Life & Wisdom Quote by Jhumpa Lahiri

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.