Father's last words to soldier son Harkrishan Singh: 'Are you feeling too cold?'

TALWANDI BAHARTH (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 ambushin 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.