Chapter 35

Naina

Your child is born in the winter months as the snow falls.

The village is cut off from the rest of the world and you deliver your son in your own house with the help of the midwife and many of the community's women.

You are both surrounded and alone, and as you hear your son's first cries, you wish that it could've been different. That you could've delivered him with your friends and family by your side, that his father…

The first thing you notice about your son is that he has his father's eyes, the eyes of a man who might never look upon him. You hold him, staring down at his small face, his hands curled into little fists and his eyes closed in sleep. What does the future hold for him? Will he be happy or like his parents…

You refuse to think it, you refuse to believe that your child will ever suffer as you have suffered. No, he will live well and he will live happily, your fate will not be passed on to him.

You have known what his name would be from the very beginning.

You call him Veer for short.

/

Veer grows quickly and he grows well, becoming the darling of the entire village. He is quick to smile, but prefers to stay by your side, clinging to you with small baby fists, crying if you leave his sight.

You wonder whether he instinctively knows, as babies mysteriously seem to, that neither of you have anybody else in this world except for each other.

There are those that you left behind, but you will not return, not now, not unless…

Unless…

And so much time has passed now that you no longer have the strength to even put your wish into words.

You hope that when Veer grows up he will become anything except a soldier. You don't want him to have anything to do with the army, you don't want him to go through what you and Rajveer and Naveen went through. He can be a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer, a teacher… he can even be a shepherd or a carpenter… you honestly won't mind just as long as he doesn't want to join the army.

Yet somehow, instinctively, you know that joining the army will be the only thing that he will wish to do.

And when they ask his name for admission at the academy, what name shall he give? Ahluwalia, which has shamed the army twice over, or Shekawat, which neither of you can ever hope to properly claim?

Or like you, will your son simply be a 'Singh', his identity hidden from those who refuse to understand?

You will send him to KMA, you decide, even as you keep hoping that he won't wish to go.

You will send him to KMA because you know it's where he belongs, because it was where his father went, his mother went, his uncle went.

And it will serve the bastards right when he becomes best cadet.