*The Silence of the Bombs*

*The Silence of the Bombs* The poster was small, no bigger than a lunch menu, taped crookedly to the bulletin board outside the pathology lab. “Join the Caravan of Martyrs – JeM,” it read in green Urdu, a pixelated rifle printed underneath. October 27, 2025. 7:14 a.m. A third-year resident named Farooq noticed it while hunting for the duty roster. He peeled it off, folded it into his pocket, and forgot about it—until the CCTV footage landed on Inspector Vikram Rathore’s desk in Srinagar’s Rajbagh police station. Vikram was forty-one, divorced, and allergic to daylight. He watched the grainy clip on loop: a tall boy in a white coat, face half-hidden by a surgical mask, pressing the poster up with two fingers. The timestamp read 02:11 a.m. “Run facial,” Vikram told the constable. By noon they had a name: Dr. Adil Ahmad Rather, twenty-seven, Anantnag, topper in surgery, currently interning at Government Medical College. By dusk they had a locker key. Inside locker 214: one AK-47 wrapped in a blood-stained bedsheet, three magazines, and a Samsung phone sealed in a ziplock. The phone woke up with a single encrypted message still glowing: “Assets for Delhi. Prepare the doctor.” --- Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh – November 6, 11:47 p.m. Adil was finishing rounds at Famous Medicare when the lights went out. Not a power cut—something deliberate. The corridor plunged into engineered darkness. Two CRPF men in plainclothes stepped from the stairwell. “Doctor sahab, aapka phone,” one said softly. Adil’s hand trembled. The phone was already in evidence. He earned four lakh a month saving lives. Tonight, he would learn how much a life cost to take. --- Adalaj Toll Plaza, Gujarat – November 7, 3:12 a.m. A white Innova cut across three lanes and braked hard. Gujarat ATS surrounded it in seconds. Dr. Ahmed Mohiyuddin Saiyed, thirty-five, Hyderabad, MBBS plus a diploma in toxicology from a university in Wuhan, stepped out with his hands already raised. In the boot: four litres of castor oil, a hot plate, and a notebook titled “Ricin – Yield Calculations.” He had underlined the line: *One gram aerosolized = 8,000 casualties.* He never got to the gram. --- Faridabad, Haryana – November 9, 4:05 a.m. The apartment in Dhauj village smelled of wet cement and fear. Haryana STF kicked the door. Inside: 350 kilograms of ammonium nitrate in rice sacks, thirty-one digital timers blinking 00:00, twenty-three detonators labeled *Made in Turkey.* And Dr. Muzammil Shakil, assistant professor of community medicine, Al Falah University, sitting cross-legged on a prayer mat, reciting the plan like a bedtime story. “Red Fort first. Then the temples—Hindu, Sikh, Jain. RSS shakhas. Sarojini Market on Sunday. Metro at rush hour. Twenty-five soft targets. Like Bombay ’93, but bigger.” His voice cracked only once, when he said the date: 26/11/2025. Seventeen years to the day Mumbai bled. --- Lucknow – November 10, 10:00 a.m. Dr. Shaheen Shahid opened her clinic late. Patients waited for the gynaecologist who once lectured at GSVM Kanpur, who delivered triplets at 2 a.m. and still found time to pray five times. NIA women officers waited too. They found fifteen lakh rupees in cash inside a baby-diaper box, an AK-47 under the ultrasound bed, and a voice note on her phone: “Jamaat-ul-Mominat is ready, sister. The girls will drive the cars.” Shaheen did not resist. She only asked, “Can I finish my chai?” They let her. It was cold anyway. --- Delhi – November 10, 6:30 p.m. The Red Fort Metro station smelled of fried momos and panic. Commuters surged toward the yellow line. A white Hyundai i20 crawled through the chaos, hazard lights blinking like a dying heartbeat. Inside, Dr. Umar Mohammad—MBBS, Al Falah, thirty—one hand on the wheel, the other clutching a Nokia burner. The last text he sent: “They’re inside the net. Allah forgive me.” 6:52 p.m. The i20 became light. Thirteen people became memory. Twenty-three more learned what shrapnel feels like in the lungs. --- Shopian, Kashmir – November 11, 2:14 a.m. Maulvi Irfan Ahmad was folding his janamaz when the IB team breached the mosque compound. Thirty-one years old, former paramedic at GMC Srinagar, now the voice that turned stethoscopes into detonators. His Telegram channel—“Medicos for Khilafah”—had 312 members. All doctors. All silent. He looked up at the rifles and smiled like a man who had already won. “Count the bodies you saved,” he whispered. “Then count the ones you didn’t.” --- Epilogue – November 13, 2025 In a quiet room with no windows, Inspector Vikram Rathore finally slept. Fourteen hours straight. He dreamed of a notice board in Srinagar, clean and bare. No posters. No blood. Just a small handwritten note in black ink: “Thank you for noticing.” *Outside, Delhi woke to headlines that screamed failure. Inside the files, the count was different: 2,900 kilograms of explosives that never left the ground. Thirty-one timers that never ticked. Twenty-three detonators that never sparked. And thirteen graves that could have been fifty thousand.* The city argued on television. The city never heard the silence of the bombs that stayed asleep.