"It's A Lonely Road. I've Lost My Best Friend": Brig LS Lidder's Wife On Preserving His Legacy

"It's never going to be easy. We are never going to stop missing him," Geetika Lidder says. It has been over a month since the Coonoor crash tragedy claimed the lives of 14, including her husband. She has not prayed since December 8, the day her life was altered forever.

Brigadier LS Lidder, fondly known as Toni to those who knew him, was the Defence Assistant to General Bipin Rawat, India's Chief Of Defence Staff (CDS). Both were among the casualties last month when an Air Force chopper on its way to Wellington crashed in the Nilgiris area. General Rawat's wife Madhulika was also on board. There were no survivors.

For Geetika Lidder, her teen daughter Aashna is currently the centre of her world. In a heartrending visual, not long after she bade her father farewell, the young girl had faced the camera and moved a whole nation to tears when she spoke with maturity about how she would miss her hero, her best friend.

"I'm trying to be the best friend for her now," Geetika says in an interview with SheThePeople. 

Aashna has a lot of 'whys' that Geetika has no answers to, but when her daughter grieves, she tells her, "I'm not the first or last woman who is widowed. You are not the first or last child who has lost her father. If it has happened to us, it has happened. We have to go on from here."

"I think it's him who gives me that strength," she tells us.

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Born into an army family herself, Geetika says she knew what she was stepping into when she married her beloved Toni at the young age of 22. The two met in Pune when she was completing her 12th grade and Lidder was visiting a neighbour of hers. A friendship sparked and soon blossomed into romance. Geetika, then all of 17, says, "I was pretty swept off my feet. He was a charmer!"

She was pursuing an MBA when she brought up marriage at home. Upon telling her parents it was an army man she wanted to spend her life with, "all hell broke loose." She recalls her father telling her, "We have not brought you up to be a soldier's wife. You're way too accomplished... you won't be content."

But she was resolute. Having grown up in similar circumstances, holding her mother up as a successful example of what life would look like as an army man's wife, Geetika had no second thoughts.

"If not him, then no one," she asserted. Time and patience worked in their favour and the two tied the knot in 1996.

In the early years of their marriage, the Lidders tried to find their footing between a wife who was working and a husband often away on military assignments. Geetika points out also that in the 1990s, neither were the technology and automation good nor the money.

"It was a very hard time," she recalls. But there was never a crib. Love always found a way.

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Geetika Lidder Interview: One Month After The Coonoor Tragedy

"I used to write to him everyday," she says. "If he was away for two or three months even, he would get as many letters." At Lidder's posting in Arunachal Pradesh in 1999, he was on a chopper-maintained post miles away while Geetika used to stay at the base camp. With a chuckle, she thinks back to how she spoke to him over a telephone magneto or a war phone.

"We took everything well in our stride. That's how we lived."

The two became parents to a daughter, their only child, in 2004. Aashna, Geetika says, had the stoic military man wrapped around her little finger. Father and daughter were very close; both type A, headstrong personalities. "Khud se miliye," Geetika used to tell her husband.

She remembers him as a whacky-humoured, large-hearted man who liked to live king size and was always the life of the party. In fact, Geetika says, to friends, the Lidder house was always the "party house."

The residence was brimming with people in the week of Lidder's death. Someone remarked on the lavish, well-stocked liquor cabinet, prompting Geetika's mother to say that given its disuse now, the cabinet was better off cleared out and locked up.

Geetika refused. "It's Toni Lidder's house! It has to be the way it was."

"It cannot be the same," she tells us. "I am a single woman. We cannot have the same kind of lifestyle, but we have some good friends. I tell Aashna we will keep it as normal as we can. We will dress up, we will go out... the way he wanted his baby to be brought up."

PTI reported earlier this month that the Haryana government, under the Sainik and Ardh Sainik Bal's ex-gratia policy of providing financial assistance to families of martyrs, approved Rs 50 lakh for Brigadier Lidder's family and a government job for one of his dependents.

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December 8, When Life Changed Forever

Geetika is a teacher at a school in Delhi. She was in a meeting when her phone rang at around half past one on December 8. It was a friend of the couple. "Ma'am have you watched the news?" he asked her. No, she said. He was silent for a bit. She knew her husband was flying to Wellington that day. But nothing struck her as odd at that moment. And definitely not the worst.

"The CDS' chopper has had a bad landing," the friend said. Geetika remained unsuspecting. It was the "military grit and optimism" in her that allowed her to shrug it off, thinking the uniformed passengers on the Mil Mi-17V-5 would escape - jump off, "maybe break a bone."

The friend on the phone said he was coming home. Soon, more people came and then some more. "It was then that I understood that it's not very good news," Geetika says.

The ">Air Force chopper took flight that day a little after 11:45 AM and was scheduled to arrive at its destination at 12:15 PM. Only a few minutes and miles away from its final stop, the chopper crashed on the outskirts of Nanjappachatiram following an unexpected change in weather conditions. Media reports emerged in the next half an hour and a few hours later, the casualties were confirmed in an official statement from the army.

"That moment is frozen for me," Geetika says, the one we see in movies. The most dreaded moment of a military wife's life. "If a uniformed officer comes to the house and straight to you and takes off his cap, you know what it means."

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For Geetika, it's a lonely road ahead, she says. "Kaam toh ho hi jaate hain... Everybody gets by. Nobody dies with their dead." Heartbreaking photos from Brigadier Lidder's funeral had surfaced on December 10, with all of India joining the surviving mother-daughter duo, bidding their best friend a tearful goodbye at his coffin, in their grief.

Their pain was palpable. And yet, as the country mourned, Geetika picked herself up and consoled it. "We must give him a smiling send-off," she said in an address that so wholly symbolised that rare breed of valour found only in the army and their kin.

At the end of the day, she says now, "I have lost my best friend. I won't get this friendship. So many times in the day I feel, 'Oh, I must tell Toni.' And suddenly I realise, no. I can't tell this to him anymore. Maybe he knows, maybe he's watching."

Brigadier Lidder's high-spirited legacy of extravagance is what Geetika hopes to preserve.

"I want to keep the love people had in their hearts for him alive. There was a lot of laughter, cheer, anecdotes. Time will fade a lot of this and people forget. But I would definitely want to keep his name, his love, the way people remember him... I want to keep that alive. That was the most special part of him - the way he could reach out. He was a tiger."

She wants, "After ten years also if I say I'm Mrs Lidder, somebody will say, 'Oh, we knew your husband'."

"His aura is there everywhere," Geetika says, cherishing the memories and goodwill her husband left her with. For her, it was neither the destination that was important nor the journey. It was the company. "It's not an easy life. But I also know I'll get by."