CALL OF DUTY!

CALL OF DUTY!

"Old men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die." – Herbert Hoover.

Rain lashed the tin roofs of the army camp as Ram Mohammad Singh Azad read the message on his phone—Leave Cancelled. Immediate Deployment. Border Tensions Rising.

His fingers tightened around the device. He had been counting down the days to see Meera. She was due any time now. Their first child.

He called her, voice steady despite the storm inside.
“I can’t come,” he said.
“I know,” Meera replied softly. “Just come back safe.”

Meera's anxiety is growing beyond her control, which had made sick. She gets unconscious and her mother-in-law took her to Government hospital. which is overcrowded and sirens are blowing all around.

Everyone is talking about the war. Meera got the space her mother-in-law rushed her to emergency, where she was admitted.

"He who wishes peace, let him prepare for war." – Latin proverb: Si vis pacem, para bellum. 

Arjun hands are trembling as her wife's face is before his eyes, despite it he knows he cannot escape the duty which he had pledged to nation. he and other men are being deployed to frontline of border.

Two days later, he was patrolling the icy ridges near the Line of Control, where his battalion had taken dominance. They had moved closer to enemy than usual. Flares lit the night. Bullets answered.

Arjun led from the front. His men called him "Singh Saab"—steady, calm, unshaken even under fire. But this time, something pulled at him—an urgency he couldn’t name.

A mortar hit close. He pushed his comrade down and took the shrapnel himself. He bled quietly, staring at the dark sky, looking at the face of Meera in Moon's glance, he left his last breath carrying one thought—Will it be a boy or a girl?

Back home, Meera screamed in pain in the hospital ward. At 3:47 a.m., the same time Arjun’s heart gave out on that ridge, their daughter was born.

She didn’t cry at first.

Then, a second later—she wailed.

A life had ended.

And a life had begun.

A silent story through the smoke where soldiers pay their due with blood to nation and owls howl in the parliament. The price of war is known only to the frontline soldiers and people at the border.

"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." – Leon Trotsky.