When grief becomes a business, it learns a vocabulary I never wanted to read. Terms like "chain of custody," "forensic confirmatory testing," and "anthropological assessment" slide across forms with polite, neutral cruelty. They are meant to make loss into protocol, to render a personal absence into a sequence of steps. Today I sat across from that language and tried to make it tell me whether the man I loved still breathed somewhere behind the white noise of reports.
I arrived at the operations tent before dawn because the world felt thinner at that hour, as if truth might slip in with the first light. Lanterns smoked in the cold. The colonel's silhouette was already a shape against the maps. He did not look like the same man who had greeted me in earlier months with a gruff nod; the morning had carved new lines into his face.
"Kavya," he said when I stepped in. No flourish — the military never offered flourishes when the work was painful. "We have a team ready to brief you."
I sat and folded my hands in my lap, because it felt better to hold something steady when my stomach wanted to be a volcano. The operations officer laid a folder between us. Inside were photographs — a tangle of cloth, a smear of mud, broken wood — images taken at the clearing site. One picture showed a small silver pendant: the silver map pendant I'd sewed into his gloves the month we'd first agreed we would somehow find each other across all the white spaces.
My first reaction was not relief but a peculiar hollowing, as if seeing it reduced the man to an accessory. The pendant looked cold and foreign in the photograph, nicked and slightly bent, as though the world had tried to rewrite its memory.
"We have sent samples to the lab," the officer said. "Forensic teams are working on identification. They pulled the pendant and several personal items. We are following procedure."
"Who took custody of the items?" I asked, the question a blade sharpened by the ugly press cycle.
He cleared his throat. "Field document. Evidence logged by the clearing patrol and delivered to the forward ops. From there, transferred to the forensic unit at the rear. The proper chain — "
"Proper," I repeated, and my voice sounded like a stone dropped into a well. "Who specifically handled it between retrieval and the rear?"
He blinked, perhaps not used to civilians asking for names. "Patrol leader Singh, then Corp. Arora at forward ops, then Lt. Verma at the field forensic unit."
"Singh?" I said, hearing the name as if I'd found a thread. "As in Aditya Rathore's area?"
"Yes." The officer's tone held a cautiousness that told me what he was not permitted to say: yes, Rathore's unit was in proximity.
Everything else thinned. Rathore, who loved being first in print; Rathore, who had a way of leaning into the microphone as if the whole country were his audience; Rathore, with his polished shoes and appetite for headlines. I folded my hands tighter until the skin around my knuckles went white.
"Have you retained all original documentation?" I asked. "Signatures? Transfer stamps? Seals?"
"Of course," he said. "Everything moves through the chain."
"You'll forgive me if I press," I said. "But when the press ran the 'MIA' then 'KIA' copy yesterday, no one from our side gave permission. I need to know how that leak occurred, and that the evidence is pure."
He hedged, the way men do when they are trying to keep a thousand small obligations from collapsing. "We're investigating the leak, Doctor. We'll trace the chain."
I left the tent with the folder in my hands like contraband. The photographs felt obscene — my grove's lantern turned into a piece of evidence. In my satchel, his letters were a softer, less legal kind of proof. I took them out and smoothed them as if touch could reassert ownership.
The first person I found was Nandini. She'd promised to help while Daiwik kept watch — a doctor who could speak in blunt diagnostics and also, with me, in curses when the fault lay with men who thought themselves gods.
"You look like paperwork," she said without preamble, which is her way of flirting with gravity. She took the folder and riffled through the photos, her brow tightened. "They flattened him into a report."
"That pendant," I said. "Can they match it? Serial marks? Any engraving?"
She peered at the image. The pendant had the tiny scratch I'd made the first night I'd given it to him — a stupid, private nick that never made sense to anyone else. "I see a nick," she said. "But the image is not high resolution. We'll ask for the item in person. Forensically, a pendant can be matched to wear patterns, but it's not absolute."
"Not absolute," I repeated. The vocabulary of uncertainty made my fingers clamp on my paper until they hurt.
I demanded access to the evidence log. It took hours, and every hour felt like squeezing through ice. Names and timestamps appeared, much as they'd said, but there were holes: a transfer stamp padded by an asterisk with a handwritten note that read "temp custody: OS unit." The note was not accompanied by a full signature. Where a soldier's name should have been, there was a code.
"OS unit?" Nandini echoed.
"Operational support," the operations officer had told me earlier. But operational support was a broad category that could mean a dozen things. It could also mean a door left ajar.
The lab said it would take time. DNA from human remains is not instantaneous; mitochondria are stubborn. But there were other doors I could open. I asked to see the personal effects themselves. It was a bureaucratic tug-of-war: evidence in the rear was seldom shown without legal clearance, but someone — mother, fiancée, legal rep — could petition. I wrote my petition in a cramped hand and delivered it to Col. Rajput with the same insistence I used in courtrooms with troubled soldiers.
"You understand the sensibilities," he told me, softer than before. "This is a military operation; some things are classified."
"I understand," I said, "and I also understand that he deserves to be a man who is more than a headline." I pushed the folder back toward him. "Please. Let me see the pendant. Let me see the evidence."
He looked at me long enough for me to see the fatigue that age and duty had pressed into his face. "I will request it," he said finally. "But be careful, Kavya. Forensics don't exist to console."
I smiled a little, because I recognized that he was trying to be kind in a field where kindness was rare.
While the request moved like a slow glacier, Nandini put a call through to a lab contact. She was a surgeon — blunt, effective — and a woman who would not take silence as an answer.
"We'll do wear pattern analysis," she said. "If the pendant matches the way it'd sit under a tunic, and if whatever DNA is clinging to its chain is human, we'll have something to press with."
It was the first star of hope I allowed myself. Not certainty, not even the glow of a candle — but a star.
That afternoon the press vans were still parked at the perimeter like pale beetles. Reporters fluttered like desperate birds. I watched them as I tend to wounds — a boy's frostbitten fingertips, a medic with a concussion, a wife with a telegram already printed in her hand. They asked for statements; I deflected. There are times when the pulls of public opinion are treacherous; I refused to feed them.
Sepoy Arjun came by, hat in hand, less the stoic boy and more the nervous soldier who had seen a man who was both his captain and a gentle giant. "Ma'am," he said, stumbling on the formality. "They say—"
"They say a lot of things," I told him. I found that the simplest honesty—the only one I trusted—was the truth of uncertainty. "We don't know yet."
He looked at me with the raw faith that makes young soldiers the most heartbreakingly brave people on the planet. "I hope he comes back."
"So do I," I said. There was nothing else to give him, so I gave him my hand and the promise to try.
Evening came with a small mercy: the colonel approved temporary supervised viewing. There was a protocol — witnesses from the forensic team, a seal intact, a small chain of custody in triplicate. It felt like a ceremony performed in the wrong church. I signed forms until my fingers cramped. Nandini drove me to the rear by convoy; Daiwik rode in the back, his silence a presence between us that neither of us had the courage to fill.
The forensic tent smelled of bleach and time. The tech who met us had kind, tired eyes and hands that were efficient in the way people become when they handle grief for a living. He laid the pendant on a clean pad.
It was mine, and not mine. Up close, the silver map pendant held the tiny nick I remembered — a shallow gouge along the rim that I'd made hours after we kissed in the grove, when he'd been stubborn and refused to let me stitch warmth into his pockets. Seeing my private nick on evidence was a paradox so sharp I laughed, wet and disbelieving.
"It's his," I said before the tech had spoken.
He nodded. "Possibly. The wear pattern fits someone who kept it under layers of cloth. But we need DNA from the chain and comparison from his dental record, or a scar unique to him. Items can be transferred. It's how troops carry mementos."
"There was a scrubbed note in the transfer log," I said. "Temporary custody by an OS unit. Why?"
He shrugged. "Sometimes forward ops package items and move them internally for security. If it was a sensitive mission—"
"If," I echoed.
I remember the way my hands trembled when I touched the pendant. It was warm where my skin met metal — not warm with life but warmed by the memory of the man who had worn it. I pressed my thumb to the nick as if the gouge might be a fingerprint that would lock him to it forever.
The forensics team allowed me to take a photograph, but not the pendant itself — the evidence remained sealed until DNA clearance. I left the tent with one photograph and a fistful of paperwork that would be used to catalog the rest of my life.
Back at the clinic, the press called more insistently. I gave them an austere statement: we had found personal effects consistent with a missing soldier; formal identification pending. It felt sterile, but it was honest. Honesty is a kind of armor sometimes — thin, but it can deflect the worst of what men like Rathore want to do with a person's absence.
That night I sat beneath the cherry trees and read his letters until the paper went soft under my fingers. The pendant photograph lay on my lap like a talisman. The grove was quiet, the lanterns a ring of small wars against the dark. I folded one of his pages into an envelope and wrote across the outside: If you can, come home. If not, return to me with truth.
When I rose to go back to the clinic, a runner intercepted me — breathless, cheeks pink from the cold. He handed me an unmarked envelope, a small thing that seemed to buzz with importance.
I slit it open with a fingernail. Inside was a single sheet and one line, scrawled in the sharp, cramped handwriting I knew as much as I knew the shape of his forehead in sleep.
Forgive me.
No name. No signature. No explanation. Just the two words — a plea and a command — folded into a paper that seemed suddenly very heavy.
My knees went slack. I pressed the sheet to my chest as if the paper could be a body, and the room spun. I thought of bandages and sutures and the infant mathematics of DNA tests. I thought of Aditya and his need to be first. I thought of Daiwik and the way he'd avoided my eyes this week and the way he had promised to be an anchor.
I did not know what this forgive me meant. I did not know whether it was a confession, a farewell, or the first breadcrumb of a lie. But I did know this: it was written in his hand.
I folded the paper again and slid it into my journal, the place where I kept vows, letters, and the small objects that kept me human. The night outside the clinic felt brittle and enormous—the way the world feels when a storm hasn't yet broken but you can smell the rain.
Some doors had opened today: access to evidence, a peek at a pendant, the confirmation that something bearing his name had been found. Other doors had closed: the full surrender of certainty, the knowledge that a leak had crafted a narrative before the family could be spoken to. And a new, thinly lit corridor had appeared: the small note in his handwriting that demanded interpretation.
There would be tests. Reports. Forensic results dripped out in fragments over the next hours. I would push for every scrap of paper, every name in the evidence log. I would ask for DNA comparison, for chain-of-custody verification, for the person who had the audacity to leak to be held to account. But under all that procedure was a single human question, a bad, relentless one: if the man who had carved my name in his breath still walked, would he forgive me for sitting here and demanding answers? Or would he think, in the way soldiers sometimes do, that I had become part of the machinery he could no longer trust?
I slid the note back into my coat and pressed my hand to the pendant's photograph one more time. The nick in its rim caught the lantern light and glinted like a scar. I whispered into the dark — a promise and a command, the only language that now felt both useful and true.
Find me. Don't make me a headline.