BANANAS, BOMBS, AND THE PRICE OF WAR.

 At precisely 4 AM give or take an hour I found myself in a war-torn Middle Eastern city, suspended precariously between journalism and tourism, because nothing quite encapsulates the absurdity of modern adventure like missile smoke and skeletal ruins masquerading as infrastructure. I was there to report, to witness, to distill chaos into coherence for an audience continents away. Yet, in that moment of existential irony, I was merely a man in desperate pursuit of bananas.

The grocery store, a defiant relic at the periphery of devastation, stood like an island in an ocean of debris. Inside, the shopkeeper a portrait of wartime pragmatism, bereft of expression or indulgence—received my modest request: two kilograms of bananas. With the efficiency of a seasoned capitalist in an era of scarcity, he handed over the fruit and declared the price—$120.

Ah, of course. The immutable laws of supply, demand, and the inelasticity of human desperation.

With the resignation of a man who had long accepted the absurd, I complied, exchanging currency for commodity, and turned my attention to my acquisition. One kilogram of firm, golden perfection—a sight so incongruous with its surroundings that it verged on the surreal. And then, its twin: a kilogram of decrepitude, decomposing into a spectacle of rot so profound it seemed to have endured more hardship than the city itself.

I registered my protest. “I paid for good bananas. Why am I receiving half my weight in organic waste?”

The shopkeeper, unmoved, imparted a lesson in the brutal arithmetic of wartime economics: "You want bananas, you take both. No choice."

And therein lay the unvarnished truth the stark economy of survival, the unforgiving calculus of war. One does not simply purchase what one desires; one accepts what is available. One does not negotiate with destruction; one submits to its calculus.

Resigned to this macabre commerce, I retreated with my exorbitantly procured, famine-priced fruit, intent on chronicling the surreal logic of conflict. But before I could even craft my opening sentence, the sky, in an act of celestial violence, split open. Bombs rained. The earth convulsed. Reality, as I had briefly come to terms with it, disintegrated.

And then—I awoke.

The battlefield dissolved, supplanted by the mundanity of my room, my bed, my unimpeachable reality. Yet, the dream lingered—not in the taste of bananas, but in the acrid residue of helpless transactions, of choices dictated by circumstance, of war’s merciless arithmetic.

Perhaps, I had not merely dreamt of war. Perhaps, I had dreamt of life itself where we all partake in the good and the rotten, pay our price without recourse, and hope, against hope, that we awaken before the bombs descend.


THANKYOU.


Written and felt by
Vaibhav Upadhyay.


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