The first fireworks of aerial supremacy in the news bulletin.

"Do you like war?" I ask my daughter. She is nine years old.

"No." She stares with uncomprehending eyes.

"Why?"

"So many people lose their lives."

Her words slowly chill me.

Do people lose their lives, or do they die?

Or is it the same thing?

Maybe the doctrine of reincarnation of the soul is secretly adulterating the pure pain of violent death, which the war brings. The murder has been painted over to look like a game and a commercial transaction.

The game of the merchants of justice and Godhead has just begun. You can see the whole of Kabul on your TV screen. It is sparkling. Death is so many fireflies. In the warmth of your bed, with the winter gently sneaking up, you watch the fires blazing, dying, and reappearing elsewhere. The telescopic perspective keeps the smoke away from your bedroom. You recall the Gulf War "that did not happen".

Horror has been converted into festive pyrotechnics of innocent perversion.

Thank you, virtuality. In the kingdom of the spirit there is no blood. Wars get fought. But you don't get to see life oozing out, red drop by red drop.

And then, you remember people falling free. Like souls when the burnt-out limbo abandons its dead. But the real falling people, infected by the virtual, morph into cutouts. Reality unreels into the unreal! You shrank from imagining the-death-by-crashing-into-the-Sun. You were afraid for your imagination; it would go mad, you thought. Now the fireflies highjack the Boeing. They colonise New York, and return the apocalypse as spectacular illusion.

The titanic icons collapse like obsolete faiths, irretrievable like the icons under the blue screen of death. The spores of sunyata fly from the powdered Buddha of Bamiyan, to display the nothing at the heart of the onion. The onion cannot make you cry, but it can draw the illusion of sorrow.

Sorry.

Onion. History, an onion. The medieval is. Just as the modern was. You thought the postmodern had resolved the problem of history. The postmodern is powerless before an onion. The latter can tickle your nose and inspire you to sneeze unto death. Death comes in a letter. The real virus follows the virtual virus. Nostradamus is here. I saw him peering out of Baudrillard's eyes on that book cover. The Baudrillard of Bamiyan has endless backups.

Like a virtual onion.

Can anyone find me the corpse of man? It lies in the debris of virtuality. I know it is there, I know it from the stench of rotting onions.

Copyright © 2001 Rajesh K. Sharma. All Rights Reserved.

Rajesh K. Sharma is a writer and commentator based in India.