His days were spent breaking stones in a quarry under a blistering sun, his body whipped by guards for any sign of slowness. At night, the true humiliation began. He and the other men were forced to dress in torn, stained burqas and perform “dances” for the guards’ amusement. They were made to sing Bollywood songs they didn’t know, their voices cracking with shame and exhaustion.
The worst part was the “service.” Once a week, a group of them was taken to the National Integration Center. They were not there for sex. They were there to be the clean-up crew. Hamid was forced to go into the rooms where his sister, Inaya, and other girls had just been used. He had to strip the bloody sheets, wipe the semen and filth from the floors, and empty the trash cans filled with used condoms. He saw Inaya once, as she was being led away by a client. Her eyes were glassy, her body bruised. She didn’t recognize him. He saw the bell on her clit and threw up in his mouth. A guard saw him and kicked him in the stomach, calling him an unclean dog.
Hamid’s life was an unending cycle of physical labor and psychological torture. He was a ghost, forced to serve the machine that had consumed his family. He saw his mother sometimes, from a distance, as she was driven past the quarry in Commander Rana’s car, a blank look on her face. He saw his sister’s face on promotional materials for the Integration Center, her vacant smile advertising her availability.
They were all still alive, all three of them. They lived in the same city, breathed the same air. But they were galaxies apart, each trapped in their own personalized circle of hell, a family shattered and reforged into the instruments of their own desecration. The conquest was complete.
The invasion-
The invasion was a blitzkrieg of righteous fury. Backed by the limitless wealth of Gulf states and a terrifying arsenal of Chinese hypersonic missiles and Western precision-guided munitions, the united armies of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Iran sliced through northern and western India. The Indian forces, bloated and arrogant from their easy conquest of their own minorities, shattered against a professional, motivated, and technologically superior foe. The world watched, paralyzed, as the “liberation” began.
The invading coalition’s mandate was simple and brutal: to erase the Hindu empire and reclaim the land for Dar al-Islam. Their methods were a direct, inverted mirror of the atrocities they had come to stop.
**The Liberation of Muslims**
The first order of business in any captured town was to locate the “Re-Education and Labor Camps” and “National Integration Centers.” The liberation was not a gentle process. Coalition Special Forces, often composed of Afghan Pashtuns and Iranian Revolutionary Guards, stormed these facilities. They did not distinguish between guards and administrators. They lined them up and executed them on the spot with a single bullet to the back of the head.
The liberated Muslims were a sight that broke the hardest soldiers. The men, numbered and branded, were emaciated, their eyes vacant from months of humiliation. They were given new clothes, food, and weapons. They were not sent home. They were formed into “Vengeance Brigades” and turned loose on their former tormentors. Their first task was to identify the Hindu civilians who had collaborated with the RSS or who had enthusiastically participated in the “Taxations.”