(A soldier’s funeral he returned too late to attend)

***

Author’s Note
This poem is an elegy for the silence between duty and love. It belongs to every uniformed heart that returned too late — not from absence of love, but because the nation asked first. This is not a eulogy. It is a still salute to the mother I couldn’t bury, and to all the absences that arrive more whole than presence.

***

I. The Letter Arrived Like Orders

They said she passed in her sleep.
No pain. No noise.
As if stillness could soften separation.

The postman stood at ease,
brief as a bugle,
delivering death like a message already practiced.

A government fold.
Black ink.
Her name, sealed in finality.

I was near Siachen,
where frost eats through the boots,
but the burn was all within.
Rage with no enemy.
Grief with no target.

No tears fell.
Not because I didn’t feel,
but because soldiers are trained
to mourn in silence.
We carry sorrow like a sidearm:
loaded, hidden, released
only when the war within
cannot be won.

We don’t cry.
We leak discipline.
And even that,
too late.

***

II. The Kitchen That Remembered Her Silence

By the time I returned,
the walls had learned her absence.
Rooms echoed her unspoken name.

The kitchen stood still.
Its silence breathed in her voice.

Only the spice box remained loyal.
Seven chambers, each a syllable
in her dialect of love.
Turmeric stains still marked the brass,
like time itself forgot to clean her away.

I held the ladle she once stirred with.
It trembled.
Not from breeze,
but from memory that refused to be history.

Neighbors arrived with steel tiffins.
Condolences disguised as curry.
I ate between breaths.

Grief eats with its hands.
Swallows unchewed.

I found her last sari
by scent, not sight.
Camphor, cotton, and something more.
The pleats still curved
like they remembered her waist.

And all of it,
too late.

***

III. The Pyre That Couldn’t Wait

She once told me,
“If I die while you’re at the border, don’t rush.
The dead understand duty.”

But duty never understood the dead.

The pyre didn’t wait.
Smoke ignored clearance.
Fire never asked for leave approval.

By the time I arrived,
they handed me an earthen pot.
Light in hand.
Heavy in heart.

And I cursed the flames.
Silent, as soldiers do.
For stealing what bullets spared
and duty couldn’t guard.

In the corner where she once prayed,
her altar stood bare.
Except for vermilion still fresh,
like grief that refused to dry.

The tulsi dropped its leaves
with ritual slowness.
A funeral in green,
marking time like my patrol,
leaf by leaf,
a salute to her absence.

***

IV. The Rain That Kept Its Word

On the thirteenth day,
I lit her lamp.
And it rained.

Not fiercely.
Just steady.
Like a soldier’s march
across broken time.

I opened every window.
But grief doesn’t come through doors.
It lives in things that once had sound.

The kettle shrieked.
Not in warning.
In accusation.

Puddles gathered in the courtyard.
Too late to catch her step.
She once swept there at dawn,
anklets drawing rhythms
more precise than any drill.

I looked into the water.
And my reflection fractured.
Half soldier.
Half son.
Both betrayed by timing.

***

V. The Things That Still Need Telling

She comes now.
Not as ghost.
But as grammar.

Correcting my posture
in slouched memories.
Judging my mismatched socks.
Lingering in absences
shaped exactly like her.

The battalion taught me
to guard borders.
But no one trained me
to defend against memory.

It passes without checkpoint.
It brings no weapon,
yet always wins.

She lives in a stove left on,
a collar still crisp,
a pillow with jasmine still clinging.

They say she died peacefully.
But I know better.

Because grief
is not the closing of a door.
It is the wind
that keeps opening it.

The kitchen clock ticks on.
Each second her breath.
Her heartbeat,
in brass.

***

Epilogue: The Salute I Gave Too Late

This is not a eulogy.
It is a uniform,
creased with regret.

This is a soldier
draped in white,
not olive.
The color she wore
when she ran out of prayers.

I raise a salute.
Not to her body,
but to the silence she left behind.

And somewhere between
the discipline of my stance
and the disobedience of my ache,
I feel her.

Light as her scarf.
Firm as her scolding.
Still adjusting the slope of my shoulder.

Not as forgiveness.
There was nothing to forgive.

Just a reminder—
some hands never stop serving.
Some silences
speak in fluent love.

Some absences
arrive more whole than presence.
And some funerals,
the ones we miss,
burn eternal,
a silent pyre within.

***