"On the screen I saw tanks rolling through dusty streets, and fallen buildings, and forests of unfamiliar trees into which East Pakistani refugees had fled, seeking safety over the Indian border"
About this Quote
War arrives here as a broadcast, then refuses to stay inside the frame. Lahiri’s sentence opens with the cool distance of mediation - “On the screen” - but quickly turns that distance into an indictment. The images aren’t curated for drama; they’re blunt inventory: tanks, rubble, “dusty streets.” The repetition of “and” mimics a channel of footage that won’t cut away, a relentless scroll that denies the viewer the comfort of narrative shape. This is not the war of speeches and maps. It’s the war of texture: dust, broken masonry, bodies implied by “fallen buildings.”
Then the line pivots to something more unsettling than machinery: “forests of unfamiliar trees.” The phrase is almost tender, even painterly, and that’s precisely the point. Refuge is framed as a kind of estrangement. Nature isn’t a sanctuary so much as a place of disorientation, a landscape that doesn’t recognize you. “Unfamiliar” belongs as much to the speaker as to the refugees; the trees mark a gap in knowledge that the screen both bridges and widens.
The historical context - East Pakistan’s 1971 crisis, mass displacement into India - sits under the sentence like a pressure system. Lahiri, so often attuned to migration’s private costs, hints at a larger inheritance: diaspora consciousness shaped not only by choice and ambition, but by televised catastrophe. Safety is described with a bureaucratic clarity - “over the Indian border” - underscoring how survival gets reduced to lines on a map, even as the human story keeps spilling past them.
Then the line pivots to something more unsettling than machinery: “forests of unfamiliar trees.” The phrase is almost tender, even painterly, and that’s precisely the point. Refuge is framed as a kind of estrangement. Nature isn’t a sanctuary so much as a place of disorientation, a landscape that doesn’t recognize you. “Unfamiliar” belongs as much to the speaker as to the refugees; the trees mark a gap in knowledge that the screen both bridges and widens.
The historical context - East Pakistan’s 1971 crisis, mass displacement into India - sits under the sentence like a pressure system. Lahiri, so often attuned to migration’s private costs, hints at a larger inheritance: diaspora consciousness shaped not only by choice and ambition, but by televised catastrophe. Safety is described with a bureaucratic clarity - “over the Indian border” - underscoring how survival gets reduced to lines on a map, even as the human story keeps spilling past them.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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