She Parked a Car With Her Husband. Fifty Years Later, She Is Still Waiting.

Before anything about this blog, its standards, or its arguments, I want to begin with a story; because sometimes a single human life cuts through every debate and reminds us what any of this is actually for.

Damayanti Tambay was 21 years old, a three-time national badminton champion, when she married Flight Lieutenant Vijay Tambay in April 1970. Twenty months later, war broke out. On 3 December 1971, they drove together to a garage in Ambala cantonment to park their bottle-green Fiat. That was the last time she saw him.

On 5 December, flying a strike mission over Shorkot Airbase in West Pakistan, Vijay was hit by anti-aircraft fire and ejected. Radio Pakistan later broadcast his name among those captured. Damayanti heard it alone. She felt relief. A prisoner of war comes home eventually, she thought.

He never did.

A Loving Wife’s Unending Search

She retired from badminton at the peak of her career and spent the next fifty years petitioning prime ministers, defence ministers, army officials; anyone who would listen. In 1989, Vijay’s uncle was taken to a prison in Faisalabad and shown a cell. Inside sat a bearded man in a white kurta, reading a newspaper. He recognised him instantly. He was pulled away before either of them could speak. Damayanti is still looking. She no longer expects him to return. She is looking for closure.

“For me, he was everything and vice versa. If I don’t look out for him, who will?” There are still 54 Indian defence personnel officially unaccounted for after 1971. That fact is not a talking point. It is not a nationalist weapon. It is not an argument to win. It is a moral wound that has not healed.

What is Wrong is Wrong

What was done to Vijay Tambay, and what has been denied to Damayanti for five decades, is not abstract. It does not belong to India or Pakistan as debating positions. It belongs to the category of wrong.

The deepest strands of every serious moral tradition, religious or secular, insist on one principle before all others: the human being cannot be reduced to an instrument of the state. Not to be traded, not to be erased, not to be forgotten because acknowledgement is inconvenient.

Humanity First. That Is What the Divine Asks of Us.

This blog has lately drifted into abstraction; vocabulary, terminology, identity, provocation, counter-provocation. Those discussions matter. Language shapes memory. History shapes politics. But beneath every identity any of us carries, Indian, Pakistani, AASI, diasporic, nationalist, secular, there is a more fundamental layer of moral reality. A woman parked a car with her husband and never saw him again.

If we cannot begin there, if we cannot agree that this is simply, plainly wrong, then no moderation policy, no pledge, no appeal to high signal will repair anything. Before we argue about civilisation, religion, nationalism, or pride, we must recover something more basic: the refusal to let a human life become collateral in rhetoric. Call it simple decency. But start there. Humanity first.