GURDASPUR: Sepoy Harkrishan Singh’s last video chat with his father, ex-serviceman Mangal Singh, from Poonch in J&K had ended with the latter asking: “Are you too cold that you need to wear that coat?”
Little did either of them know that the cold blast of an unseen tragedy would strike them in a few hours.
Harkrishan was among the five Rashtriya Rifles soldiers killed in a terrorist ambush that set their truck aflame along a mountain path at Bhata Dhurian in Poonch district of Jammu division.
The slain 25-year-old sepoy’s father, who had jocularly asked his son about feeling “too cold” because the weather back home in Punjab’s Gurdaspur was making him sweat, can’t help but replay that final conversation in his head, as if to find any clues that he might then have missed.
“We last saw him around 12pm. He asked about our well-being and talked to everyone in the family. He was wearing a warm coat; so when I asked him about it, he said it had been raining since morning,” Mangal recounted.
Harkrishan, a native of Talwandi Bharath village in Fatehgarh Chrian tehsil of Gurdaspur, was to become a father for the second time in about four months. He and his pregnant wife Daljit Kaur have a year-and-a-half-old daughter, Khushpreet.
Daljit could barely speak between her tears as relatives and neighbours milled around her Friday. Khushpreet kept asking when her father would return home. He had last visited his family in February.
Mangal said he was proud that his son, who joined the armed forces around five years ago, died in the line of duty. “I want all my children to follow in his footsteps and serve the nation,” he declared.
Little did either of them know that the cold blast of an unseen tragedy would strike them in a few hours.
Harkrishan was among the five Rashtriya Rifles soldiers killed in a terrorist ambush that set their truck aflame along a mountain path at Bhata Dhurian in Poonch district of Jammu division.
The slain 25-year-old sepoy’s father, who had jocularly asked his son about feeling “too cold” because the weather back home in Punjab’s Gurdaspur was making him sweat, can’t help but replay that final conversation in his head, as if to find any clues that he might then have missed.
“We last saw him around 12pm. He asked about our well-being and talked to everyone in the family. He was wearing a warm coat; so when I asked him about it, he said it had been raining since morning,” Mangal recounted.
Harkrishan, a native of Talwandi Bharath village in Fatehgarh Chrian tehsil of Gurdaspur, was to become a father for the second time in about four months. He and his pregnant wife Daljit Kaur have a year-and-a-half-old daughter, Khushpreet.
Daljit could barely speak between her tears as relatives and neighbours milled around her Friday. Khushpreet kept asking when her father would return home. He had last visited his family in February.
Mangal said he was proud that his son, who joined the armed forces around five years ago, died in the line of duty. “I want all my children to follow in his footsteps and serve the nation,” he declared.
