19 September — 21 October 1947
The lamp on Anirban's desk had burned long enough to make the paper edges glow. It threw a pool of yellow across maps that smelled faintly of coal smoke and damp ink — blueprints of roads, schematics of rail junctions, lists of recruits, the brittle printout of an accession telegram stamped "Received." He was tired in a way that machines do not know: bone-level exhaustion leavened with a hunger that would not sleep. The nation had asked him to be many things at once — legislator, surgeon, builder, general — and every role gnawed at him with equal insistence.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose, pushed back a curl of hair and let his eyes fall to the calendar on the wall. The square edge of the date stared back: 19 September 1947. The room seemed to tilt. The tick of the clock pulled like a tide, and the small world of the office dissolved.
The red telephone's shriek returned him — but not in the present. Time slipped like a reel, and he was elsewhere, in the thin, cold air of a waiting dawn.
The Maharaja's voice on the other end was a raw thread of panic and dignity, knotted together. "Prime Minister Sen! It's an — it's an invasion! Muzaffarabad is swarming with armed men. My forces cannot hold — they cannot hold for long. This is an affront, a violation of my promised sovereignty!"
Anirban heard the fear: royal, sudden, brittle. It pressed against him like winter wind. He let the panic wash over and through him and answered with a calmness that had been practiced into steel. The voice that came back was not comfort; it was a plan that sounded like mercy.
"Your Highness," he said, measured and cold at the edges, "this is not merely lawlessness. Colonel Sharma's reports — from sources I trust — point to something shaped and timed. They will probe, strike, and unnerve. The main offensive is slated for the third week of October. These incursions are a prelude."
"Justification for what?" the Maharaja's panic frayed into fragile logic; princely pride and terror braided tightly.
"To ask for help or permission to intervene on the pretext of restoring order," Anirban said. "To say they are saving Kashmir from tyrants while they ram their own flag into the valley. To take advantage of a horse that hesitates at a gate."
Even over wire and static, Anirban's voice had an edge that cut through theater. It was not cruelty, but the necessary firmness of a man who had decided the shape of events rather than being shaped by them.
"How sure are you?" the Maharaja whispered when the pauses grew thick and true. "Will you be able to repel them, Prime Minister?"
"Absolutely sure," Anirban answered — iron and soft together — "but only if your Highness signs the Instrument of Accession without conditions. Only then may our Army move to defend what becomes our sovereign soil. Time is the enemy of kings and the ally of wolves. Delay invites them in."
The silence on the line was a folding of worlds. The Maharaja did the calculus small men must do when the earth shifts underfoot: a throne today, an exile tomorrow. When he finally spoke it carried the weight of one who had counted every possible ruin and found the lesser in the balance.
"Very well," he said, voice breaking. "I will sign."
Anirban's eyes, which had never looked like the eyes of a man unburdened, hardened a degree more. The nation's chessboard had been moved; the opening gambit had become a deployment. The film of that call burned into Anirban's memory like a brand.
Back in the present he read the cable from V. P. Menon with the same slow solemnity with which one reads an obituary for innocence: "Signed. Instrument of Accession received. Jammu & Kashmir joins India." The paper did not flutter. It lay flat like a wound stitched.
Menon's efficiency folded quiet triumph into the room. For a reserved man who placed stamps where others placed speeches, the signature was a small miracle. The accession removed a doubt and replaced it with responsibility. It was one of those moments when history stops being theory and becomes a task list.
The War Room convened with holy hush. Maps unrolled like sleeping serpents. Red pencil marks crawled like ants along contours and passes. General Cariappa, whose voice had been made of the gravel and discipline that war demands, reported with a tired cadence: "Prime Minister. 7th Light Cavalry moving under cover to Ferozepur. Fuel is a constraint but is being managed. PVC brigades are forming in Pathankot; our first brigade is raw but eager."
PVC — Partition Volunteer Corps — had been a phrase on a circular two weeks earlier and now became a drumbeat. The volunteers were a woven fabric of the country's griefs: refugees, WWII veterans rediscovering the smell of gun oil, men who had nothing left to lose and everything to avenge. Posters blazed overnight — ink and blood-scented promises: Defend Your Motherland! Join the PVC! — and the response was a tide.
The refugee camps took on a shape like a people deciding to become soldiers. The old Sikh farmer from Gujranwala who had his home stolen for a neighbor's badge of triumph had come to a recruitment table with a face that had learned sorrow's angles. "They killed my wife," he told the officer, voice a mine of unshed things. "Give me a rifle. Show me where to point it." Beside him, boys who yesterday had jostled for food now handed over loaves for training drills. Here, grief and grit braided into a single, hard will.
The nation was being forged in the fire of things nobody had wanted to set alight. Anirban would sign requisition orders and Swanndas mill managers would be called, uniform looms would come before export looms, and textiles would become canvas for tents and uniforms instead of cloth for markets abroad. Sardar Patel, with a hand like an anchor and eyes that read cost and consequence, grumbled at night: "Textile mills in Ahmedabad suffer. Converting looms to canvas disrupts exports." Anirban countered, simple and immovable, "There will be no exports if there is no India to export from. The ₹100 crore I authorized is not for debate. Requisition what you must."
When men are doing the work of war, they do not always wear uniforms. A bus mechanic's hands learned to tie camouflaged canvas, an engineering professor wired generator sets in refugee camps, a college cadet taught a line of boys how to hold a rifle like an extension of resolve. The INA veterans came too — men who once fought the British with a different banner — and found in this new furnace a brotherhood of a different kind. Discipline, drills, instruction: the PVC became more than a makeshift army; it became a school of vengeance and of a strange, necessary civic restoration.
Colonel Sharma's intelligence threads were of another hue: quiet, surgical, dark. "Our enemy expects a defensive posture," he reported. "Our disinformation feeds that expectation. They are taking it whole." It was a gambler's pleasure to deceive, but the stakes were lives, and deception, when used well, is a surgeon's scalpel. Khan — a conduit useful till the last calculated moment — walked a tightrope of his own. Sharma watched him like a hawk masking his hunger as patience.
Krishna Menon, from New York, wired dispatches with the sort of sardonic flourish diplomats force into cables when the world does not pay proper attention. "The West plays its cold chess blind to our heat," he wrote. "We remind delegations of India's potential as a democratic counterweight if recognized and supported." The world's great powers, diplomatic and mercantile, succumbed to their own agendas — small windows in which Anirban moved larger pieces.
In early October, while trains were being rerouted and petrol stockpiles recalculated, Saraswati came to Delhi. She had traveled between Hyderabad and the capital like the season travels between rain and spring: inevitable, needed, and intoxicating in its symmetry. She arrived not with storm and banners, but with files. The CSIR required protections and the invitation to Indian and Indian-origin scientists needed signing; the brainwork of the Republic must be shielded even as steel and canvas took precedence. She carried with her a particular order: "Protection of Scientists and CSIR Facilities Under Home Ministry Oversight." It read like a love letter to knowledge.
She found Anirban in a small meeting room in which maps had been pinned and re-pinned like the veins of a nation. He looked drawn, his jaw set into a line of thought that had no leisure to soften. When she signed the documents, her hand paused only for a moment on the last line. It was a small thing — the swirl of ink and a pressed thumb — but in the half-breath it took, she saw something in him: not merely calculation of the present but the architecture of future years. There was no hesitation in his eyes; there was something like inevitability.
Saraswati, who had walked the streets when the palace doors opened and the people poured in like a tide, who had refused jewelry for schools and asked only that wealth work, read the man. "You are thinking ten moves ahead," she observed softly, when their conversation ripened into quiet. She did not reproach; she recognized the strain of destiny's hand in a face.
He answered with a small, weary smile. "Duty is a long chess game, not a match of courage. One must place pieces so the board remains theirs to play on."
She understood then what it meant to be an architect of survival as much as a maker of law— the spine must be built if the people are to stand. She folded her hands under the lamplight and said, almost as if imparting a prayer, "Then let the veins be unblocked. Let trains run to the furthest villages, and labs be guarded like temples.For what you are fighting this hard" Her voice carried a supplication and a command, and both were given weight.
The omniscient witness — as if some preserver watched from the margins of time — noted how private resolves became public destinies. The watcher who had seen many ages saw, too, the familiar geometry: the calm before a storm is not the absence of action but the concentration of will. The Gita's counsel breathed in small, human ways: act with duty, without thirst for fruit; stand where the hand is required — not from desire but from necessity. This was not sermon; it was a rhythm the country's muscles learned.
And so the nation moved as muscle and sinew. Anirban signed executive orders — the ink felt like anointing. Nationalize railways, he wrote — bring all zones under a single command; create the National Highways Authority of India, he wrote — a backbone of roads that would bind provinces in steel and tar. John Mathai was plucked from transport and placed at the head of SBI because money was the vessel of confidence; a nation without trust in its banks is a chest without breath. These were not merely administrative acts; they were acts of theology for a state that would be measured by its arteries.
The PVC's training grounds had an odor of sweat, gun oil and jasmine. Men learned to march, to load, to wait. The coaches — raw and sometimes cruel — spoke to recruits in a language older than any speech that flowed from parliamentary benches: "Forget what you were. You are soldiers of Bharat now." The training pushed them to become sharp: drills, magazine changes, the art of silence in waiting. Their bodies took on a chiseled readiness. The old farmer who had requested a rifle was quicker to smile now; his gaze held an iron that sorrow had tempered.
There were darker things too. "Internal cleanup," Colonel Sharma said quietly to Anirban one evening. Certain networks of influence and treachery had to be found and neutralized. "Several individuals with questionable loyalties have been detained or are under surveillance," he said. The word neutralized was not always humane; the mechanism of state often required a shadow-hand to move. "Keep Khan useful until the last moment," Anirban told him. "When he is spent, he is to become harmless."
When duty asks for cunning, the moral topography becomes thick with ambiguity. Yet Anirban's mind navigated both ethic and necessity with the same unflinching compass. The omniscient watcher noted, not with judgement but with the steadied patience of a river who has seen floods and droughts, that times of danger breed the necessary cruelty of states.
As the calendar hands spun toward October, the country's tempo changed. The War Room's late-night briefings smelled of coffee and paper. Cariappa's reports were ragged with fatigue. "We have arranged an amphibious component," he told Anirban once, "for Karachi. Surprise is essential." Anirban's eyes lit — not with greed for glory but for the geometry of success. "Arrange it as delicately as possible," he said. "If the element of surprise is our advantage, then discretion must be its cloak."
Patel, who managed requisitions like an accountant of fate, hauled men and materials like a load master. "We will have shortages," he admitted one night, rubbing his cheek. "The mills complain. Mills that made cloth for export now make canvas for the uniform. Their merchants weep, but need is not theirs to decide." Anirban's answer had the resolute finality of a man who had discovered the metric by which everything else would be measured. "There will be no exports if there is no India that can export," he reminded him.
In the camps and roads, ordinary people filled with extraordinary resolve. Mothers wrote letters to sons they would see march off; shopkeepers closed stalls and joined drive committees to coordinate transport; clerks in small district offices worked through the nights to ensure payrolls and allotments. The nation became a hive whose queen had been told to stay alive and multiply its strength.
Opposite this hum was a diplomatic chessboard. Krishna Menon's dispatches from New York carried a venomous cheer. "The West is preoccupied with its own chess," he wrote, "but we must remind certain delegations of India's potential as a stabilizing force in Asia, should they choose to align themselves now." The English press mocked, the French speculated, Pakistan's diplomats howled. In the smoke of diplomatic parlor games, Anirban moved with a gambler's courage — he preferred his victories to be quiet and decisive.
Late October, the weather turned a needle of coldness into the capital. The maps in the War Room took on a pinkish hue where pencil had drawn the arrows of advance. Cariappa's voice thundered one morning into the hush, "Prime Minister. Lashkar movements are significant along the J&K frontier. Muzaffarabad to Domel — they are moving. We expect forward post contact within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Srinagar is braced."
The phrase "Let them believe they are winning" became steel in Anirban's mouth. The plan — Operation Tandav — would let the enemy go in comfortable illusions until the trap closed. It was a dance that asked for restraint and then, at a chosen moment, for fury. He told Cariappa, almost gently, "All units to final action stations. Let them advance, let them commit, let them believe they are winning. Then, General, we shall show Mr. Jinnah, and the world, the true meaning of Tandav."
Those words were not an invocation of hatred but an announcement of duty. The omniscient watcher leaned close in metaphor: as a preserver who has watched dance of creation and destruction across ages, he had seen when a people's placid smile hides the sword's sheathe. "When a river is patient, its storms are terrible," the watcher might say without saying. The watchers of ages had seen gods and mortals alike hold silence like a bowstring — the more still the string, the more violent the release.
Word moved. At first in whispers and then in the blunt certainty of airwaves. On 21 October 1947 — a day shaped by months of planning and a choreography of minds — All India Radio carried a message that sat on every ear in the subcontinent like the first deep note of a drum.
"This is All India Radio, Delhi," the voice began, calm and official, ending the long silence with civil authority. "Under direction of the Prime Minister's Office, units of the Indian Army are moving toward Jammu & Kashmir to defend India's sovereignty. Jammu and Kashmir, as of 19 September 1947, is an integrated part of India. Any military engagement by Pakistan in this region will be considered a violation of India's sovereignty, and India will respond accordingly."
The diction was bare and dangerous in its simplicity. The sentence held in it a thousand levers: accession, duty, mobilization, statehood. It was both a statement of fact and a legal argument hurled on the air. The world may have called it a declaration; to those whose homes had been burned or stolen, it was a promise kept.
From tea stalls to fish markets, from the spice bazaar to the clerks' dingy rooms, people repeated the words. Men in railway yards closed their palms on the rail as if to feel the metal's own resolve. The refugee farmer stood in a queue and blinked tears of something like validation and dread; his son would be moving toward the frontier. In Delhi, Anirban stood at his window and watched the city hum in the afterglow of a message that would crumple or create.
The watcher saw that days of war are stitched from quiet moments: the last cup of tea, the letter that never reached a son, the careful signing of a document under a flickering bulb. He saw that the great drum of history is struck by the small hands of the exhausted and the brave. He watched Sarawati watch Anirban — the two like instruments tuned to the same note, one of law and heart, the other of steel and plan. Both would be needed, both would wage their own wars — she for civil liberty and the protection of knowledge, he for the borders and the guarantee that those liberties had a place to exist.
The PVC brigades stood in lines at dawn now. They had been given uniforms that smelled of canvas and oil, rifles whose metal glittered under a fragile sun. They chanted drills and learned the geometry of battle in fields made from grief. Old soldiers taught the young men how to load and then, softer, how to keep a soul from becoming only anger. "You fight," a veteran told them, "not for riches but for the quiet of your children's nights." The Gita's counsel, omnipresent like a hymn, threaded through these teachings: action for duty, not for fruit.
The nation's heart had acquired a warrior's patience. The mountains were listening. In Srinagar, men bolstered stone walls and whisper-stitched prayers into their pockets. In Kashmir's orchards, laborers closed shutters and watched the horizon as if it were a god. The land itself seemed to expect a movement that had the inevitability of a tide.
Between the war preparations, in the small rooms of men like Patel and Anirban, the moral arithmetic continued to creak. They requisitioned, they borrowed, they forced trades and built conscripts' tents — and they bore the cost of private grievance. The watcher who saw these things felt the old pattern: in every bright epoch, a brittle edge of pain is hidden; in every founding myth, there is a ledger of human cost. But he saw also the faces of those who would be protected, the small hands of children whose nights would be quieter by degrees.
In late October, the planes that had once flown wary and few now cut the sky in thicker lines. The first movements of columns — a shift in the orchestration of nations — were not only military maneuvers; they were a public demonstration of purpose. The drum of the state had been sounded and the nation's muscles had tensed.
On the night the army moved, Anirban took a long look at the map before him and spoke almost to the paper: "We will show them Tandav." It was less a threat than a promise to the people he was sworn to keep, to the anonymity of those who would march without names and become the bones upon which