Bride of war hero for a day, widow for life

Her husband, Dalip Singh of the Rajput Regiment, had left to join his troops the same day she took her first step into her marital home at Jatoli village near Gurgaon. Singh’s leave had been cut short abruptly, owing to an impending threat of war with China.

A veiled Ramavati never got to see her husband. But almost five decades later, she still remembers his parting words to her: “Laut ke aunga tab milenge” (We will meet once I return).

“A few days after he left, I went back to my parents’ home (Bankapur in Gautam Budh Nagar). I used to shuttle between the two villages, counting every passing day for him to return,” she says.

A few days after Singh left, news reached the family that he had gone missing and was feared dead. The family prayed for his life and waited anxiously for good tidings. Five months later, however, in October 1962, news reached Dalip’s village that he was no more, and his memories came home packed in an Army trunk. It was many months later when the family finally disclosed to Ramavati that her husband was dead.

According to official records, the three years of Dalip Singh’s service in the Army ended on October 21, 1962, the day he was “presumed killed in action”. He was a recipient of the Sainya Seva Medal and the General Seva Medal, 1947, with the North East Frontier Agency. The family observes “Shahid Diwas” on October 20, the day China attacked India.

“I did not know how to react to the news. Since I never got the opportunity to actually know my husband, I cannot say I grieved deeply. The thought, however, that I would never be able to dress as a married woman was dreadful,” says Ramavati.

For Dalip’s parents, The news that their young, newly-married son would never return, was a blow too hard to accept.

“For an entire year, my mother, 92 now, would visit the temple and, standing in waist-deep water, pray that her son might return one day,” says Satyapal Singh, the youngest brother of Dalip Singh. “Till his last day, my father went to the nearby Pataudi railway station every evening and waited for the evening train in which faujis came home. He would ask every Army man who alighted at the station for news of those who fought in the 1962 war. He died in 1976.”

“It was only when a road in the village was named after Dalip in 1993 that my mother accepted the fact that her son would never return — after a long wait of 31 years,” he says.

The family thought of Ramavati’s remarriage, but she refused. They finally decided to get their fourth son, Anangpal Singh, married to Ramavati’s sister Mukundi Devi so that she could provide her sister company.

Ramavati spends the meagre amount she receives as pension on her family and at present on the treatment of her sister who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer.