Sometime in 1997, an army officer and his artistically-inclined wife discussed the army wife, discussed how the woman who stayed home was in reality as strong, as courageous, as the man who went away to risk his life in service of his country.
The thought "marinated" in their minds for years, occasionally resurfacing in their conversations -- until, early in 2000, their thoughts crystallised to the point where they seriously contemplated crafting a play.
From that point on, the couple began working on the play. The wife did the actual writing -- but every stage, every piece of key dialogue and action, every plot point, was discussed by the couple as a unit.
By late June, 2007, the play was mostly complete -- what was left was the climax. She wanted it to be upbeat; he felt it was better, more pointed, if the hero died. The play titled The Second Front was after all about three generations of women, from pre-Independent India through the Kargil war, who were struck by the tragedies of Life and Death and how each showed the strength to overcome. And death was after all the ultimate tragedy an army wife had to cope with, he argued passionately during the phone calls he made from his base.
Finally, sometime in the third week of July 2007, his point of view prevailed. Back home, she wrote that final scene. The play was finished to her satisfaction -- and when, over the next three days, she read him extracts and discussed key moments, he said he was satisfied, too.
On July 31, Subhashini Vasant answered a knock on the door of her parents's home, in the Sanki Road area of Bangalore. On the doorstep stood officers from the Bangalore army cantonment -- and when she saw them, she knew.
Her husband Colonel Vasant Venugopal, commanding officer of the Ninth Battalion of the Maratha Light Infantry, was never coming home again.
For one bizarre moment before grief swamped the senses and overwhelmed conscious thought, even as the officers confirmed in sympathetic words what she already knew in her mind and heart, she thought: 'Oh god -- that play I wrote, it is actually about me!'
That day, Colonel Venugopal had led his men into a forest in the Uri sector, acting on information that a group of terrorists were attempting to sneak back across the border. In the fierce firefight that followed, the officer was hit, but fought on till the eight infiltrators were wiped out. Before he could be conveyed to the camp hospital for treatment, however, he succumbed to his wounds.
They say of some army personnel that the uniform becomes them, that they wear it like their skin. Talk to Subhashini Vasant, to his parents and hers, and to those who knew him well, and a picture emerges -- not of a man who wore the uniform like a second skin, but of one for whom the uniform was in fact the skin.
He became it, they say, because he was it. He was not just in the army -- he was the army, heart, mind, body and soul.
His mother speaks of how her Vasant, then aged four, declared while the nation was in the grip of the 1971 war against Pakistan that he wanted to be a soldier when he grew up.
Dismiss that, if you will, as the sort of thing parents say when their daughter has just won Miss Universe -- 'She always wanted to be a beauty queen, even from age three.' But Subhashini, who lived with him for 15 years and who knew him from the time she was 14, says hyperbole had nothing to do with it -- her Vasant, she says, was first, last, and always, a soldier.
That is the nature, then, of the man who laid down his life in July last year, fighting terrorism at its most virulent. He left behind two daughters -- Rukmini, 10, and Yashoda, 7 -- and his wife of 15 years, Subhashini.
If you had to describe her in a word, that word would be: Steel.
There is a quiet, indefinable strength about her, a courage, which defies descriptors, eludes adjectives. On the morning of January 23, she sat on a swing, in the informal living space off to the side of the formal living room in her parents's home, talking to us of the man she loved and had so recently lost. She is precise, articulate, eloquent -- and always in steely control of herself, of her emotions.
It was the first time she was talking to anyone outside of the family and friends, and there was about the scene a domesticity at startling variance to the subject of conversation. Her mother interrupted occasionally to serve tea or to remind her that she needed to pack -- she was due to fly to New Delhi next morning, for two days of rehearsals and, on January 26, the formal event when she would receive, from the hands of the President, the Ashok Chakra, the nation's highest honour for gallantry in peace time.
She dealt, with affectionate good humour, the playful demands of Yashoda -– currently at home recuperating from chickenpox -- that she needed neem leaves in her bath water, and oh maybe she didn't want a bath after all and no, she didn't want breakfast if there was no Nutella in the house.
And in between all of this, for an hour-and-a-half, she spoke in a clear, calm voice. Just every once in a while, she would look away, or up at the ceiling; just every once in a while, moisture would dim the natural brightness of her eyes.
Each time, she regained her composure, swallowed the catch in her throat, absorbed the tears that threatened to spill over -- and picked up the conversational thread without missing a beat.
The normal practice is to reduce such interactions into a 'story' -- a narrative in which you synthesise, editorialise, summarise words and thoughts and impressions and season them with carefully chosen sound-bytes.
But that brings us to the other thing about Subhashini, besides steel: She is articulate, with a quick mind that cuts to the heart of the matter and a voice that speaks with rare eloquence.
Hence, this: Subhashini Vasant, widow of the late Colonel Vasant Venugopal, in her own unedited, unfiltered, voice. Listen to a hero speak about her hero:
Image: Subhasini Vasant and her daughter Yashoda. Photograph: Prem Panicker
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