The Indian sailor’s final words, ‘I will come home safely,’ now ring with the hollow finality of a Victorian valediction sent from the Crimea. A single sentence, typed perhaps into a phone, meant to reassure a family, has become an epitaph. The US struck, he died, and the UK now mutters the obligatory plea for de-escalation.
This is the rhythm of our age: a pulse of violence, a chorus of diplomatic throat-clearing, and the quiet, private grief of a family left with a ghost and a text message. We are, as ever, rehearsing the fall of another empire, only this time the barbarians are not at the gates. They pilot drones, and they serve our own governments.
The British call for restraint is the same polite fiction uttered in the halls of Versailles before the next war. It is the language of a civilisation that no longer believes in its own words but cannot bear the silence. The sailor’s promise was a tender lie, but the lie of our leaders is a far colder deception: that any of this is under control.
The only honest response is to admit that we have turned the world into a machine for breaking promises, and that the last words of the dead are the only truth we ever hear.
