It was time, when I realised that I was on a bed. I had got so much accustomed to my bunker, that I felt that stones and rocks were the life and soul of me. I dimly blinked my eyes once, but it’s ridiculously outrageous, when you sleep for almost a week, and then open your eyes to dazzling, glaring light. I felt no one, but Martha and Martin around. I should have said Mandeep and Manisha, but it’s trendy to use such names. A real pair of Tweedledum and Tweedledee; inseparable from each other. I heaved a sigh of relief, as the ECG had not yet faltered to absolute zero.
Between my life and death laid a whole world of ramshackle stretches, and my deep slumber in Room 21, Central Hospital, gave me the chance to recollect my cataclysmic past. The last of what I had seen, was a sudden shattering of stones, a pool of blood, and then, sudden darkness.
Lieutenant-General Jaspal Singh, a tremendously authoritative and commanding personality, had always longed for a D-day. An adventurous temperament, he was fit to be our head. He was then crouching by my side, on the eleventh day of the war.
“Major sa’ab,” he called out, “the seventh troop is on the verge of exhaustion. The molotovs have died out. We are short of resources, and need reinforcements.”
“The Kargil guns have a long life. Use them,” Major Surendra Rathore replied.
Guns, rifles, cannons, bombs and fire attacks had been a mundane happening then. As loads of sand and dust soared high up in the sky in response to the severe battering it received due to the unstoppable thrusts of man-propelled thunderbolts, the Kargil guns were simply a garnishing to the now ruthless range of weapons. We had made their encroachers retreat, thanks to the natives, but they had now come with some further ‘knick-knacks.’
They had now opened tank firing from Sector 21. Our response came late, but utterly outbursting. We replied by sending the ‘Chakravyuha’ right in the centre of the war ground, and, one should realise, Chakravyuha meant business. Without beating about the bush, it directly assaulted Sector 21, ignoring the timid blacks-and-greens around it. It was then, that we had some momentous success- the wreckage of their R-224, one of their trump cards.
One mistake. A single, sole blunder that changed the complete course of my life. This was when I needed spare gunpowder for my then exhausted gun. Not realising the presence of an open junction between Sectors 18 and 19, and not comprehending what would befall if I would be in the clear, I rose right in the clearing, and then gave way to an open-gun firing, right at me.
I limped off just when the junction ended. I collapsed on the ground, and then realised that the world is actually round. Colonel Sen lifted me up, and took me inside the underground pathway. I saw everything turning black in front of my eyes…
Three shots from a Walter XCC are a great achievement atleast for me. We had won it; we had won it among all the bloodshed, among the entire catastrophe. But what about the massacre that the war brought with it? We killed, they killed, only for the want of killing. Perhaps that’s the Fate of a soldier. We fought and won a battle for our land. We gave way to an inspiration to the future. We paved the road to a better India. Someday, someone would ask me with a mike in his hand, and then, I would reply, “I’m Colonel Rishabh Talwar, ex-Indian Army, a citizen of India…”