face is carved from a kind of restrained winter—lines that say grief does not make a man loud. When he finally looked up, his eyes were small, like a man trying to keep a storm weathered and neat.
"Kavya," he said simply, as if names could be scaffolding. "Sit."
My knees protested but obeyed. I sat because there is a ritual in being told to sit down to bad news. It is a way the world announces that it will deliver sorrow with manners. The colonel folded his hands.
"We received a report during clearing operations at grid sector—" he paused to scan the page in front of him, to show me the language had been chosen, "—and found human remains consistent with a combat fatality. There are personal effects." He looked at me; his voice softened with the briefest flinch of something private. "They found a locket."
I felt my lungs stumble. A locket. The small silver map pendant I had given him, the one he toyed with in his letters—always near his heart. I had imagined a thousand ridiculous ways he kept the pendant—tucked beneath his tunic, bound in a cloth, folded in a pocket near an unsent poem. That tiny, intimate thing had become an evidence tag in somebody else's folder.
"Identification is underway," the colonel continued. "I am deeply sorry, Kavya. Protocol requires we wait for formal confirmation before notifying family, but the press has picked up an unverified feed. We are trying to control the narrative so that families are informed properly."
Control the narrative. My teeth ground at the phrase. The leak had already done its damage—Aditya had his byline, the city had its headline—but here in the tent the machinery of grief was being assembled with steady hands: lists, phone trees, notices. The colonel's method of grief was efficiency and procedure. I admired him for doing it; I resented the system for smoothing over edges with such composure.
"Can I see the effects?" I asked. The voice that answered was smaller than I felt. I wanted to touch the pendant I had given him, to confirm that the metal was still warm with his imprint.
"We have to follow the chain," the colonel said. "Identification comes back through the proper forensic channels. We will... we will inform family first. I won't allow the press to—"
The words stopped. The tent seemed to shutter and echo. I left without waiting for the formalities. Outside, the wind had found new cruelty; it pressed like a hand against my cheeks.
They tried to keep me in the clinic that day—the kind faces of medics and orderlies, the thin logic of staying safe while decisions aggregated upstairs. But safety is a poor counterweight to the ache for one human life. I went into the grove because that is the only refuge I own; the little stump where I'd sat with a thousand letters felt like a meeting place for memory. Lanterns still hung there, wickless now, their ribbons frozen. I pulled the locket from my pocket and held it between both palms, the metal warm where my skin met it.
I read his letters in the order you read scripture—slowly, reverently, trying to find meaning in the hand that had written the lines. There was one I had not yet opened because the seal had been stubborn that morning months ago. I broke it now. The first line sang bright: I carve your name in my breath. He had written other things—foxes in the snow, a ridiculous sketch of a grove with two lanterns, the sentence: Promise me you will not be a monument to me; promise me you will live. It hit me like a blade. Live. As orderlies buzzed and the colonel assembled statements upstairs, the man who loved me asked me to keep living. How do you keep living when the world insists on presenting you with a body of evidence that proves you are to be alone?
Daiwik found me in the grove hours later, his face the color of paper left too long in the sun. He sat down on the stump beside me as if we were still partners in some small conspiracy. He handed me a mug of tea that smelled of smoke and charity.
"They called me before the press," he said. "Operations told me they'd found remains. There was a locket. The identification team is en route."
"Why did the press have it first?" My voice had edged up into an animal note. It wasn't just a question of process; it was a question of humanity. Who had decided a man's fate should be a headline before the people who loved him had been told?
Daiwik's eyes dropped. He did not answer at first. The pause hollowed me. I had lived long enough now to read people's faces; his told a story of compromise.
"Kavya," he said finally, in a voice I recognized as the careful edge he used when he was about to make something small into truth, "there are things they aren't telling us. Some missions—some operations—are designated sensitive. If something is politically useful, or if an officer wants visibility—" He swallowed. "It's complicated."
"Complicated." The word was a thin curtain. I had to tear it. "Is someone lying?"
Daiwik avoided my gaze. "Possibly," he said. "Or possibly someone is trying to protect an operation's secrecy by controlling what goes out."
"Or," I said, because I could not stop the way my anger sharpened into the shape of a question, "someone got first and decided to tell the world before they told us."
He flinched as if I'd struck him, then folded. "Aditya's been... very active. He's been pushing for stories. He's charming the PR folks."
Aditya Rathore. The man with the slicked hair and a taste for headlines. I wanted to find him and tear the lie from his mouth. But the grove is a small world; it is not the place where I could wage war on ambition with a voice and not lose my temper in front of friends who still wanted to be friends.
"Did you see Shash?" I asked, and the weight of the question pressed at days when he had been gone but writing. Did you hold him? Did you treat him? The sick, private part inside me already knew the answers I feared.
Daiwik's hand found mine and squeezed. "I was with him before the mission. He gave me a locket to keep if something went wrong—" He faltered. "He told me not to tell you anything if orders required silence."
Something in me crumpled at that sentence. It was not betrayal in the immediate sense; it was the terrible logic of war that turns people into keepers of secrets as if that somehow shields what is delicate. "He told you to lie."
"No." Daiwik's voice was a whisper. "He told me to follow orders."
Orders. The word sat between us like a wall. I thought of all the times I had told other people to trust systems, to follow channels. Systems protect institutions and institutions sacrifice people to stay intact. He had asked Daiwik, in the only way a soldier can, to obey the chain—and Daiwik had obeyed.
"If they told you he was alive," I said slowly, tasting each syllable, "did you tell me?"
Daiwik's eyes filled. "I didn't have confirmation. I was told waiting for confirmation was the only way. If I—if I had said something that wasn't cleared, it might have put the operation at risk."
"Or it might have saved him from being a headline," I whispered, and the words cut like a frostbite.
He leaned his forehead to the stump and made a sound that was half apology and half prayer. "Kavya, I thought—God, I thought I was protecting you."
"By hiding the fact my lover might be alive?" The sentence felt obscene even as it came out. Protecting me from pain by letting me be broken felt like violence I would not consent to.
Daiwik reached for the mug and I watched his knuckles white on the paper cup. "I was trying to keep the operation from being compromised. I didn't think about your right to know."
It was, in its own awful way, an argument for the lesser of evils. But there is no lesser of two evils when the choice is between a woman's right to grieve on her own terms and someone else's calculation about media cycles.
Night fell around us with the suddenness of a decision. The headlamps of official vehicles painted the sky a harsh white as families began to arrive—men and women who had not expected to be called to the tundra of loss. They clustered at a respectful distance, faces shocked into theater. A mother behind a father gripped his arm; the husband of a soldier folded in on himself, the way men fold in on loss. The press trucks stayed at the perimeter, lenses pointed like beaks.
I clutched the locket until it warmed my palm with my own blood. I thought of the way he had once written about returning from the pass and bringing me a fox if he could. How trivial that seemed now—how monstrous, in its smallness, that my life could be reshaped by an inked line on a feed.
"You're going to fight this," Daiwik said, surprisingly steady.
"You mean fight for what?" I asked. Was it the truth? Was it the right to see what they had found? Was it the right to keep him from becoming someone else's tidy tragedy?
"For answers," he said. "For a proper identification. For control over who tells his story."
His last words landed with a clatter. Control the story. I had not realized until that moment how precious authorship could be when it came to the life and death of the person you loved. If other men wrote the narrative, they could claim the truth as a trophy. I would not have that.
I slept in fits that night; the letters were a stack of small islands on the cot beside me. In the gray hours I wrote until my hand cramped, drafting a letter I did not send—half instructions, half accusation. I wrote with the neatness of a woman who understands that sometimes a document is the only instrument the world respects. I would request formal confirmation. I would demand that protocols be followed before the city turned my private absence into public spectacle. I would ask for the chain of custody, for the list of items recovered, for a forensic report.
And beneath every bureaucratic edict I would hide the sentence that mattered: I love him. Bring him back whole or tell me the truth so I can fold him into the life we built.
Dawn would come too soon and, by then, the world had already made its choice to talk. But words can also be tools. If men in polished boots wanted headlines, then I would write the counter-story in a language they could not ignore: the language of paperwork, of proper channels, of witnesses and lists. If they preferred a tidy narrative, I would ask for the receipts.
The radio called my name at dawn—not an official but a runner. A sealed envelope in his hand carried a thin strip of truth: formal notice that remains had been found and sent for identification. No name, no seal with the certainty I wanted. The air inside my chest remained raw.
As I tucked the sealed letter into my journal, folding the world of ink and paper around the uncertainty, I made a promise—not the gentle vow I carved into letters for him but a fiercer one, edged and insistent: I would not let strangers make a martyr of him on false terms. If they had decided his life story was a commodity, I would take up pen and procedure and force them to reckon with the human cost.
Somewhere beyond the ridge men waited in the white. Somewhere beyond the radio a man had perhaps staged an exit, or perhaps been felled. The only thing I could hold for certain was the heavy weight of the pendant at my chest and the way his name felt like a bell I could not stop tolling.
I stood, folded the letter into my coat, and walked back toward the clinic—the place where small acts could still ward off despair. There were patients to see, bandages to change, breaths to teach. The world insisted on carrying on, and love, stubborn as frost, insisted on surviving by doing the same.
When the clock hands slid toward the hour of official notification, the press vans would line up. Men in pressed uniforms would make statements that would be quoted in the city and then vanish into memory. I would be there, pen at the ready, not as an accessory to grief but as its informed custodian. They might try to write his end as spectacle; I would make sure his end was a matter of record. That much—at least—was still mine to do.