A love like this

Is Love truly a rapture that transforms the very core of one’s being? Is it as deep, transcendent and incredible, as the writers and poets would have us believe?

The question of "what is love?" has put the imaginations of the greatest poets and philosophers in a spin for more than two thousand years and they are still groping for a definite answer… Love, if you ask me, is fundamentally unknowable. The greatest mystery of humankind. Elusive. Hard to define and confine.

So what am I doing here? Am I just trying to hold your attention with an enticing title while I have nothing substantial to speak about? Or am I posing as the connoisseur of love and asking you to sit with me by the fireside while I give you few lessons in love? No, I am not. I am not even trying to do something as feeble as explaining the mysteries of love in this small article. All I want to do is take a short trip with you down the ‘love lane’

Let us start with this acknowledgment that deep down in our hearts we all dream that some enchanted evening we will meet our soul mate, the perfect person who will meet all our needs and fulfill all of our dreams of true love. To begin with, let me come clean, ‘I do.’ Now, chances are that you may be reading this piece because you have just fallen in love and are feeling exhilarated and a bit dazed. You have finally found that special someone and are rapturously saying to your significant other ‘Where have you been all my life?’ Or, sadly, you just had a break up and have fallen out of love and are whispering to yourself in the dark ‘What went wrong?’

Spiritualists have us believe that what we call love is really a whole spectrum of relating, bonding, reaching from the earth to the sky and the professed heaven beyond. At the most earthy level, love is sexual attraction, which often comes with tags of expectations, demands and repressions. And no matter how strong and all encompassing this attraction is, we can’t deny the capriciousness of such a love and I am sure we all have ‘been there done that’ and have come up with our own philosophies to deal with the ‘aftermath.’

On the other hand, the most exalted form of love is what the Seers call, the ‘divine’ love. This love has wings and it takes us higher and higher as it exists beyond sexuality and honors the unique individuality of the other, accepting them in totality. This kind of love is based on freedom, not expectation or need. When such a love happens, it is said to make one change directions, sometimes the entire course of life. It transcends barriers, creates its own parameters. It is deep, subtle and quietly committed. A sacred fire, where one immolates the self and comes out alive and shining. As one Urdu couplet goes “Ek Aag ka darya hai, aur doob ke jaana hai.” (You have to swim in the river of molten fire before you seek true love). Perhaps, this is the kind of love Sufi saints and Mystiques claim to have found.

Alas! Most of us mortal beings can just dream of such a love, as in all this uplifting discussion about love, the saddest truth of the matter is that we can’t find love at our will. Remember what Kahlil Gibran says in The Prophet, “And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.” We may dream of it night and day but we cannot pick out arrows from cupid’s quaver and personally hand it over to him. He shoots blindly and we must fall in the line at that particular moment. You wish.

Nevertheless, each one of us know about this thing called love, in all its surrealistic avatars. The love that comprises of swirling mists, moonlit nights, purple prose, pink rose petal, yellow butterfly, twinkling eyes, lopsided smile, singing heart, dancing feet, melting chocolate, glowing embers, thawing snow, starry night, warm blanket, soft whispers, tender touch, blue bed sheets, happy tears, joyful laughter. A gasp, a whiff, a glimpse, a glance…bated breath! The kind of love where one sits with the lover and gazes into their eyes in the flickering candlelight. The love where passion is triggered by the sight and presence of another. The love where incongruities are initially ignored, due to unreal projections. The projections that sometimes change into disillusionment. We know the wear and tear… the drama and excitement of such a love.

I too carried these manifestations for years until one day I came across Him at a NGO where I worked as a volunteer. He delivered lunch packets to the staff at the organization. He was well into his mid seventies, with grey, scraggly hair and a slight stoop to his painfully thin shoulders. He was a stickler for time; you can set your watch to his timing. Always very quiet. Carrying an aura of stillness around him. Looking at him, I always felt that his silence is very eloquent, as if there is something brewing, deep within his soul. One day he smiled. That day there were fewer clients due to the torrential rain falling outside and I was relatively free. I was sitting in the living room reading a book when he arrived at his usual time. Wet to the core but bang on time with his delivery.

I asked if he would like a cup of tea and he smiled, saying yes. Between the sips of tea he told me he works the first half of the day preparing lunch and delivering it to his clients and the second half of the day he spends at the hospital with his wife. She is in coma for last two years and it is for her treatment that he does this work. He got up immediately after tea, looking at his watch and telling me he has to rush. In this rain? I looked outside the window; the rain was a thick, impenetrable sheet of grey. He was already quite drenched. I asked him to hang on a little more until the rain stops a bit. He told me he couldn’t keep her waiting.

But she is in coma. I did not speak aloud but he read this query in my eyes. "I know," he said. "She has not opened her eyes in the last two years, but I know she is there on that bed and that she is my wife."

He smiled again and picking up his synthetic raincoat walked out in the rain. Goosebumps sprang on my skin. Something choked my throat and I blinked rapidly to push away my tears.

Now who ever wrote a verse, a poem a couplet on this kind of love? The love that is the essence of exaltation, because it moves us from the narrow confines of our ego into the broader, more generous realm of our relationship. The love that is ready to surrender the self and bleed willingly and joyfully for the loved one. The Love that is sometimes just a silence between words. A gap between the ongoing and incoming breath. A hospital bed, a life support machine, a motionless hand. A tremor on the lips. A face on white pillows. A hopeless hopefulness. A walk in the rain.