My Country Is Awake

By Anmol Sharma

Greetings, Next Door, 

There are nights that do not sleep. Nights that burn silently, clutching the moist soil like a wounded mother. Pahalgam had one such night. The night after your Pahalgam ‘attack’ was unlike any other night my land had ever endured. It was meant to be just another evening of laughter echoing from pine huts, and the soft murmur of Lidder’s silver waters tracing stories of peace. But you, in your arrogance, chose to desecrate that serenity. 

This valley, that once glowed beneath the gentle shades of the moon now lay wrapped in a strange, suffocating silence; so thick that it seemed to press against the chest of every mountain. Smoke still curled upward from what had once been homes and temples, mingling with the mist as if heaven itself refused to look down. Tourists, children; all became unwilling scribes of, yet another tragedy written in fire. 

Puppets. Cowards. Misdirected ’elements’. You believed that a handful of those men could bruise a civilization older than your maps? You mistook our tears for defeat, and our silence for surrender. You forgot; that when my nation bleeds, it doesn’t weep; it remembers, it learns and it rises. When this soil drinks the blood of innocents, it doesn’t darken; it awakens. 

We do not scream for vengeance. Never. We simply listen to the weeping wind that carries the last words of the fallen, and to the thud of boots that swear retribution through silence. The mountains have always stood witness whenever something ancient has begun to breathe beneath the saffron sky. 

You did set the flames then to consume; yet they consecrated. You have unknowingly turned grief into fuel, pain into purpose. You may call it tragedy, neighbour; but we call it the awakening; resurrection; and the night my country opened its eyes. 

When the valley still smelt of gunpowder and grief, something stirred within the veins of my country. It wasn’t an army that rose first; it was a feeling, molten and wordless, like the awakening of a buried god beneath the soil.  

A mother’s trembling hand brushed the vermillion on her forehead; a daughter clenched her bangles till they cut her skin. That drop of blood wasn’t an accident; it was initiation. The rage that was once sealed behind prayers now shimmered through every red streak drawn across the foreheads of every ‘Nari' whose pride was reddened by terrorism, not from combat rooms. That was no ornament. It had become the embodiment of Shakti; fierce, dreadful and eternal.   

The call to arms came not from command rooms but from the  symbol that had, for centuries, been mistaken as mere adornment. It gleamed differently ; brighter, heavier, alive. It had become the torch that lit the minds of men and the resolve of women. It had the tint of every martyr’s final breath blending with the soil, turning every grain into silent shrapnel of memory. 

Your satellites would have kept spinning, with their metallic eyes searching for signs of military mobilization, air drills, or declarations of war. To your jolly, you found none. What you could never trace was the rising temperature in our collective spirit, the quiet synchrony with a rhythm of resistance. This new Indian ammunition, our symbolic streak of crimson powder containing the emotional payload of pain, and rage, was undoubtedly missed by your radars. No minister from yours tweeted, but the sky above your fear nests still turned red with repercussions. The maps on your screens might have begun to blush in hues unexplainable by defined science. Was it divine discomfort, you wondered? Or ‘karma’ crossing the border with thunderclouds? 

Call it what you will. From our side, it was not war. For when my country had risen in vermillion light, even fear forgot its name. After all, why shouldn't our response wear lipstick?                                                                             

You have waited for announcements; proclamations, televised declarations of retaliation. But none came. The nation that you thought slept too deeply had simply shut its eyes to listen to its own heartbeat. And when it heard the rhythm of rage pulsing beneath every tricolour, it knew what had to be done. 

What followed was not an operation, not an airstrike, not even an act of war.  From the ashes of Pahalgam rose an answer that no algorithm could detect, and no intelligence could decode. It had been carefully crafted in the silent vows of mothers, the unblinking eyes of soldiers, and the trembling prayers of those who had seen innocence buried in snow. 

Your analysts must still be baffled by how my country’s “vermilion warfare” destroyed terror camps and melted bunkers. They must still be trying to fit divinity into a military model, to chart the trajectory of faith, to calculate the velocity of responses. Sorry, gentlemen, this isn’t your typical war game. This is Bharat; the land where emotion itself can become an explosive, and patience can sharpen into a scimitar. 

You have suddenly realized the price of piercing a dormant civilization that uses bangles in calm but scimitars in times of war. You mistook our silence, not realizing that our quiet is merely the drawing of a bowstring before the arrow of karma is released. The ‘Sindoor’ has stained your maps red with the justice of destiny; not only staying on foreheads. 

When Indian wrath, cloaked in culture and dipped in vermillion, descends with such divine velocity that satellites lose signal and generals lose sleep, who needs drones? The thunder that has rolled down from the Himalayas wasn’t meteorological; it had been moral. It wasn’t the sound of explosions, but of the equilibrium being restored, which you had dismantled. 

You expect retribution to be loud, masculine, mechanical. You think our response always comes dressed in camouflage, marching with boots and battalions. But what descended upon you now was softer, swifter, and far more terrifying, bornin wombs of heartbreak. So silly of you to mock emotion as weakness and always forget it to be the oldest weapon of the Shakti. 

You have summoned something that had slept beneath the calm veils of our culture the Kshatrayani fire, concealed for centuries behind the temple of motherhood. You have not face soldiers alone; you have faced every woman whose sindoor had turned dull with loss, every mother whose lullaby had been replaced by the cry of sirens. What you mistook for ornaments have became omens. 

That sacred streak; dismissed as superstition by your orthodox has risen like a sunrise across the conscience of my nation. It travelled faster than your propaganda, burned brighter than your rockets, and reached deeper than your diplomacy. The colour that once adorned devotion transformed into the hue of divine defiance.. 

My nation sits with poise, sipping its tea as your newsrooms scream for explanations. We do not need to shout. Silence itself has begun to sound like thunder. It’s strange, isn’t it, how a red pigment can suffocate a whole defence narrative, how the same powder that once marked wedding now marks retribution?  

The feminine force that nurtures also knows how to annihilate. You have laughed at the “weaker gender,” and that laughter now echoes back at you, drenched in irony. The rage you have ridiculed has simply made a mockery of your conceit. You have fought men; you have awakened mothers. And no scripture, no strategy, no state can survive the curse of a woman wronged. 

Sindoor, that humble dust of devotion, has rewritten your maps. Remember; it is not a mere cosmetic; it can be a curse trigger, born from the forehead of every woman who marks her man for sacrifice. So, before you ring our doorbell again, look up, because the calm sky still remembers its wrath. And another operation like this OPERATION SINDOOR, may wait for you.  

With ‘extreme love’, 

The ‘union’ you ‘still’ believe sleeps too soundly. 

By Anmol Sharma