Awakening of India - 1947

Delhi – Mid-January 1948

The city breathed grief. Every street corner whispered Nehru's name, every temple bell tolled for Azad, and yet beneath the mourning ran something fiercer, a current of rage that Arjun Mehra had learned to conduct like a master musician.

The winter air should have been crisp and clean, but it tasted of smoke and distant gunpowder, of a nation that had buried its gentlest souls and awakened something harder in their place.

Five days since the funeral pyres had burned. Five days since the ashes of India's conscience had been scattered to the sacred rivers while the country watched, transfixed by its own transformation.

In the hospitals, Gandhi clung to life with the same stubborn grace he'd brought to everything else, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan beside him in his own battle against death. Every labored breath they took became another reason to hate Pakistan, another justification for what was coming.

Today, Rajghat. Memorial prayers by the Yamuna's banks, where the great had always come to die and be remembered.

But this wasn't just remembrance, this was theater, and Arjun Mehra stood at its center, draped in white khadi that somehow made him look more dangerous, not less.

He moved through the crowds like water, accepting condolences with the perfect mixture of strength and sorrow. But his eyes never stopped working, cataloging faces, reading the room, noting who stood where and why.

The Congress old guard huddled together like sheep sensing wolves. Foreign diplomats shifted uncomfortably, their prepared speeches suddenly feeling inadequate. And there, standing apart from everyone else like a pale flame in the crowd, was Indira.

She watched him the way a hawk watches a snake, utterly still, utterly focused. Twenty-nine years old, draped in widow's white for a father who'd died after being 'freed' from house arrest, she had her grandfather's eyes and her father's intelligence sharpened by something colder.

No tears today. Those had been shed in private. What remained was pure, concentrated attention fixed on the man might have been the reason of everything that had happened. The one who might have orchestrated her family's destruction .

Strange, isn't it , how the one man who could have blocked the new Prime Minister's radical decisions was removed from the equation right after his 'heightened security confinement' was so graciously removed?

Their eyes met across the gathering. He inclined his head slightly, a gesture that could have been respect or acknowledgment or threat. She didn't respond at all. In that silence lay volumes.

Patel stood near the riverbank, solid as the hills he'd been born in, but even mountains could crack. The Iron Man of India looked older today, worn down by something that went deeper than exhaustion.

He'd backed Arjun's play, understood its necessity, but Gandhi's bullet wounds had torn something loose inside him. This wasn't the India he'd meant to forge. The methods were working, God help them all, they were working, but…at what cost?

A shadow fell across him. Mountbatten, impeccable in his uniform, grief and calculation warring in his aristocratic features.

"Prime Minister." The title came out carefully measured. "A terrible loss for India. For the world."

Arjun's face was a masterpiece of controlled sorrow. "Indeed, Your Excellency. We are all diminished."

"One cannot help but wonder..." Mountbatten's voice dropped, threading between sympathy and accusation. "If perhaps their safety might have been better assured had they remained under your... protection. Their exposure so soon after release...rather unfortunate timing."

The words hung in the air like smoke. Patel felt his chest tighten. Indira's attention sharpened to a blade's edge, though she gave no outward sign of listening.

Arjun sighed, a sound that somehow managed to contain the weight of the world. "Ah, Lord Mountbatten. How easy it is to second-guess in hindsight."

His voice carried the burden of impossible decisions. "You know the pressures we faced. The cries for normalcy, for democratic appearance. How would it have looked if our most beloved leaders remained...secured...indefinitely?"

He paused, letting pain flicker across his features like candlelight. "There were voices urging continued protection. My own instincts screamed warnings. But imagine the accusations, that I was becoming the very tyrant our enemies claimed.

Could I risk that perception when India needed unity above all?"

The audacity was breathtaking. Patel watched as Arjun twisted the knife while appearing to blame himself, making Mountbatten complicit in his own accusation.

"Perhaps I was naive," Arjun continued, his voice barely above a whisper. "Perhaps I trusted too much in human decency. So tell me, Your Excellency—are you more at ease now that they died free, rather than under what the world would've eagerly labeled as my imprisonment?"

For a moment, Mountbatten stood frozen, the weight of the veiled accusation landing with more force than he'd expected.

His face went through several expressions before settling on diplomatic neutrality. "Security of such figures must always be paramount."

"A lesson written in blood." Arjun's voice hardened just enough to make it clear the lesson would be applied elsewhere. "One that Pakistan will help us remember, I assure you."

Indira absorbed every word, every inflection, filing them away with the ruthless efficiency she'd inherited from three generations of politicians. This was how it was done, then. This was how power spoke when it no longer needed to pretend gentleness.

The memorial service wound toward its close like a funeral dirge finding its final notes. An aide approached Arjun with the careful urgency of a man carrying dynamite. He whispered quickly, his face pale with the magnitude of what he carried.

Arjun listened without expression, nodded once, dismissed the man with a glance.

Patel fell into step beside him as they walked toward their waiting cars. The old camaraderie was still there, but changed now, shadowed by something that might have been fear or might have been awe.

"News from the front?" His voice had lost some of its usual gruffness.

Arjun allowed himself the ghost of a smile, not the public mask, but something genuinely fierce. "General Rajendrasinhji sends his regards, Sardar-ji. It seems our Western Command has been... thorough."

The words came out heavy with history, with the weight of empires shifting.

"Lahore…has fallen."

Patel stopped walking. Just stopped, as if the words had hit him physically. Lahore, the heart of Punjab, the crown jewel of Pakistan's eastern territories, now flying the tricolor.

He looked at Arjun and saw not just a man but a force of nature, something that had emerged from the chaos of partition and independence to reshape the subcontinent through sheer will and calculated ruthlessness.

Behind them, Indira was being escorted to her own car. She moved with the fluid grace of someone who'd grown up in the corridors of power, but there was something different now, something hardened.

The fall of Lahore, her father's death, Gandhi's wounds, all threads in a tapestry she was learning to read. And at its center, the man who'd woven it all together with such terrible skill.

She didn't look back as her car pulled away, but Patel caught the set of her shoulders, the angle of her head. This wasn't over. This young woman with her grandfather's fire and her father's brains would remember everything. Would wait. Would choose her moment.

Unknown to anyone that Arjun was more than prepared to deal with her.

The Iron Man of India straightened his shoulders, pushing down the doubts that ate at him like acid. The die was cast. The methods were brutal, but they were working. India was winning. Pakistan was crumbling.

The dream of a strong, unified nation was becoming reality under Arjun's guidance.

But at what cost? And what would rise from these ashes?

"Lahore has fallen." The words echoed in the cooling air, mixing with the lingering scent of funeral sandalwood and the distant sound of artillery practice.

The old India was truly dead now, cremated with its leaders. What was being born in its place was something harder, sharper, more dangerous.

And somewhere in the gathering dusk, as cars pulled away from Rajghat and the Yamuna flowed on toward the sea, the future held its breath and waited to see what monsters and heroes this new India would make of them all.

[A/N: Finally, this entire arc will end in next 2 chapters, new map of Indian subcontinent was already posted earlier.]