In the vast garden adjoining the kothi,¹ a cat had given birth behind the bushes, and the tom had eaten the kittens. Then a bitch had given birth, and her young had grown large, barking day and night inside and outside the kothi, scattering filth everywhere. They were given poison. One by one, all of them died. Their mother too. Their father, no one knew where he was. Had he been there, his death too would have been certain.

God knows how many years had passed. The bushes of the garden adjoining the kothi had been trimmed and pruned hundreds and thousands of times. Several cats and bitches had given birth behind them, and not a trace of any remained. Her ill-mannered hens would often lay eggs there, which she would gather every morning and carry inside.

In that very garden, some man had murdered their young maidservant with great cruelty. Around her neck was twisted her red silk drawstring with its tassels, which she had bought two days earlier from a peddler for eight annas.² The murderer had wound it so violently that her eyes had bulged from their sockets.

Seeing her, a fever so violent had seized the mistress that she had fallen unconscious, and perhaps she was unconscious still. But no, how could that be, for long after that murder the hens had laid eggs, no, the cats had given birth, and a wedding had been celebrated. There had been a bitch with a red dupatta³ around her neck, a mukesh-work⁴ dupatta, shimmering and glinting. Her eyes were not bulging outward; they were sunken inward.

A band had played in the garden. Soldiers in red uniforms had come, pressing colourful bagpipes under their arms, producing strange sounds from their mouths. Several tassels hung from their uniforms, which people plucked one by one and tied into their own drawstrings. But when morning came, not a trace of them remained. All had been given poison.

Whatever possessed the wretched bride, she gave birth not behind the bushes but on her very bed, to a single child, round and fat, red as a tassel. Her mother died. Her father too. Both were killed by the child. The father, no one knew where he was. Had he been there, his death too would have joined theirs.

The soldiers in red uniforms, their great tassels dangling, vanished and never returned. Tomcats prowled the garden, staring at her, taking her for a basket full of offal, though the basket held only oranges.

One day she took out two of her oranges and placed them before the mirror. Standing behind it, she looked for them, but they could not be seen. She thought it was because they were too small, but even as she thought this, they grew large, and she wrapped them in silken cloth and placed them on the mantelpiece.

Now the dogs began to bark. The oranges began to roll across the floor. They bounced on every floor of the kothi, leapt through every room, and rolling and bounding, went racing through great gardens. The dogs played with them and quarrelled among themselves. For some reason, two of those dogs ate poison and died. Those that remained were devoured by their middle-aged, robust maidservant, the one who had come in place of the young girl whom some man had murdered, slipping the tasselled drawstring around her neck.

There was her mother. Six or seven years older than the middle-aged maidservant, but without her robustness. Every morning and evening she went for a drive in the motorcar, and like her ill-mannered hens, laid eggs in distant gardens behind the bushes. Neither she nor the driver would bring them back. She made omelettes. The stains fell on her clothes. When they dried, she would throw them into the garden behind the bushes, where kites would swoop down and carry them away.

One day her friend came. Pakistan Mail, motor number 9612 PL. The heat was great. Daddy was in the hills. Mummy had gone out for a drive. They were dripping with sweat. No sooner had she entered the room than she removed her blouse and stood beneath the ceiling fan. Her breasts, which had been boiling, cooled down slowly. Her own breasts, which had been cool, began to boil slowly. At last both sets of breasts swayed and clinked like bangles and turned into sour lassi.⁵

This friend’s band was played. But those uniformed soldiers did not come to wave their tassels. In their place were brass vessels, small and large, from which sounds emerged, thunderous and soft, soft and thunderous. When this friend was met again, she announced that she had changed. And truly she had changed. She now had two bellies. One old, one new. One mounted upon the other. Her breasts had curdled.

Then her brother’s band was played. The middle-aged robust maidservant wept a great deal. Her brother consoled her at length. The poor woman had been reminded of her own wedding. Through the night, her brother and his bride quarrelled. The bride wept; the brother laughed. When morning came, the middle-aged robust maidservant took the brother away to console him. The bride was bathed. In her shalwar⁶ lay her red tasselled drawstring. One cannot say why it was not tied around the bride’s neck instead.

Her eyes were very large. Had her throat been throttled with force, they would have protruded like the eyes of a slaughtered goat, and a violent fever would have seized her. But the first one had still not broken, or perhaps it had broken, and this was a new fever in which she remained unconscious still.

Her mother was learning to drive. The father lived in a hotel. He came occasionally, met with his son, and left. The son occasionally summoned his wife home. Every two or three days, when some memory tormented the middle-aged robust maidservant, she would begin to weep. He would console her, she would coax him along, and the bride would depart.

Now she and the bride, the bhabhi,⁷ both went out for drives together, the friend too, Pakistan Mail, motor number 9612 PL. Driving on, they would find themselves at Ajanta,⁸ where the art of painting was taught. Looking at the paintings, all three would themselves become paintings. Colours upon colours, red, yellow, green, blue, all of them screaming. The creator of those colours would silence them. He had long flowing hair.

In winter and summer alike he wore an overcoat; he was handsome enough in appearance, and always wore wooden sandals, indoors and out. Having silenced his colours, he himself would begin to scream. All three would then silence him, after which they themselves would begin to shriek. All three painted hundreds of works of abstract art at Ajanta. In one woman’s every painting, the female figure had two bellies, in different colours. In the second woman’s paintings, the female figure was always middle-aged and robust. In the third woman’s paintings, there were tassels upon tassels, a great clutch of drawstrings.

The abstract paintings continued. But the breasts of all three dried up. The heat was immense, so much so that all three were drenched in sweat. Entering the khus-curtained⁹ room, they removed their blouses at once and stood beneath the ceiling fan. The fan turned and turned. Neither coldness nor warmth entered their breasts.

Her mother was in the next room. The driver was wiping Mobil oil from her body.

Daddy was at the hotel, where his lady stenographer was rubbing eau de cologne onto his forehead.

One day her own band was played too. The desolate garden became festive again. The owner of the Ajanta Studio had decorated the flowerpots and the doorways. The great deep lipsticks took fright at his scattered colours and fled. One, which was darker than the rest, fled so far that it fell right there and became his student.

He had also designed her bridal costume and had created a thousand dimensions within it. Viewed from directly in front, she appeared to be a bundle of multi-coloured drawstrings. Step a little to one side and she was a basket of fruit. Move to another angle and she was a phulkari¹⁰ curtain hanging in a window. Step behind her and she was a heap of crushed watermelons. Shift the angle slightly and she was a jar filled with tomato sauce. Seen from above, she was singular art. Seen from below, she was the obscure poetry of Mera Ji.¹¹

Connoisseur eyes exclaimed in delight. The groom had been so moved that on the very second day of the wedding he resolved to become an abstract artist himself. Accordingly, he went to Ajanta with his wife, where they discovered that the owner was himself getting married and had been residing for some days at the home of his intended bride, the very dark lipstick that had been darker than all the others. For the first few months, her husband retained interest in the lipstick and in abstract art, but when the Ajanta Studio closed down and no news could be obtained of its owner from any quarter, he took up the salt trade, which proved most profitable.

In the course of this business he encountered a girl whose breasts had not dried up. He found them to his liking. No band was played, but a marriage took place. The first wife took her brushes and went away to live apart. This estrangement was at first a source of bitterness for both of them, but later transformed into a strange and peculiar sweetness. Her friend, who had changed her second husband and journeyed through all of Europe and was now afflicted with consumption, painted this sweetness in cubic art. There were countless translucent crystal cubes arranged among thorny succulent plants in such a manner that two figures had formed within them, and upon these, honeybees sat drinking nectar.

Her second friend took poison and killed herself. When this sorrowful news reached her, she fell unconscious. One cannot say whether it was a new unconsciousness or that same old one which had descended after the violent fever.

Her father was in the eau de cologne, where his hotel was stroking the head of his lady stenographer. Her mother had handed over the entire household accounts to the middle-aged robust maidservant. She had learned to drive by now, but had fallen gravely ill. Even so, she remained much concerned for the motherless child of the driver, feeding it her own Mobil oil.

Her bhabhi and her brother’s life had grown very middle-aged and robust. The two met each other with great affection, until one night, when the maidservant and her brother were settling the household accounts, the bhabhi appeared. She was abstract, with a pen in her hand rather than a brush. But she settled the accounts of both of them quite conclusively. In the morning, two large clots of dried blood, shaped like tassels, were removed from the room and attached to the bhabhi’s neck.

She came somewhat to her senses now. Because of her estrangement from her husband, her life had turned bitter and then transformed into a strange sweetness. She made an effort to render it a little bitter again and began to drink, but failed, for the quantity was too small. She increased the quantity, until she was plunging into it like a swimmer. People thought she would drown now, but she would surface again, wiping the liquor from her mouth and breaking into laughter. When she rose each morning, it seemed to her that through the night every particle of her body had been wailing and beating its breast. All those children who might have been born to her, in those graves which might have been made for them, were weeping in anguish for that milk which might have been theirs. But where were her breasts now, for the wild tomcats had long since drunk them dry.

She would drink more, seeking to drown in a fathomless sea, but her wish was never fulfilled. She was intelligent. Educated. She spoke of sexual subjects freely and without the slightest affectation. She saw no impediment in forming bodily relations with men. Yet even so, sometimes in the solitude of the night, her heart would wish that she might, like one of her ill-mannered hens, go behind the bushes and lay a single egg there.

She had been hollowed out entirely. Only a skeleton of bones remained, and people began to keep their distance. She understood, and so she did not run after them, and began to live alone in the house. She smoked cigarette after cigarette, drank, and sat lost in thoughts no one could read. She slept very little at night. She wandered around the kothi. In the quarter in front, the driver’s motherless child wept for Mobil oil, but its mother had run dry. The driver had met with an accident. The motorcar was in the garage and its owner lay in hospital, where one leg had already been amputated and the second was awaiting the same fate.

Occasionally she would glance into the quarter and it would seem to her that a faint tremor had arisen in the very dregs of her breasts, but even this bitter taste would not so much as wet the lips of that child.

Her brother had for some time been living away from home. Then one day a letter arrived from Switzerland saying he was receiving treatment there, that the nurse was very fine, and that upon leaving the hospital he intended to marry her.

The middle-aged robust maidservant stole a quantity of jewellery, some cash, and a great many garments belonging to her mother, and disappeared after a few days. Shortly after that, her mother died in the hospital, the operation having failed. Her father attended the funeral. After that, she never set eyes on him again.

Now she was utterly alone. She dismissed all the servants, the driver included. For the child she engaged a nursemaid. No burden remained, save that of her own thoughts. If anyone came to call on her, she would cry out from within: Go away. Whoever you are, go away. I do not wish to meet anyone.

In the safe she found her mother’s countless precious ornaments. Her own were there too, for which she had no desire. But now she would sit naked before the mirror for hours at night, adorning her body with all that jewellery, drinking, and singing obscene songs in a cracked and tuneless voice. There was no other kothi nearby, so she had complete freedom.

She had stripped her body bare by many means already. Now she wished to strip her soul bare as well. But in this she felt an overwhelming veil between herself and that act. Only one method suggested itself to her for tearing that veil away, to drink, and to drink without restraint, and in that condition to take the aid of her naked body. But it was a profound tragedy that, having been stripped to the last extreme of nakedness, it had clothed itself in modesty.

She had grown tired of painting. For a long while now, her painting materials had lain locked away in a small chest. But one day she took out all the colours and dissolved them in large bowls. She washed all the brushes clean and set them aside, then stood naked before the mirror and began to paint new contours and features upon her own body. This effort was an attempt to render her existence entirely bare.

She could paint only the portion that faced her. She remained occupied with this the entire day, without eating or drinking, standing before the mirror, applying different colours to her body, drawing crooked and wavering lines. There was assurance in her brushstroke. Near midnight, she stepped back, surveyed herself with care, and breathed a sigh of satisfaction. After that, she adorned her colour-smeared body with the jewellery piece by piece and looked once more, intently, into the mirror, when suddenly she heard a sound.

She turned. A man stood with a knife in his hand, a cloth bound across his face, as though about to strike. But when she turned, a scream rose from the intruder’s throat. The knife fell from his hand. In a state of utter confusion he turned first one way and then another, and finding whatever opening presented itself, fled through it. She ran after him, screaming and calling out: Stop, stop, I shall say nothing to anyone, stop!

But the thief would not hear a word of it and, vaulting the wall, vanished. She returned, defeated. Near the threshold of the door lay the thief’s dagger. She picked it up and went inside. Suddenly her eyes met the mirror. Over the place where her heart was, she had painted a sheath-like form, the colour of hide. She placed the dagger against it and looked. The sheath was far too small. She threw the dagger aside and, swallowing four or five great mouthfuls of liquor from the bottle, began to pace about restlessly. She had emptied several bottles already. She had eaten nothing at all.

After pacing for a long while, she came before the mirror once more. Around her neck was a painted necklace resembling a drawstring, with large, full tassels. She had made it with her brush. All at once she felt that the necklace was beginning to tighten. Slowly, gradually, it was sinking inward into her throat. She stood in silence, her eyes fixed upon the mirror, those eyes emerging outward at the same measured pace. After a little while, every vein in her face began to swell. Then, all at once, she let out a scream and fell face forward onto the floor.

Translator’s Notes

¹ Kothi: A large, detached residential house, typically of colonial or upper-class construction, common in the subcontinent. The word carries connotations of established wealth and social standing, distinct from an ordinary dwelling.

² Anna: A unit of currency formerly used in British India and later in Pakistan and India, equal to one-sixteenth of a rupee. Eight annas constituted half a rupee, signifying a modest, everyday sum.

³ Dupatta: A long scarf or shawl worn by women across the subcontinent, draped over the shoulders or head. It carries both practical and cultural significance, often associated with feminine modesty and adornment.

⁴ Mukesh-work: A traditional South Asian embroidery technique in which fine metallic wire, typically silver or gold, is stitched flat onto fabric to create a shimmering, reflective surface. It is commonly used on wedding and festive garments.

⁵ Lassi: A traditional yogurt-based drink, either sweet or sour, widely consumed across the subcontinent. Sour lassi, made from curdled or fermented yogurt, is the unsweetened, salted variety.

⁶ Shalwar: Loose trousers, typically gathered at the waist with a drawstring, worn as part of the shalwar kameez ensemble common throughout South Asia. The drawstring referred to throughout the story, the izar-band, belongs to this garment.

⁷ Bhabhi: The Hindi and Urdu term for one’s elder brother’s wife. It carries a specific familial weight, denoting both kinship and a customary relationship of deference and affection.

⁸ Ajanta: A reference to the Ajanta Caves of Maharashtra, India, celebrated for their ancient Buddhist murals and sculpture, regarded as masterworks of classical South Asian art. Manto uses the name for a fictional art studio, evoking both the prestige and the pretension that surround artistic circles in the story.

⁹ Khus: The root of the vetiver grass, woven into screens or curtains called khus tattis, which are kept wet so that the breeze passing through them cools and perfumes the air. Their use was widespread in the subcontinent before mechanical refrigeration.

¹⁰ Phulkari: A traditional embroidery style originating in Punjab, characterized by dense, colourful floral and geometric patterns worked in silk thread on cotton cloth. Phulkari shawls and dupattas are particularly associated with bridal and festive occasions in Punjabi culture.

¹¹ Meera Ji: The pen name of Muhammad Sanaullah Dar (1912-1949), an influential and deliberately obscure Urdu modernist poet associated with the Progressive Writers’ Movement and the halqa-e-arbab-e-zauq literary circle. His verse was known for its dense symbolism, psychological complexity, and frank engagement with themes of desire and alienation, qualities that make the comparison in the story pointed and ironic.

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Shouldn’t a ravaged lover revel in his agonies? Should the suffering that was his only companion when distances, and bitterness and anguish inflicted him in all their mightiness, be forgotten? I believe not. So let’s not take our union for granted, let me pay a homage to what until now have we suffered. Nothing in the world that is of any considerable quality I believe can be stripped off of pain. Suffering forms the very fabric of anything of substance. Wouldn’t you think?

What intimidation can love claim to wield if it cannot induce any submission through it? …and absolutely damned and insulted would be those who would find a distraction to avoid the sufferings of love. I, for one, ventured right into it. One might argue that Patience in love doesn’t have to be a deliberate endeavor, not something that helpless love strives for consciously but rather is an inherent quality of this beastly emotion. I would say, my love, that if love was an entirely effortless play of emotions, no love or lover has to stand out and receive any extraordinary attention anywhere in the world. Only once you have put not only your madness but also your reason and not only your impulse but also your determination into it is when you can speak of having acquired, if any, acquaintance of what lies behind the impenetrable facet of affection.

I knocked at your door and my eyes met your astonished gaze. To this astonished gaze, that stood only steps afar from me, across the door that I knocked at and which I had knocked at one million times in my imagination, I would say, while you see my apparition all covered in dust of longing and make out my features in the mist of time-worn gloom, do not fail to acknowledge what lies beneath all this; an eternity of suffering and despair that I travelled across to see you.

In chaos of rose blossom

I stay still and sprung, static

In a jungle of waning thorns;

I touched you from a star

And died in the deep red aftermath.

In absence i thrive, sustained

By your scent from afar.

My death, your eternal victory,

The heavy song of martyrdom,

Is all that now remains..

I am grateful that you listen to (read, to be precise) my gibberish. Most of the time even I don’t know what I am writing. Time is passing, or we are passing, without any conviction of existing. As Berkeley says, “To be is to be perceived,” and most of the time I feel that I cannot perceive myself. I wonder if someone else does.

I don’t know why, but I think evening is the hour when a person who tries to understand and sense life feels the most vulnerable. It is something inexplicably complicated. The soul becomes fragile in the evening. It grows desolate and melancholic, at least mine does. You stand somewhere between the light and the darkness, and the gloomy air shackles your soul with the weight of despair. I have been going through this every day, and I suspect you have too. I cannot explain it to anyone. I am writing this to you because I know there is an invisible thread connecting us, simply because we read. Others would call it madness. But clowns are in demand these days.

Perhaps it is the sadness of not doing anything except living, the tiredness of being a conformist, the anguish of remaining sane all the time. I really don’t know. What I do know is that it comes and goes, every day without fail. This is a phase, and it is necessary to remind yourself that it is temporary, like everything else. Or maybe that is a kind of compromise, a consolation we offer ourselves to stay afloat, to stay desperately hopeful. Because we fear what losing our mind altogether might look like. I once read a line in Oscar Wilde that said, “The basis of optimism is sheer terror.” I could not understand it then. Now I do.

You might find this letter completely incoherent. But is it necessary to be coherent all the time? Isn’t there a pattern buried somewhere within the chaos?

Your Friend

,

Our dreams are like the silent fall,

Of haze after the evening rain

And all my ache spills from the song,

Of the nightingale's vocal chain.

I know, if we touched the sky, We would grow wings;

You seem so far, yet near,

So infinitely like a blessing...

Of word-petals and song shards; here alone,

In this broken empire i reign,

No human may trespass, save..

those who willingly risk being witness,

to the inflictions, those painful wonders

of Chaos, havoc and divine reincarnation

And all manner of bizarre etceteras.

Life is passing like water that flows in a river,

Time has nothing to offer and nothing to deliver,

My eyes have grown weary with sorrow,

My voice has begun to quiver,

But in this bleak and fleeting life,

So full of sound, fury, and strife,

There are still some things to be cherished.

Your voice that sweetens my hearing,

Your eyes that grant me a beautiful sight,

Your lips, the source of my deepest delight,

When everything turns to darkness around me,

I light the lantern of your memory,

Where we are still together,

And I hold your hand like a breeze, soft as a feather,

Gentle as the first ray of sun upon the water.

Every night I coax my weary heart,

To silence all this hollow pain,

And hold you in my arms again.

Dear Friend,

I received your letter, and with it, your question about why I’ve stopped writing. I must apologize for my delayed response. Life, it seems, has become an enigma or perhaps it has always been so, and I am only now beginning to notice. They say adversity inspires the most poignant writings, that a writer’s craft is the reflection of wounds etched deep into the soul.

But, my friend, how does one write in times like these? Here, each day carries its own tragedy, a relentless parade of despair that numbs the senses. The anguish of others surrounds us, yet we act as though it’s unfolding on some distant planet. Words are uttered in abundance, but they lack gravity, substance. The truths that beg to be voiced are stifled. Only the cries of the oppressed bear meaning - those violated, marginalized, silenced. The rest of our noise is just dissonant, empty clamor.

I often think about what happens to these cries. Scientists tell us energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed. Then where do the anguished voices of the wronged go? I am convinced they don’t disappear, they linger, haunting the edges of our consciousness. Perhaps this is why we feel so hollow, why we seek distraction in indulgence and superficial pursuits. We have turned away from ourselves, filling the void with meaningless consumption. It is no wonder we fear solitude so deeply.

For those of us who attempt to understand, who engage with the world through books, reflection, and observation, the burden is heavier. Consciousness feels like a curse, isolating us in a world that rushes forward without pause or thought. We are outsiders in the rhythm of this linear, unfeeling time.

You ask why I haven’t been writing. The truth is, I don’t know where to begin. There is either too little to say or far too much. Every thought feels inadequate, every word insufficient. And yet, I feel the weight of everything I’ve left unsaid.

Even the format of our conversations, the way we communicate, feels like a testament to the strange absurdity of our existence. We live in the asshole of the world.

I hope to hear from you soon.

Your Friend,

Ammar Yasir

And wonder where you discarded

Your bangles and embroidery:

Oh you who came, but you who never came.

—I run a quiet sink-full of water and wait, watch

As the wasp wings circle my stoned fingers;

I snatch at the sting and press, hard. I feel Nothing.

My lips whisper your name, think of your lips

The dispensers of bliss and soul-morphine;

I see your bangles, bright, full of rejoice

Half-drowned in a precious scum of soapy water. 

I rearrange my perception of the Universe

And hear your heartbeat through the ticking of God’s clock.

I drink a cup of tea and ponder the blessings,

in the aftermath of fury.

"In any case civilization has made mankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty. In old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace exterminated those he thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves."

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864)

There is a particular kind of moral sickness that only the most advanced civilizations are capable of producing. The barbarian, to use the word in its classical sense, killed without the burden of self-consciousness. His violence was cosmologically sanctioned, socially celebrated, and psychologically uncomplicated. He did not require humanitarian law to frame what he was doing, because what he was doing made no pretense of being anything other than itself. What modernity introduced was something qualitatively different: the simultaneous perfection of violence and the perfection of its justification, a condition in which the machinery of killing and the machinery of conscience sustain each other in a closed circuit that has been running, with increasing sophistication, for several centuries. Dostoyevsky saw this from his underground room in nineteenth-century St. Petersburg and could not look away. We have built the underground into the architecture of global governance and called it civilization.

The Enlightenment is the name for the moment when this circuit was first fully assembled. It promised, with extraordinary ambition, that reason would do what religion and tradition had failed to do: ground the dignity of the human person in something universal and inalienable, beyond the reach of sovereign caprice or theological whim. The promise was genuine, and the people who made it believed in it, which is precisely what makes its record so devastating. The same century that produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man also produced the systematic enslavement of millions of Africans, and these were complementary projects, running in parallel, funding each other. The universalism of Enlightenment thought required, as its operating condition, a category of beings to whom the universal did not apply, because the material wealth that funded European philosophical culture (its institutions of learning, its printing presses, its salons) required the exploitation of human beings who could not, within the civilization's own stated values, be legitimately exploited unless they were first removed from the category of the fully human. The rights of man were the rights of a specific kind of man, and the history of the last three centuries is the history of that specificity defending itself against every attempt to extend the promise to everyone it excluded when it was made.

The modern nation-state became the institutional vehicle for this defense. It is, at its analytical core, an engine for the legitimation of violence, for the transformation of killing from a crime into a policy, from an atrocity into a necessary exercise of sovereign duty. The modern state kills within a framework of justification so elaborate and so thoroughly internalized by its subjects that the killing and the justification have become indistinguishable. When a government bombs a civilian neighborhood and calls it a surgical strike against terrorist infrastructure, this is the state speaking its native tongue, the tongue of legitimation that is its fullest expression. The rules of war, the humanitarian conventions, the international legal architecture built in the ruins of the Second World War: power helped design these frameworks, and power has spent the decades since their signing, learning to inhabit them while continuing to do what power does.

Gaza is the most complete contemporary illustration of this dynamic. Since October 2023, Israel has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, among them thousands of children, in a campaign that has destroyed schools, besieged and leveled hospitals, engineered famine as a weapon of war, and reduced one of the most densely populated places on earth to an archaeological site of civilian death. Every stage of Israel's campaign has been accompanied by a legal framework, by press briefings, by military spokespersons explaining the targeting logic with the measured calm of administrators rather than the passion of killers. The United States has provided the weapons, absorbed the diplomatic cost, and vetoed ceasefire after ceasefire at the Security Council, performing throughout the role of a reluctant but principled ally doing what the situation regrettably requires. In February 2026, American missiles struck a girls' school in Minab, southern Iran, during school hours. The Secretary of Defense described the operation as delivering "death and destruction from the sky," with rules of engagement deliberately loosened to "unleash American power." The president, confronted with images of the school's wreckage, told the press that Iran had bombed its own school.

Iran carries its own portion of responsibility. Its foreign policy has armed and directed forces across the region that have targeted civilians, and its government has for decades used the Palestinian cause as a geopolitical instrument while denying its own people the most basic political rights. The distinction that matters, though, is one of position. Iran has never presented itself as the civilization whose values define the standard of the human. It has never authored the international legal order, chaired its institutions, or presented its military power as the enforcement arm of universal rights. The United States and Israel have done all these things, which is precisely why their conduct demands to be measured against the standards they have claimed as their own. The pretense of equivalence distributes moral responsibility so evenly that it becomes weightless, which is precisely its function.

The question that requires the deepest theorization is the question of children. A civilization that targets children is making a statement about which futures are permitted to exist. The child is the biological and cultural reproduction of the people you are trying to destroy, the carrier of language, memory, and identity into the generation that will either continue a people's existence or inherit its erasure. When Israel damages or destroys 778 of Gaza's 815 schools, when American missiles strike a girls' elementary school in southern Iran during the school day, when the pattern of targeting makes itself legible across multiple theaters of war, the word accident becomes a kind of intellectual cowardice. The destruction of children is the destruction of futurity itself: the attempt to ensure that the people who survive the present cannot transmit themselves into the future. For certain kinds of war, this is the logic, stated plainly and pursued consistently.

What connects this to the Epstein network is a structure, and identifying it carefully matters. Epstein trafficked and sexually abused hundreds of children over decades, protected by men of extraordinary institutional power whose names remain partially sealed in files that the justice system has managed with a seriousness of purpose reflecting how much their full disclosure would cost. The network survived because the institutional architecture of power that these men inhabited was designed, as all such architectures are, to protect its members from the accountability it imposes on everyone else. The connection to Israel's bombing of schools is that in both cases, children exist in a zone where the civilization's formal protections do not reach them, where their bodies are available to power in ways that the law prohibits and the institutions permit. The question of why the powerful are so consistently drawn to the domination of children, whether from the air over Gaza or in the private rooms of the powerful, is a question about what domination ultimately seeks. It seeks the most complete form of itself. The child represents absolute vulnerability, the purest possible expression of the asymmetry of power. To exercise violence upon a child, whether military or sexual, is to strip domination of every complication and deliver it in its essential form. That this occurs within and through the institutions of the civilization that most loudly proclaims the protection of children is the diagnosis, and it should be read as one.

Foucault understood what lay beneath all of this when he wrote: "The strategic adversary is fascism, the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us." The fascism he named is the psychological structure by which populations come to identify with power rather than with its victims, to experience their civilization's violence as the defense of their own safety, to watch a school reduced to rubble by Israeli or American strikes and feel the dull satisfaction of a civilization being protected. It is the achievement of a long pedagogical project, sustained across educational institutions, media systems, and political culture, that has taught people to see through the eyes of power so thoroughly that the view from below has become, for those who benefit from the view from above, literally unimaginable.

Dostoyevsky's underground man never left his room. His lucidity was his prison. The children in the rubble of Minab and Gaza, and the children in the Epstein files, are not asking for our lucidity. They are the evidence that the civilization which wrote their protection into law made the writing a performance and the protection a selective privilege, available to those whose existence the civilization has decided to value and withheld from those whose existence it has decided it can afford to destroy. Which is worse: the honest barbarism of the past, or this? The question has an answer. We simply prefer, like the underground man, the clarity of seeing it to the difficulty of saying so.