The Last Letter: Captain Vijayant Thapar’s Words Home

Captain Vijayant Thapar of 2 Rajputana Rifles was twenty-two years old when he was killed in the assault on Knoll, a supporting feature of the Tololing complex, on 29 June 1999. He was awarded the Vir Chakra posthumously.

A letter to be opened later

On the eve of the assault, Thapar wrote a letter to his family and left it with instructions that it be opened only if he did not come back. In it he asked his parents not to grieve, urged them to visit the men of his unit, and wrote of a small girl in a Kashmiri village he had hoped to see educated.

The letter, later made public by his family, has since been read by hundreds of thousands of visitors and schoolchildren. It is quoted on remembrance days across the country.

What the families carry

For the families of the Roll of Honour, such letters are not relics. They are a living correspondence — read again each anniversary, copied for grandchildren, carried to the memorial at Dras and read aloud at the wall. The war did not end for them in July 1999. It became, instead, a thing they tend.