Uttarkashi: Tears rolled down her eyes as she staggered and could barely speak a word when 65-year-old Amra Devi saw the photograph of her martyred husband Sundar Singh for the first time – 47 years after his death did them part.Devi was just 18 when her husband belonging to The Brigade of the Guards regiment became the solo martyr of Indo-Pak war from Uttarakhand’s Uttarkashi district.In 1971, the couple had barely got married when he had to leave for the war. There was no time for the customary wedding photo which couples in the remote hill region then got clicked at a studio in the nearby Dunda town.Her husband, then 20, was killed somewhere in East Pakistan and his body was buried there.Soon after the news of his death, she had begun her quest to see him one last time. She contacted the district administration but the DM’s office also didn’t have any photographic record of the martyr and, hence, he remained unseen for decades.After a long struggle, the Directorate of Soldier Welfare and Rehabilitation Department (DSWRD) came to her rescue. When the board came to know of her request from the district administration officials, they started contacting the martyr’s friends from the regiment and they in turn went through the records in the regiment’s headquarters in Maharashtra. He was finally found in one of the group photos in the regiment’s records.On the occasion of Vijay Diwas on Sunday, the district administration officials gifted the photo, though a blurry one, to the widow who then paid floral tributes to the war hero.A look at her husband’s photo for the first time in her life brought both tears and smile on her face. Nearly five decades is a very long time. Teenager Amra Devi is now 65 with a failing memory.“All these years, I had even forgotten how he looked and how he talked, but now he seems alive all over again. I was a newlywed at that time with dreams like all others. With the news of his death, a part of me died. But I always wanted to see him once,” said the widow who waited for almost five decades for this moment.“This is the best gift of my life and I will be forever grateful to the administration and the Army board for doing this for me. This was the best way I could pay him a tribute,” she said.Sainik welfare board officer DD Pant told TOI, “Singh got martyred in December 1971 and since then Devi has been waiting to see him one last time. We have been trying to help her for the past many years but failed to do so earlier. We even tried to draw Singh’s portrait but neither Devi nor any villager remembered his face. However, this time we got lucky. We found a group photo of senior officials of the regiment from during the 1971 war and identified Sundar Singh. Since this photograph is blurry, we are now planning to draw a portrait from this photo and gift it to her soon.”

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