THE PROMISE HE KEPT

EPISODE 2: Dust and Diesel

Here's Episode 2, and I really hope you enjoy where the story goes from here. Let's continue... 📖✨

The field hospital smelled the way it always did — antiseptic fighting a losing battle against dust, diesel, and the sharp tang of tea boiled too many times on the same stove. Aakash had been back three days and already the smell of home was fading out of his skin, replaced by this.

"You're doing the thing," Vikram said, not looking up from the crate of supplies he was inventorying.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you go quiet and stare at nothing for ten minutes and I know you're thinking about her. You did it on the flight in. You did it at breakfast. You're doing it right now."

"I was counting sutures."

"You were counting sutures for four hundred seconds. That is not counting, Aakash, that is longing." Vikram finally looked up, grinning, and there was nothing in his face but pure, uncomplicated delight in teasing his oldest friend. "Marriage has ruined you. You used to be fun."

"I'm still fun."

"You burned the upma story into a whole legend. 'Burnt is how I'll remember the smell of the kitchen.' Who talks like that? A poet who joined the wrong profession, that's who."

Major Kapoor's voice cut through the tent flap before Aakash could retort. "If the two of you are done reviewing each other's marriages, I have actual work." He was a broad, weathered man who had been at this for twenty years and had long since stopped pretending to be anything other than exhausted by it. "Convoy's short two medics for the supply run to the forward post. Vikram, you're on it."

"Me? I'm not even meant to be near the line, sir, I do inventory—"

"You're the one who knows which crate has the plasma and which has spare boots, and I'm not sending someone who'll open the wrong box under fire. It's a supply run, not a patrol. You'll be back by dinner." Kapoor was already walking away. "Four hours, there and back. Don't make me regret trusting you with a truck."

Vikram turned back to Aakash, rolling his eyes with theatrical suffering, but there was an undercurrent of nerves under the joke that Aakash knew well enough to notice. "Back by dinner, he says. Naina's making something elaborate tonight — her sister's visiting, apparently there's a whole production planned. If I miss it I will never hear the end of it."

"You'll make it."

"I know I will. I'm not worried." He said it too quickly, the way people do when they're talking themselves into something. "Four months and then I get to go home and find out if it's a boy or girl. Naina wants to wait and find out at the birth, I want to know now, we've been arguing about it for a week like it's the biggest decision either of us will ever make."

"What do you think it is?"

"Boy. I don't know why, I just — I have a feeling." Vikram closed the crate and sat on it, suddenly looking younger than his years, the way he sometimes did when he talked about the baby. "You know what I want, Aakash? I want to be boring. I want to be the most boring father in Bangalore. School runs and birthday parties and complaining about school fees. I've had enough of interesting for one lifetime."

"You'd be terrible at boring. You'd turn the school run into an adventure."

"Fair point." He laughed, and for a moment the tent felt almost like the colony street they'd grown up on, two boys with nothing more urgent to worry about than cricket scores. "If anything ever happens to me — don't. Don't say it like that, I can see your face doing the thing again."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to make it heavy. I refuse. Nothing's going to happen. It's a supply run." Vikram stood, dusted off his trousers, and clapped Aakash on the shoulder on his way past. "Hold my tea. I'll be back before it's cold."

Outside, the convoy trucks were already idling, engines coughing dust into the white afternoon light.