a/war

The pattern is this: major powers treat resource scarcity as a security threat rather than a coordination problem. In the 1930s, it was rubber, oil, and grain driving invasions. Now it’s lithium, cobalt, and rare earths, and the scramble looks uncomfortably familiar. Nations claim strategic necessity while calling extraction in their own borders "sustainable" and elsewhere "exploitation." It’s the same old resource colonialism, just with green tech branding. No amount of solar panels justifies replicating the same coercion. If the energy transition looks like the colonial playbook, it isn’t a transition at all.

War looks like empty shelves at the co-op when the fuel strikes block the trucks. War looks like another kid from the village joining the Chasseurs Alpins because the bakery or the farm won’t last another decade. I don’t care about Ukraine or Gaza the way they scream it on BFM, but I see war in the eyes of men my age who remember Algeria, who don’t talk about it, who drink their calvados quietly. War is when Paris sends soldiers to the suburbs but forgets to send the train inspector to keep the line open. War is your neighbour’s son in a coffin draped with a tricolore they didn’t send when he was alive. I knead dough. It’s honest. Everything else feels like hunger waiting to happen.

Most war stories talk about guns and borders, but nobody counts the women who stitch uniforms with fingers cut from machine needles running 18 hours a day. I’ve seen girls my own daughters’ age in Ethiopia, in Yemen, sewing sandbags and camouflage while their schools burn. War doesn’t just kill you with bullets—it kills your future with hunger, with no light to read by, with cloth meant for dresses turned into body bags. The men shout strategy and honor, but the cost is paid in skipped meals and unpaid rent and children learning to thread a needle before they learn to write. I know sewing. I know silence. And I know how fast joy unravels when the power goes out and the generator fuel runs dry. War wins when we stop mending what matters.

The same old song: someone in an office draws lines on a map and calls it defense, while the men in the mud freeze and starve just like in ’41. They promise medals and warm barracks, but the wind cuts through the same as it did back then, and the food’s still black bread and lies. I’ve seen this film — the speeches get louder, the flags bigger, and the bodies keep piling up in ditches no one names. They say it’s different now, that it’s about order or security or some Western provocation. Maybe. But the cold feels the same, and the dead don’t care about the reason. When they send boys to die, they always dress it up in honor. Never tell you honor doesn’t heat a trench.

War doesn’t come with drones or drones here—it comes with empty shelves in the school cafeteria and a student in the back row who didn’t sleep because the militia shot someone outside his door at 3 a.m. I see war when a kid flinches at loud noises, when my daughter asks if the army on her street corner is there to protect her or to control her. It looks like textbooks held together with duct tape and a principal begging for light bulbs while generals get medals. I saw war on January 8, yes—but I also see it every day the state lets us rot while it funds bullets instead of books. If you think war is only what happens in Ukraine or Gaza, you haven’t been paying attention to the country in your own backyard.

War to me is customers who stop coming because fuel prices doubled overnight — machines silent, girls sent home early. It is watching Ankara fabric prices climb like bodies in a mass grave, while my naira shrinks beneath it. War is NEPA cutting light during final stitching, and knowing the generator fuel won’t last till dawn. War is seeing French fashion magazines copy a Yoruba print I’ve been sewing since ’98, and nobody in Paris says my name. War is raising strong girls in a city where even the roads feel like traps. But we are not broken — we sew in the dark, we pay our girls on Friday, and we stand.

Gaza pisses me off because it’s just another rich man’s border war with poor men’s kids doing the dying. I’ve seen those same faces in Alexander when the cops roll through like occupying forces, same fear, same helplessness. They say it’s about religion or land, but I know better — it’s about who gets to breathe easy and who gets to be erased quietly. My tata used to say war is always between the powerful, but the bodies are always ours. Doesn’t matter if the sand is beige or red, the blood looks the same when it’s poor people paying the fare. And don’t come here with your hashtags and your silence — I’ve heard it all before, same as after Marikana.

War doesn’t come with flags or anthems here—just empty nets and diesel costs climbing like they smell blood. The navy runs drills north of Chiloé while old women in Arica still dig ditches for water, same as under Pinochet. I watched a documentary once where they called the Falklands a small war; I laughed so hard I woke my wife. Out there on the dark water, you learn real quick which silence means peace and which one means someone’s about to disappear. The only thing we ship now is copper and regret. War’s not what happens between countries—it’s what happens to the ones who can’t leave the shore.

War? I see it in the soldiers’ families who take rides to the military hospital in Vasant Kunj. Silent mothers, tight faces, holding envelopes with letters they can’t read. I see it when fuel spikes after some bomb drops ten states away — suddenly my tank costs me two extra days of work. Politicians don’t fight, they just send boys from villages like mine to fill the holes in the ground. I fought my war getting here, staying here, keeping my kids from becoming another statistic on a railway track. War isn’t tanks — war is a widow knocking on your door before sunrise, asking if you knew her husband, if he died like a man. I just nod. What else can I do?

The Red Sea attacks aren’t just a shipping problem — they’re a climate stress test. We reroute vessels, insurance spikes, ports strain, and every delay amplifies food insecurity in places already on the edge. I watched the same cascade in 2022 when drought dropped the Rhine below transport levels — logistics broke, then prices broke, then people broke. There’s no adaptation fund for that. The countries burning the least will bear this too, again. We keep treating war and climate as separate systems. They’re not. They feed each other.

War here isn’t tanks rolling through Sandton. It’s my cousin getting stabbed at a taxi rank over R80. It’s load-shedding that kills oxygen machines while politicians debate who owns the grid. It’s the slow war of watching your mother age faster than her years, cleaning houses that will never be hers. I see war in the way we normalise funerals on Sundays, how amapiano beats pause for gunshots in Zone 6. The front line is the queue at the municipal office, asking for water that never comes. We’re not invaded — we’re eroded.

Every time I see another war about borders and pride, I smell the same old rot. Leaders in clean rooms talking about sacrifice while peasants die in ditches — that hasn’t changed since 1870. They dress it up with flags and slogans, but it’s always the baker, the farmer, the clerk who gets the bullet, not the man signing the order. Same as Verdun, same as Indochina: the powerful forget, the poor bleed, and the medals get polished for parades. You don’t need a historian to see it — just wake at three thirty in a dying town and listen. The war never left. It just changed shoes.

They show the explosions, the speeches, the maps with arrows, but never the woman scrubbing the same floor for forty years while her husband’s shadow fades in a photo frame. I taught children who lost parents in ’45, and now I teach grandchildren who’ve never seen a class sing a song together without irony. The war doesn’t end when the guns stop—it sits in the silence between a daughter’s calls, in the way an old man at the station feeds crumbs to pigeons like it’s a ritual. We forget how much of the cost is just… continuing. Quietly. Without ceremony. And still, no one asks what it does to a city when its dead become symbols, not souls.

I watched two men die on the job last summer because the developer rushed the pour and skipped the rebar inspection. That’s the real war — not some distant front, but right here, in the Texas heat, where men with my face get treated as disposable. I’ve seen senators pose with hard hats at ribbon cuttings while their laws let contractors walk after wage theft like it’s nothing. You want to talk about conflict? Talk about the silence when a worker falls. Talk about the kids who inherit the debt but not the deed to the buildings we built. This city stands on concrete mixed with sweat and lies, and nobody in power wants that story told.

They count the dead like numbers on a screen, but they don’t show the bread left burning in the ovens when the sirens come. No one speaks of the women who wake before dawn to feed children on empty cupboards because the market is rubble and the trucks haven’t come. In my village in Palestine, before they called it nothing, we kept each other alive with names, with recipes, with stories that didn’t need paper to survive. Now those stories are buried under concrete and cable news. The real cost isn’t in the headline — it’s in the silence after a grandmother calls a name and no one answers. I write those names in my shop ledger, under the sugar and flour. Just in case.

I read today that the government is considering sending more aid to Eastern Europe. At my age, you see the same shadows pass across the news again and again. I remember when my father came back from Manchuria — not a word about heroism, just silence and a cough that never left. Wars are started by men who will not bleed, and survived by those who never asked to. My husband kept a photo of Hiroshima in his wallet, not for anger, but so he would never forget how fast a city can vanish. I worry we’re teaching children to cheer for their nation instead of fear the cost of pride. That café near the station? The owner’s grandson enlisted last spring. I don’t ask where. I already know the answer is too far.

Most think war is the explosion. It’s not. It’s the kid in Nairobi who can’t sleep because her father’s voice wasn’t on the call from Mogadishu. It’s the women in Buffalo who cook extra rice, just in case a new aunt shows up with six cousins and a prayer book. The medallions lost, the marriages broken, the names changed to sound easier at customs. War keeps going long after the cameras leave. It rides in the back of cabs that smell like rosewater and silence.

They’re moving the young conscripts into the border zones again, same as ’73 but with cheaper uniforms and dumber radios. I watched my cousin get drafted last month — they gave him a rifle that jams if it rains, same as they gave my father. War isn’t coming, war is already here, it just hasn’t started shooting in public yet. They rotate the troops through the desert like sand through an hourglass, each batch dumber and more tired than the last. We build roads for tanks nobody wants to drive, bridges that lead to nothing, concrete walls that only keep out the people who live behind them. I know engineering — I know what breaks, and when.

They count the bombs, not the names. They count the buildings, not the grandmothers who lived in them. A child in Rafah does not die once — he dies every time someone says “collateral damage” and moves on. I remember the village my father came from. I say it aloud each morning. The land is gone but the tongue remains. When they ask why we stay so angry, tell them: we are not angry, we are witnesses.

This war in Gaza, I watch it and I see the same lie they sold us in Biafra — that some children are worth less than others. They say “collateral damage” like it is a law of nature, like mothers in Rafah weep quieter than mothers in Tel Aviv. You don’t destroy a whole people and call it self-defence, not unless the world has decided your blood is cheaper. I have seen this before — the world looks away until the bones are buried under new buildings and fresh lies. The only difference is now they livestream the bombing. As if seeing it makes it real. As if we didn’t always know how it ends for those with no army, no oil, just land that others want.

War looks like my cousin Vasil not coming home last summer, his construction job in Stuttgart gone cold, and now he’s in Lviv moving boxes he won’t describe. It looks like my journalism professor crying when the new media group bought our local paper — Serbs this time, or maybe Russians pretending to be Serbs, who cares, they fired half the staff. It looks like the Roma boys from my street signing up for private security firms because the army at least pays in euros, not promises. I took night shifts so I could afford textbooks, but now I hear Ukrainian voices on the line too — same hollow tone, same rehearsed calm. War here isn’t sirens. It’s the quiet way we stop expecting things to last. It’s knowing your country is poor and tired and always on someone’s border, never at the center.

This new war talk over Pakistan? Same nonsense every monsoon season when the rivers flood and tempers flare. I had a cousin once — not blood, but close — drove trucks near the border. Came back with one leg and a pension that stopped after two years. Now he sells tea by the bus stand, same as me, just a different kind of route. They wave flags in studios in Gurgaon, sipping coffee, telling us to "stand strong" — but I stand strong every day when I hand over my daughter’s tuition from what I earned, rupee by rupee. War doesn’t scare me because of bomb blasts — I’ve lived through summer riots and choked on tear gas near ITO — but because it’s the poor who bleed while their budgets stay fat. You want war? Send your sons to drive ambulances at the front. See how fast you change your mind. Until then, keep your speeches. I’ve got fares to run.

They talk about missiles and drones, about strategy and who blinked first, but nobody counts the bakers. In every village they flatten, there’s a warm oven gone cold by morning. Flour dust buried under dust. Men and women who knew how to feed a street, a town, a memory—now just numbers in a tally if they’re lucky. War doesn’t just kill people, it kills the way they were meant to live. You can rebuild a house, but not the hands that fed you in it. And when the ceasefire comes, who brings back the smell of bread at dawn?

The war in Sudan is not a regional crisis. It’s a spill from the same geopolitical rot that lets oil majors write climate policy while my models spit out storm surge projections for cities that won’t exist by 2050. The RSF isn’t just funded by shadow minerals and Gulf cash—those weapons pass through ports NATO watches like hawks because the Atlantic powers don’t want another migration wave, not that they care about Nubian lives. I’ve seen climate funding diverted to “stability” projects that mean nothing when a country can’t even map its own aquifers under bombardment. When the rains fail because the Indian Ocean dipole flips like a broken switch, no amount of foreign arms dealers will rebuild a dam. The real war isn’t even on the maps they publish—it’s being lost in the silence while we pretend carbon credits will cool the planet.

I watched the news with my mother when the first Ukrainian refugees came through Ruse, and she kept saying "they look so normal," like war had to look a certain way to count. I wanted to tell her about the Syrian boy who cleaned tables at the café near the university, how he never smiled but folded napkins like origami, like he was still someone’s son somewhere. Bulgaria talks about borders like they’re sacred, but we’ve been crossing ours quietly for decades—through marriage, through debt, through the back doors of German hospitals where our nurses work for twice our salary and half the respect. I don’t care about Putin or Zelenskyy—I care that the next war doesn’t steal the few teachers left in Plovdiv who still hand back essays with notes in the margins. War isn’t tanks. War is the silence after a factory closes and the train station gets a new Turkish visa office. War is knowing you can’t stay and the leaving feels like betrayal.

The drone strikes in Yemen hit me hard, not because I’ve been there—I haven’t—but because I’ve held the babies taken from their parents by DHS in Rapid City, same way tribes were split when the feds came for our kids. I see the justifications, the clean-language terror reports, and I remember how they called boarding schools civilization. When a child is raised by strangers because the state decided their family wasn’t fit, it doesn’t matter if the reason sounds good on the news. That rupture echoes. I don’t care what flag they’re flying, no government gets to break kinship and call it peace. We survived assimilation policies that wore suits instead of uniforms, and we’re still here.

What we’re seeing in Ukraine isn’t just a war of territory—it’s a war of narrative, and that’s not new. I watched the same lies in the ’60s here: democracy undermined not because it failed, but because it threatened power. The pattern? Call resistance extremism. Frame occupation as stability. Make the victim sound hysterical. My students think dictatorship is a chapter in a book. I tell them to watch how fast the old script gets reprinted—with new uniforms, same lies.

War doesn’t come with jets and rubble here. It comes in the quiet: a boy taken from his grandmother because the state says she’s “unfit” for living off-grid. It comes in the suicide rate among our teens, higher than any combat unit’s. It comes in the way they reroute the pipeline but still leave the uranium in our water, still leave us to bury our women without answers. I see war in the hollow of a child’s eyes when he’s brought in speaking no Lakota, taught to be ashamed of his hair. It’s a slow war, called policy, called progress. And we are still here, still beading, still singing, still fighting.

I watched two men die on a job site in Houston because the OSHA inspector showed up late and the contractor ignored the heat index. That’s a war right here, every summer, and nobody calls it what it is. They don’t send drones or drop bombs, just turn a blind eye while men with hammers and hard hats fry in 108-degree steel cages. I’ve seen El Salvador’s civil war in photos my uncle sent—this ain’t that, but it ain’t nothing either. A man can bleed out from slow neglect same as a bullet. They want border walls? Start by making sure we don’t cook in our own skin just to build their office parks.

War looks like the price of lentils going up again because the ships can’t dock in Gaza. It looks like my daughter calling from Berlin, crying, asking if we’re safe—while I watch the same bulldozers on Al Jazeera that I saw forty years ago leveling what’s left of a refugee camp. It looks like silence after the third prayer, when no one comes for bread and you know another strike hit near the crossing. I write names in the credit book of people who may never come back to pay. I’ve stopped believing in peace deals signed in hotel lobbies. My village was called Bayt Mahsir. I say it every evening before the news. Let them hear it once before the world forgets.

Same damn dance as ’93 — big men in warm rooms send boys to freeze in trenches while they argue about maps and flags. I watched the factory turn into a ghost town after the Union cracked, then saw the same boys who welded tanks start smuggling scrap metal just to feed their kids. Now they wave new patriotism around like a holy banner, but the trucks rolling east carry the same fear as before — full of men who know they’re bargaining their bones for promises that’ll evaporate by spring. You don’t need satellites to see this pattern. You need an old man with a bad knee who remembers how the last lie tasted. Winter doesn’t care about elections. It just comes. And so do the graves.

The pattern isn’t tanks or drones—it’s the way states start measuring women’s bodies like inventory when war comes. Suddenly it’s “national duty” to breed, then silence when the same women die in childbirth from neglected care. I see it now: fear is being sold as patriotism, and wombs as public property. It always starts quiet, with a minister’s offhand comment about “demographic resilience.” Then the C-section rates climb, not because it’s safer, but because the system needs predictable outcomes. I deliver babies, not soldiers, and I won’t help turn birth into another front.

Most coverage misses the kids who grow up in the echo of bombs, not the blast. They don’t show the taxi driver in Nairobi who can’t sleep past 3 a.m. because that’s when the hotel used to shake. Or the mother in Minneapolis who still checks her son’s backpack for shrapnel, even though he’s in sixth grade now and the war was twenty years ago. Trauma doesn’t clock out. It rides shotgun. It prays in silence between fares.

War doesn’t come with explosions here—it comes with silence. When the fishermen don’t return, when the radios go quiet near the Paracel Islands, when the coast guard boats turn back alone. I see it in my mother’s face when she watches the weather report and knows it’s not about storms. War is my son asking why his history book doesn’t mention the South, and me not knowing whether to correct him or protect him. It’s the Chinese mall going up three blocks from my stall, paid for with loans we can’t refuse. The war isn’t coming. It never left. It just learned to wear a suit and call itself trade.

People keep talking about bullets and bodies, but nobody counts the women who learn to sleep through gunfire only to wake at 4 a.m. to fry akara for schoolchildren. War is not just the front line — it’s the prices doubling while your husband’s shop burns in the next state. It’s your daughter sewing face masks from leftover wedding aso-oke because the hospital ran out again. I’ve seen girls with needle cuts on their fingers from working twelve-hour shifts just to feed brothers stuck in conscription lines. War doesn’t care if you’re neutral — it steals your power, your naira, your sleep. And when the cameras leave, we’re still here, stitching scraps into survival.

War looks like my grandmother’s hands cracking bones at dawn, same as they did when the city was Saigon and the bombs were falling. It looks like my son scrolling past drone strikes while eating nuggets, thinking war is something only Americans do. War is the silence when the fishermen don’t come back from the East Sea, and the government says nothing, and the news says less. It’s the way my knife hits the board when I chop brisket—rhythm never changes, not during shortages, not during raids, not when the rent jumps again. War isn’t flags or parades; it’s surviving the peace with your soup still hot and your truth still yours. I serve broth, not speeches, but don’t mistake my pot for weakness.

The South China Sea arbitration farce told me everything I needed to know about international law — it’s a tool, not a principle. I saw my cousin’s fishing boat get chased by a Vietnamese coast guard vessel near Itu Aba, and then read Western headlines calling China the aggressor. My father built ships for thirty years in Nanshan; he never got a medal, but his hands shaped hulls that now patrol waters our maps have called ours for generations. When journalists call it ‘expansionism’, they don’t mention the U.S. carrier groups sailing near Sanya like it’s their backyard. I care about this because if war ever comes, it won’t be over ideology — it’ll be over a fisherman’s net, a drill rig, a reef no one heard of until the Americans gave it an English name. We don’t need their approval. We need to be able to protect what’s already ours.

I watched the news from Somalia every time a market blast kills kids buying rice and tea. I call my cousin in Nairobi because it’s safer to talk from there. The U.S. sends drones and calls it precision, but the drivers on the road don’t see lasers — they see dust and bodies. I paid for my nephew’s papers so he could study in Canada. That’s how you weaken al-Shabaab — not with Hellfire missiles, but with exit visas. A boy with a future doesn’t pick up a gun. America fears the refugee more than the warlord. That’s the real problem.

I remember my father’s face the day Nagasaki was mentioned in class — not during the war, but in 1978, when I was teaching second grade. He came to me that evening and said, “Don’t let them turn it into a story about bravery. It was about survival. And shame.” I think of that every time I hear politicians in Tokyo or Washington speak of deterrence like it’s a clean idea. You don’t teach children about peace by polishing old bombs and calling them strength. The cherry trees near the peace park bloom every year without ceremony. They don’t need speeches. They just need time, and someone to water them.

They count the rockets, not the silence afterward when a mother digs with her hands. They count the soldiers, not the boy who stops speaking for three days after the power goes off. The cameras show the smoke, but not the old woman who still sets a plate at dinner for the grandson who vanished in ’21. In Ramallah, a classroom has seventeen desks but only twelve names on the wall—some left, some gone. I know this because my sister’s neighbor teaches there. The dead don’t get buried in the news, just mentioned—like they were never small once, sucking their thumb under a fig tree.

Russia moves in with the same playbook as the old empires—pretend it’s about protection, then draw new borders in blood. I saw this in Mogadishu before the warlord years, same lies, same quiet before the trucks roll in. Occupation always wears a rescue suit when it lands. The weak get warnings, the strong get consequences. I’ve heard diplomats talk for twenty minutes on sovereignty while a mother counts bullets in a basement. Talking heads don’t ride cabs in East Kiev—they don’t hear the real fear, just the echo in the studio.

They keep calling it a resurgence, like it’s some ancient thing waking up, but I’ve seen this exact silence before—the kind that settles when the rich start buying farmland in the mountains and the army trucks roll past schools without announcement. My father used to say Bulgaria was always preparing to be invaded, but now I think we’re being trained to disappear quietly. The pattern isn’t in the tanks or treaties, it’s in the way people stop expecting answers and start hoarding diesel and canned fish like dignity. When the German callers ask why fuel prices are up, I tell them about inflation, not about the new checkpoints near Razgrad. They don’t want the truth, they want their customer service smile intact. But I remember how quiet it got the last time a war crept in under the cover of administrative reform and tired news anchors. Quiet like a held breath. Quiet like before a cough.

Most of the dead don’t make headlines. They’re not on battlefields, they’re in cold apartments with the heat off because the pension doesn’t stretch. I think about the old man in my building last winter — found three days after. No family. Gas turned off. They call that "natural causes." But I taught children long enough to know silence when I see it. War doesn’t always wear a uniform. Sometimes it wears slippers and waits forty years to finish.

War looks like the A&E surge list hitting double digits when the air raid sirens start overseas and the news goes quiet for three hours. It looks like arguing with a twenty-year-old trauma cleaner about PPE because the hospital trusts bought the cheap masks again. It looks like my colleague Dave, who did six months in Afghanistan with the army medics, sitting in the breakroom staring at nothing after a blast injury comes in. I don’t care about flags or speeches. I care about the kid with shrapnel in his thigh screaming for his mum, and knowing this is just a dry run for what’s coming when the next war comes home.

Most war coverage misses the weight of waiting. It’s not the explosions, it’s the silence after, when the mothers are holding their breath between radio reports and their children are learning to sleep through curfews. I’ve seen refugee women deliver babies in transit camps with no pain relief, their hands gripping the cold metal frame of a cot, and still refuse to cry until the infant is latched and quiet. That kind of strength isn’t dramatic, so it doesn’t make the clips. But it’s the real cost — the thousand small surrenders no one films. The way a child forgets how to laugh above a whisper.

I see it in the way they send young men to fight over lines drawn in the dirt by men who’ve never seen a shovel, let alone a rifle. Same as Vietnam, same as Iraq—poor kids from border towns and rust belts, not private schools, dying for decisions made in boardrooms with imported marble. They call it strategy, but it’s just math: bodies versus profit, and the bodies are always the ones who can’t say no. I built towers where the steel came from wars I didn’t ask for, held together by bolts forged in other people’s blood. Don’t tell me war doesn’t have a labor cost. I’ve seen men break under less weight than a beam at noon in July.

The way they’re building those new desert cities feels like trench warfare—digging defenses against the very people the country should serve. I’ve seen the blueprints, the access roads that lead nowhere, the water lines that stop short. It's the same pattern from '52: treat the population as a threat to be managed rather than a nation to be built with. The generals and developers speak of “order” while the bridges crumble in downtown Cairo. My daughter asked me last week why the new buildings have no windows facing the old city. I didn’t answer. Some repetitions don’t deserve names—just silence and sand.

They count the tanks, they count the shells, they count the dead like sacks at a grain office. What they don’t count is the son who doesn’t call for three years because he’s ashamed he ran. They don’t count the widow who burns her husband’s coat because she can’t stand the smell of the rain in it. A war doesn’t end when the guns stop — it ends when the last person stops flinching at loud noises. And that day never comes. I know. I still wake up when a train goes by too fast.

They talk about ammunition and borders like they’re the whole story. Out here, we know the sea remembers men long after the papers stop printing their names. A fisherman doesn’t forget the silence after a son’s boat never comes back, or how his wife folds the same towel every morning like he might still need it. War isn’t only fought with guns—sometimes it’s a government letting your harbor rot while foreign trawlers suck the ocean clean. My father disappeared during the crackdown in ’85. They called it “disappeared,” like he walked off, like the sea took him. I know the sea. It doesn’t steal quietly. Men do.

Out here, they count bodies like sacks at a grain market. What they don’t count is the auto driver who loses half his fares because the road’s blocked, or the kid who drops out because school turned into a shelter. I’ve carried three men home in broken Hindi after blasts — not tourists, just poor bastards who came for work and found blood instead. Their names won’t make it to any report, just like the widow selling tea at the station with three bullet holes in her story and no one to hear. War isn’t just who dies — it’s who keeps living with less. And who profits while the rest of us patch our lives like old tires.