# After Valentine's Day Love The flower petals had begun to wilt by Tuesday. She noticed them first—the red roses he'd given her on Sunday, now browning at the edges, drooping in the vase like tired dancers who'd performed one show too many. She didn't throw them away immediately. There was something in that decay she found oddly comforting, the way things naturally returned to themselves, shedding their temporary grandeur. By Wednesday, the water had turned cloudy. By Thursday, two petals had fallen onto the windowsill, paper-thin and fragile as old skin. He called on Friday. "How are you?" he asked, the way people do when they're trying to sound normal but aren't quite managing it. "The flowers are dying," she said. There was a pause. She could hear him breathing on the other end, could imagine him standing in his office—or was he home now?—searching for the right words. "All flowers die," he finally said. "I know." "Should I bring you new ones?" She looked at the vase, at the dark water that smelled faintly of decay, at the few remaining petals still clinging to the brittle stems. There was something almost honest about the sight of them now, something that Valentine's Day flowers never possessed. The red was less theatrical, more truthful. The fragrance had given way to something earthier, closer to soil than perfume. "No," she said. "Don't." After they hung up, she sat with the dying flowers for another hour. The afternoon light came through the window, and in that light, the brown edges of the petals looked almost beautiful—like autumn captured in winter, like the truth of things settling in after all the performance had ended. She finally discarded them on Saturday morning. The vase, when she rinsed it clean, looked naked and uncertain on the windowsill. He texted that evening: *Are you angry with me?* She thought about the flowers, about the way they'd held their brightness for a few days before surrendering to inevitability. She thought about what it meant to love something enough to watch it die, and to be loved by someone who was still learning how to do the same. *No*, she typed back. *I'm not angry.* What she didn't say—what perhaps there were no flowers grand enough to carry, no words perfect enough to convey—was that she understood him now in a way she hadn't before. That after Valentine's Day, when the commercial perfection faded and real life reasserted itself with all its uncertainty and difficulty, that was when love actually meant something. That was when it became true. She put the vase away and made tea. Outside, it was beginning to snow.

 
I can't say exactly how many years ago it happened. But it happens now, keeps happening, and I suppose it will keep happening.
On one side rice paddies, on the other mustard fields; back then I didn't pay attention to anything else. Walking along the bunds between them, the play of yellow and green; or was it those movements in the distance that never quite became haystacks, those flights of white herons—which was more beautiful, or whether any of it was beautiful at all, I couldn't tell. Lost in such thoughts, or perhaps thinking of nothing at all, drifting in that peculiar detachment as the wind—that wind thousands of years old that plays freely through the grain heads—carried both me and her away. I don't know from when this wind has blown. Who was she? Was she really anyone? Or was it all just magic, some simple rural fable made real? Or a restaging of all those exquisite moments from A Beautiful Mind? If someone had killed me without reason, or simply because they wanted to, or because they had a gun in their hand, I would have died with some measure of pain, some grievance. But did a flight of white herons, waiting to be hunted in that old dusty field where I used to run as a child, wait with the same pain and grievance? (Does death really involve waiting? Is it that simple? Sssss! Really that easy?)—even the finches perched carelessly on the dead wood trees nearby didn't know, I suppose. We didn't have shotguns, so the finches chirped away without fear, kept chirping—or not quite; they were fearless because they somehow knew that no one ate their flesh. When no one eats your flesh, you are at once utterly carefree and sometimes sorrowful too; sorrowful because when nobody looks at you, there's nothing in you worth looking at. You are both blessed and cursed by God all at once. The finches took comfort in the thought that though they were less beautiful than the herons, they didn't suffer as much. God never sent anyone here blessed with both beauty and safety at once. One's own flesh is one's own enemy. A little ugly, a little safe. Come what may, all joy lies in being beautiful. No one can keep accounts of sorrow against the currency of beauty in life. In the joy of this beauty, death slips away, and what we call life is merely this strange, beautiful performance of survival.
When village roads are unpaved, I love them; when they're paved, my mood sours. Perhaps it's because my love for authenticity runs deep; but far more than that—it's the fact that I don't have to live there. So much of human love is really love for the opposite, because we ourselves are not there. I think: where I'm not, there lies all happiness! Who knows! The whole afternoon after some Valentine's Day, I spent in some village, and by evening I came to the bookshop at the lighthouse. Which village was it? Perhaps villages differ, but the ones I love or wish to love are much the same. Two beautiful villages don't have two different faces. On Valentine's Day, nobody—out of love, lack of love, ill will, good will, or even hatred—gave even a paper jackfruit to anyone. Did anyone ever hate me, actually? Or am I not even worthy of the hatred that comes after love runs dry? Otherwise hatred would have ended too. But it hasn't! All right then, when love ends, must hatred begin? The love that doesn't end or culminate in hatred—that is a good love indeed. If I hadn't loved, why would I have to hate? The opposite of love being hatred—that's only in Bengali textbooks, not in life.

I’ve always loved thinking about it this way: that hatred on the flip side of love must mean there’s something in the calculus of gain and loss, nowhere else; and who doesn’t know that life’s equation is nothing but earthly reckoning! When, where, and why did love ever have to become earthly? I’ve never found that address! Have you?

Once, on some February the 15th, all of this happened. Not today. Today none of this happened. Yet nothing happened that would have made it wrong if it had. Does what never happens truly never happen at all? Or how much of what does happen actually happens? Yesterday’s formal Valentine’s Day—that day of loving and being loved. What’s so terribly wrong about loving yourself a little, keeping this day in front of you (or leaving it behind)? In the old habit of many years, that’s exactly what I did today—I loved myself and bought myself some books. This primitive and genuine love one bears for oneself—narcissism, or self-love—it comes in two forms. First: living loved by oneself when someone else loves you, because if you survive, even if you get nothing else, you’ll at least have love. Perhaps you won’t even have that. But still, on the mere hope of it—love will come—that hope alone is enough to keep living! Second: not becoming so unnecessary that you can’t go on without regret. The most painful feeling in this world is the feeling of being unnecessary. Of course, on Facebook, everyone is more or less narcissistic. Everyone wants others to think they’re like a hero or heroine, that everything about them is perfect. A man with a head full of gleaming baldness often stands before the mirror and loves to think, “Wow! The five long hairs crowning my head are so beautifully thick!” Someone who looks like the number five in Bengali script sees Ranbir Kapoor when he looks in the mirror! From some angle, surely he looks like a chocolate boy! He stands before that mirror his whole life searching for that particular angle. There’s nothing wrong in this. He who doesn’t love himself can’t love anyone. He who loves himself makes every effort to present himself beautifully. The eyes of one who is beautiful catch the beauty in others much more than the eyes of one who is plain. So I say: let narcissism triumph, let love spread far, let beauty surround us, let envy lose its kingdom and wander homeless through barren lands.

This time at the book fair, I got the chance to go just once. Today, suddenly, I felt this burning urge to wander through the book fair. But alas! I’m nowhere near the book fair at this moment! I went to Rokomari dot com. It has almost every book from the fair. I picked out about fifty books from this side of Bengal and that side of Bengal and placed the order. Oh, what bliss! One of the five most peaceful feelings in the world is the feeling of buying books. This feeling flows in my blood. The way blood dances and throbs—those who don’t buy books, how would they ever understand that thrill? Of course, I’ve used the word “books” in a symbolic sense. Books mean joy. I’m talking about buying joy—with time, or with money!

I bought these books out of love—and I say this with complete honesty, because it’s as easy to say “I love” in various circumstances without meaning it as it is difficult to spend hard-earned money without genuine affection. A person you love deeply may, despite that profound love, abandon you simply because you cannot express it, or cannot express it in the way they prefer. But a book does not abandon you so easily. There are two reasons for this. First: a book is immobile—it cannot walk away—so it simply waits, hoping that moths will eat through it, will chew it to pieces and finally set it in motion. Second: even if you cannot finish reading it right away, even if years pass until you finally feel “I ought to at least read some of it”—even then, if you cannot manage that, the book suffers nothing. Standing on a shelf, it is praised unstintingly; it may even serve some generation’s purpose, now and then. And when it does serve, we receive treasures beyond measure. Amitav Ghosh became Amitav Ghosh by reading the books in his uncle’s collection. Yet Amitav Ghosh’s uncle remained merely Amitav Ghosh’s uncle. Of course, being Amitav Ghosh’s uncle is no small thing either. One might well buy an entire library of books simply for the privilege of being the uncle of such an Amitav Ghosh! There are countless such examples.
The other day at the book fair, and now browsing through Rokomari, sifting through the books that made an appearance at the fair—it struck me that certain old truths might bear retelling, approached from a different angle.
When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Swift wrote this before Facebook existed. Had it existed, he might have said:
When a genius appears on Facebook you may doubt him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy for him.
Alas, the eloquent descent of the lowborn made popular!
John Kennedy Toole knocked on publishers’ doors and doors again, until at last, unable to bear another rejection, in a fit of wounded pride he took his own life at thirty-one. His manuscript—torn, stained, shabby—found its way into the trembling hands of his mother, Thelma Toole, who carried her grief to Percy Walker. Walker was a teacher, a writer of sorts. At first he refused even to read the manuscript. “My son,” the mother said, “suffered greatly because this work would not be published. He took his own life carrying that pain in his heart. I am leaving this with you; please, read at least a few pages. If it is not worthy of publication, send me no word—you yourself throw it away. I will take comfort in that, perhaps telling myself you never even had time to look at it.” And with these words, she left the manuscript on Walker’s desk and departed from his office without hope—the way a helpless mother leaves her child at an orphanage, praying only that it might survive, whether or not it flourishes.
What happened after, everyone knows. Eleven years after the author’s death, one of the finest comic masterpieces in all of American literature, A Confederacy of Dunces, was published. The author was even awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously. But I cannot help wondering: what is the worth of such honor? A flower whose fragrance intoxicates only others—that flower pierces the heart of its giver far more deeply than any thorn.

I recall a beautiful song sung by Santosh Sengupta… *In life, you never gave him garlands, so why do you come with flowers at his death?*

Kamalakumar and Jibananda—they were never published, never would be read, and yet how much devotion, what depths of love they poured into their novels, knowing all this. Today’s writers should pause and think about that, please? We readers come to books with such hope! To carve time out of countless commitments and finish a book—those who don’t read, yet write anyway; or who write but can’t even find time to read—how will they ever understand that? How much trust a reader places when they set aside countless *should-read* books and begin a newcomer’s work. If they kept that in mind, these creatures, in their blind compulsion to breed like animals, could easily have spared themselves—and us—from the names printed on these book covers (and I don’t have the dullness of mind to call such people “writers”). We see the ruin of literature itself at every book fair, watching this tribe of writers who squeeze out their autographed, bile-laden books through force and emotional blackmail! If the “pitiful consequence” of getting too many likes on your Facebook status is giving birth to a book, then we’re truly lost! Status-posters are beautiful on Facebook; writers strut about at book fairs. Nobody understands. Nobody.

The book fair comes, and so many write. We readers too wait for this season. Humayun Ahmed would write novels with the book fair in mind, plays with Eid approaching. Watching him, I realized: *Writing for writing’s sake* needn’t mean it’s something worthless—*Writing for money’s sake* isn’t always shabby either. There are many such examples. Much of Sunil’s work was written purely for money. We mustn’t forget: Dostoevsky himself belongs to this camp. So we can’t say that commissioned work is always cheap, whether the commission comes from need or occasion. But alas! There’s only one Humayun Ahmed. Still, I see books, I buy them, sometimes I read them. After reading certain recent books, I often feel like that mouse from the Ratatouille animation—*Anyone can write, that does not mean that anyone should.* The good news is, we’ve found some writers whose work lets us strangle that rodent’s confession before it escapes our lips.

For a long time now, I keep rediscovering this truth: not falling in love is a remarkably economical thing. The amount I’ve spent on books for my literary beloved just to get through this (north)Valentine’s Day—could I possibly keep a human beloved happy with so little? Perhaps my anxiety about money is merely the poverty of my own mind, and yet…

And so life passes. Not a drop of blood is shed! How strange, isn’t it?