It wasn't just about spending time with him. Wherever we went, I would spend a couple of hours teaching local children to dance. It is just two months, yes, but there is still a lot you can teach, and Vasant encouraged me in this, helped me make all the arrangements.

I had gone to Kashmir to meet him, in December 2006. I went again in May-June 2007, spent two months there with the kids. When you see it, Kashmir, it is the beauty that strikes you. I would tell him the place is so heavenly, but he could never see the beauty there. For him, it was all about strategy, which gully, which nalla, which peak was a probable route for militants to take; he saw everything in terms of his work, which when you are in a place as beautiful as that with the person you love can be at times a touch frustrating.

What has happened, Vasant used to tell me, was that within Kashmir the army had managed to win hearts. The locals are pro-army, to a considerable majority. And there is nobody from the local people who are now going out to get trained and come back to cause bloodshed.

That is why the mujahideen are finding it such a problem to keep up the supply of terrorists. The feeling among the locals is that it is a futile war, that they can't go up against the Indian Army with any hope of something positive emerging from such a conflict, that the only effect of prolonging this is that their daily lives are disrupted, their livelihood affected. The best thing is to toe the Indian line, to stick with it. The foreign militants who keep coming in have to be curbed, he would say -- track them down, capture or kill them.

I never felt insecure there, ever, never felt afraid though there were all these stories of bombings and shooting and death. I in fact, I even ended up alone on a house boat on Dal Lake, one night. It was late June, towards the end of my visit. Vasant came with me from Uri, where we were living, to Srinagar to see me off.

We decided to spend the last night on a houseboat, hired one, and had reached the middle of the lake when he got this message.

His boys had gotten caught in an ambush -- he had to go, he told me. There were some boats idling in the water, he waved one over, hugged me, stepped off the houseboat and into that boat and went off towards the shore.

That was the last time I saw him, actually -- leaving me on that houseboat, heading back to the shore and into who knew what kind of danger? As it turned out, he went back and that operation was a success. After he died -- in the next operation, as it turned out -- some news reports said he had won a Vishisht Seva Medal for that operation, but he never had, he hadn't won any medals, so we published a correction. Vasant wasn't the type to boast about what he in fact had achieved; he would have hated to be credited with something he had not won.

Image: "Finally, this is all I have left of him," Subhashini Vasant says, pointing to a wood-and-glass box, about one-and-a half foot square, within which lies folded the national flag that draped her martyred husband's corpse. Photograph: Prem Panicker

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