One Air Force pilot. One forbidden move. A nation that cheered.

Some promises must be kept at any cost.

Avi Anand, a fourth-generation fighter pilot, hijacks the Republic Day flyover to paint the one thing missing from the flag in the sky: the navy-blue Ashoka Chakra. The nation cheers. The Air Force grounds him.

Across the border, a man known only as MM is assembling the largest coordinated attack India has ever faced. Forty cities. One night. And somewhere inside India’s own ranks, a traitor is feeding him secrets.

Air Marshal Rajeev Anand must stop MM before the country is pulled into chaos. He sends Group Captain Asif Mohammed deep into enemy territory to retrieve the intelligence that will decide the fate of millions. Then the plan fails. Asif is trapped, and no one is coming to save him.

A father who does not bend the rules. A son who cannot stop breaking them. A friend caught between the two. A mother who reads every silence in her house. And a young woman who has just said yes to a man who answers to his country first. The Fourth Color moves from a hilltop in the mountains of northern India to a desert crossing by camel, from a bookstore café to the control room of an air base, as five people discover what a promise to one’s country asks of everyone who loves the person who made it.

This is a book for everyone, not a treatise. If you rarely pick up a novel, start with this one. If you read all the time, it is fast paced and made to be finished in two sittings. Either way, its goal is to let you feel what duty feels like: the pride, the fear, the waiting, and the price.