About the Book
What the War Left Behind
A collection of 21 poems examining the profound echoes of conflict — not the noise of battle, but the silence that follows it.
Where Guardians in the Gale stood at the border and watched the storm, In the Absence of Gunfire turns homeward — to the folded uniform, the unanswered letter, the empty chair at the table. These verses focus on the internal lives and enduring sacrifices of soldiers and their families, capturing the quiet battles fought long after the gunfire fades.
It is a book about what remains: grief that learns to walk, love that refuses to end, and the slow, dignified courage of those who carry a nation's cost in private. Written from the same place of remembrance that shaped his debut, this second collection deepens Siddhant Kumar's tribute to the unseen price of freedom.
"Peace is not the absence of war. It is everything war forgot to take."
The Heart of It
Themes & Threads
Homecoming
The soldier who returns, and the one who returns only in memory — and how a home holds both.
The Waiting
Mothers, partners, and children who live a war they never fought, measured in doorbells and silence.
Aftermath
What grief becomes when it has nowhere to go — and how it learns, slowly, to become something like grace.
Remembrance
The names history forgets, and the small acts of keeping them alive against the pull of time.
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