Bombay, Mumbai, call it what you will – a woman’s last conversation with her husband was captured on a crackling phone line before a US missile reduced him to a statistic. The sailor, a man whose name will be erased by the next news cycle, told his wife he loved her. Then a bang.
Then silence. And now, dear readers, the British government is in a flap because someone suggested we might have had a hand in the coordinates. The Foreign Office, a collection of men who look like they’ve just sniffed a badger, insists they were merely ‘observing’ the situation.
Observing, like a cat watches a mouse before disembowelling it. The Indian government, meanwhile, is performing the diplomatic equivalent of a hand-wringing mime. They want answers.
They’ll get a press release. The sailor’s wife gets a folded flag and a sympathy card from the prime minister’s office, probably signed with a biro that’s run out of ink. This, my friends, is the theatre of the absurd.
The man is dead, the row deepens, and somewhere in Whitehall, a civil servant is worrying about the wording of a memo. Meanwhile, the gin in my glass is the only thing that’s honest. It doesn’t pretend to care.
It just numbs.
