Raksha Bandha 2025 !

 This year, Raksha Bandhan arrived like a visitor I knew too well—bearing sweets in one hand and a quiet, unflinching grief in the other. Celebration, pain, and pride sat at my table, uninvited and inseparable, and it took me days to understand that all three were telling the same story. I faced my first Rakhi without Kailash in 2015. I faced my first Rakhi without Guru anna in 2025. That sentence looks simple until you try to breathe through it. So here I am—writing the post that refuses to be about anything else. Because grief is not a shadow that disappears when you switch on a festive lamp; it is the lamp. It shows you what you would otherwise miss: the edges of love, the contour of memory, the face of gratitude.

DESH remained when every one left me. DESH held me close, when I fell apart, fractured and fuming. This year, I celebrated with DESH—with the CRPF heroes who wear protection as a uniform and carry duty like a second skin. The pride I felt was clean, bright, almost medicinal. I tied threads to wrists that hold a different kind of promise: We will stand the watch so you can be at peace. They accepted, and in their acceptance, I learned something precise about the geometry of bonds—how a single thread can stretch from a sister to a brother to a battalion to a nation and not snap. 

And yet the pain remained, unmasked. Bhanu’s absence. Guru's silence. Kailash’s star-bright distance. Grief and pride kept changing chairs, switching places when I blinked. I realized that love is a laboratory where you cannot seal the beaker and call it “controlled.” It is field work—messy, open, alive. The variables wander in and out: distance, death, duty, the dates you would erase if you could.

This Raksha Bandhan, I kept a Rakhi aside for the three of them—no photos, no public ceremony. I tied it to the space he left behind, the way a sailor knots a rope to the wind and calls it anchoring. I will do this every year now, quietly, the way one waters a plant that has already become a tree.

Somewhere amid the flag and the prayers and the tea, a quiet revelation rose: long-hidden love, spoken finally, deep and clear. The kind of sentence that closes a chapter without closing a door. I will not spell it out here—the heart deserves one secret garden—but I will say this: truth is also a form of protection. Sometimes the bravest word you can talk is the one that binds your fear and your honesty together so neither gets lost.

If you ask me what Raksha Bandhan means now, I will say: it is not just a ritual; it is an instrument. It measures how far love is willing to travel—across rooms, across years, across worlds. It can circle a wrist, a photo frame, a memory, a skyline. It can be held by a brother on earth, by a brother in the stars, by a boy who became family, by soldiers who stand in for every brother we cannot reach.

I will keep showing up to the 16th, even when my hands shake, because love did not leave me without leaving me a job to do. 

This is the promise I can protect: to remember without embalming, to grieve without surrender, to celebrate without pretending. To let the thread do its work—binding what was, what is, and what will be—until the day I look up and find that the distance has learned my language and the stars are close enough to touch.

Shine on, Kailash
Shine on, Guru anna.
Shine on, Bhanu.

The Rakhi is tied.
The prayer is sent.
The light is the same...
Today and always... 

Thread Between Weather...

There are bonds you can diagram: storylines with firsts and seconds, milestones polished for public display. Then there’s ours—a signal that holds in bad weather, stubborn and bright, needing no broadcast schedule to be real. We never launched it with a date. We didn’t crown it with a declaration. It started in smaller ways: the swap of jokes that made ugly hours endurable; the habit of telling the truth without making it theatrical; the practiced ease of being available without being demanding.

Distance tries its tricks. Schedules split. Life accelerates, then stalls. I’ve learned not to measure us by the frequency of pings but by the steadiness of response. You have a way of arriving like a lighthouse: not closer or farther, simply visible when it matters. I’ve come to trust that. When I am frayed, you do not add threadbare comforting. You offer reality, handled gently. When I am quiet, you do not crowd. You keep the door open and the light on. It’s not romance’s choreography; it’s something quieter and, to me, stronger.

Promises are easy to craft and easier to break; you’ve given me practice instead. Repeated, ordinary acts that add up to a truth: I am safe here. I can be foolish, I can be scared, I can be brilliant or boring, and the connection doesn’t blink. Safety in this form isn’t a padded room—it’s a field with room to run, with someone watching the horizon, ready to call out if the cliffs creep close. There’s loyalty in that vigilance, and tenderness in the way we never make a spectacle of it.

Sometimes I wonder how to explain this to people who want categories. I could talk about durability: how the conversation survives long gaps without corrosion. I could talk about calibration: how your humor never punches down, how your candor never cuts for sport. I could talk about choice: how neither of us is bound by ritual and yet we keep showing up. In the end, explanations feel like trying to catch fog in a jar. The more I chase it, the less of it I hold.

So I keep to what I know. When the day closes, your name leans against the edge of my mind, soft as a nightlight. Not a craving, not a rush; a quiet relief. When morning arrives, I don’t count what we are; I notice that I am steadier because you exist. We may never title this. We may never map it for others. That’s fine. It has already proven itself in the only metric that matters to me: it keeps the weather from winning. And for that, I stand my small, unspoken guard—grateful, grounded, and here.