"I haven't seen sunlight for a month…
give me poison. It would be kinder than this slow suffocation."
Arjun's voice did not rise, it fractured.
Like something inside him had already collapsed long ago. Once again, his plea for interim bail had been denied.
In a courtroom full of strangers, he stood like a man already erased from his own life.
"I hold no grievance against anyone," he said, each word dragging itself forward.
"I ask for nothing… except release. If not freedom - then death."
"The way they look at me… as if I am less than human.
Their eyes don't just judge, they strip me of whatever I have left."
"I haven't seen the sun in weeks. Time has lost meaning.
My skin rots in this damp darkness… my breath feels borrowed."
For a moment, silence settled like dust.
Then the judge's voice cut through - firm, almost offended.
"You are a soldier. You cannot afford such weakness."
Arjun lowered his gaze.
What he wanted to say remained locked behind his teeth — that soldiers, too, are made of flesh and fracture; that beneath the uniform beats a heart just as fragile, just as breakable.
That they do not only die for the nation —
they also live, quietly, for those who wait for them at home. But truth, he had learned, often arrives too late… or not at all.
When he was brought back to the district jail,
the iron gates opened with a hollow groan —
and closed like the final line of a story no one intended to finish.
Inside stood walls too tall for hope to climb,
watchtowers that saw everything yet understood nothing, and eyes—so many eyes—that measured him, reduced him, condemned him.
Barrack Number 5. Whispers followed him, slithering through the air —
"That's him… the one who killed his wife."
Arjun did not look up.
Some accusations are so heavy, they bend the spine of even the innocent.
This is how it ends, he thought. Not with truth, but with a label.
Prison life did not move, it repeated.
At dawn, a whistle tore through the quiet.
Bodies were counted like objects.
Days were assigned like punishments.
Some cleaned. Some scrubbed. Some chopped wood as if splitting their own past into pieces.
And night…
Night was when the prison revealed its true face.
When the cells were locked, the silence was not empty, it was crowded.
With muffled sobs. With whispered prayers.
With regrets that refused to sleep.
The walls did not just stand — they listened.
And what they heard, they echoed endlessly.
Pain had a voice here. And it never stopped speaking.
On his first day, an old man had asked him,
"What did you do?"
Arjun had stared at the ground for a long time before answering,
"They believe I killed her… but I didn't."
The old man smiled — not with amusement, but with understanding.
"Truth is a luxury here, son. In this place, guilt is not proven, it is assigned."
The words pierced deeper than any accusation.
They called him Madhav Kaka— a man who carried innocence like a quiet burden,
serving time for a crime that belonged to someone else.
Sleep abandoned Arjun that night.
Memories did not.
His wife's voice returned in fragments —
sometimes soft, sometimes distant, sometimes unbearably close.
Then his mother—frail, waiting.
His sister—vulnerable, alone.
And then regret, creeping in like poison —
Why did I come home that day?
Why didn't I choose another path, another moment, another life?
"Why was I forced into that marriage?"
"Did my wishes never matter?"
No one had asked him then.
And no — no one cared to hear him.
She was never happy with him.
That was true.
But was unhappiness a crime punishable by death?
Or worse— by blame?
That question followed him like a shadow that refused to detach.
Every day, it returned—
Am I the criminal… or merely the consequence of circumstances?
The prison walls held his body. But it was his own conscience that imprisoned his soul.
A trial that had no judge. No verdict. No end. He cursed time.
Thirty days of leave in a year—
and even those felt like a mistake now.
It had only been two years since he became an Agniveer.
He remembered his first leave—the hope, the plans, the quiet pride. He had debts to repay. Dreams to rebuild. A family to hold together. But life had unraveled faster than he could mend it.
A father lost to illness. Land mortgaged to survival. A mother broken beyond recovery.
And now—
his own name buried under accusation.
A labyrinth had formed around him—
intricate, invisible, inescapable.
Inside the prison, stories did not live—they bled.
Every wall was stitched with fragments of broken lives. Every cell held a narrative that no one would ever read.
Madhav Kaka would often say—
"These walls can hold our bodies… but never our longing."
"Give a man one more chance," he would add softly,
"and he might rewrite his life into something worth remembering."
At night, when silence deepened into something almost sacred,
the mind grew louder.
Arjun wept quietly— for a mother he could not reach, for a sister he could not protect.
Elsewhere, someone smiled through tears, remembering a child. Someone stared at the sky, bargaining with fate.
Someone crumbled under the unbearable weight of their own past.
Beyond those walls, life continued - indifferent, uninterrupted.
But inside… Time did not move forward.
It circled one question endlessly—
Are they merely criminals…
or human beings waiting to be understood?
They said Arjun had killed his wife.
But the truth was far less simple— and far more tragic.
That marriage had been a slow collapse.
She could never belong to him. He could never reach her.
And somewhere between distance and silence—
they both became prisoners.
Not of law.
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