Oh, this cursed forgetting! I forget everything, nothing stays with me. Not even love. Even when someone loves me, I should love them back—but even that escapes me. Each time I think, later, someday, I'll take the time and love them properly. I'll have all the time in the world, I'll love them lavishly. And then I forget. Even when the time comes, I don't love them. I make time for nothing. It's not that I refuse, or stubbornly withhold my affection. The real problem is I forget to love. Which means I forget to *show* that I love them—to express it, to let them know. What a wretched affliction! Love must be made visible, mustn't it? So why not? Those who love us are of two kinds. Some will understand without me showing it, knowing I've simply forgotten; they know me well enough not to misread my silence, and they'll love me again. These few are rare as rubies. The rest may never think of me again. Without love, the mind unravels. Yet not everyone bears the burden of redeeming my indifference. Even those who could choose to bear it might simply let the debt go unpaid, refuse to wait for me to gather myself, and vanish entirely into distance. So much happens, after all. So here's my New Year's resolution: I will not forget to love those who love me. I keep some flowers in my room. I'm never truly alone there—my heart is there too. For its sake, I think, let there be flowers. Before the tender body of a bloom, the crown of the world's sternest tyrant bows down. The world's mightiest cannon falls helpless before the strange power a flower wields. A single flower wins everything—from the human heart to the bullet itself. Most of my beloved flowers are white, or nearly white. Night-blooming jasmine, henna flower, Spanish cherry, jasmine, yellow jasmine, wild rose, kadamba, champak, chrysanthemum, jasmine, night-flowering datura. When white flowers gaze at me without blinking, I want to touch them, touch them again, and pour all the love and beauty and juice of my heart into them, only wanting to love. When the soft petals—soft as a beloved's lips—touch my eyes, my breath, my mouth, the tremor that runs through every pore of my skin has no equal and no second—I didn't want to write "second," there's a reason I can't speak of it. Those fragments of time spent in a flower garden are the most exquisite moments the world offers. Flowers never lie. Yet, alas! Lies bloom around them! This morning, caught between leaving my bed and staying in it, I found such comfort in watching the gladioli in the corner of my room. I felt I could suddenly, impulsively, fall in love with someone! But alas! Except for a hideous, long-tailed lizard lurking in the corner of the ceiling, I found no one worth loving. Some say marriage is useful if you have love. It occurred to me—good heavens, why wouldn't one want marriage just to be able to love, physically or otherwise, whenever the urge strikes? Thinking this way, I wanted to hurl that stubborn obsession—"Why must we marry?"—away like a used tissue, never to return. Some thoughts are like tissues; once their use is spent, throw them away and be rid of the discomfort. What's happening here? From flowers to lizards to the wilderness of the mind! What's my fault? I called for my beloved. She didn't come; a lizard arrived instead! At least a cockroach hasn't shown up, or I'd release it near her out of spite! Tell me, are women a little like lizards? Or are lizards a little like women? Or do neither have any particular type? I mean, did you notice I'm deliberately wasting your time with this rambling nonsense? You still haven't figured it out?
# On Flowers and Falsehoods
Very well, a brief answer to a brief question. Marks: 5. Time: the duration it takes to finish a packet of almonds while making love. (Why did I say ‘moment’? Because even five hours is but an infinitesimal moment in the span of lovemaking.)
The question is: Write down five similarities between a lizard-girl and a girl-lizard.
Fail this exam, and as punishment, the next time you cook red lentils at home, the electricity will suddenly cut out. Before the lamp flickers back on, a lizard will have dropped into your dal, unreasonably increasing its protein content! You’ll know nothing of it—only notice a delightful variety in the taste of your dal. Rather amusing, isn’t it? Hehehehe…
These words above are born from a meditation on Subhash Mukhopadhyay, the poet of “Let flowers bloom or not, spring is here today.” Not because of that poem, but in the resonance of another. The thing is, for reasons I cannot say, these few lines of his have been circling through my mind since this morning, round and round and round…
*People tell such terrible lies with flowers, that’s why*
*I have never been drawn to flowers.*
*I prefer the sparks of fire instead—*
*which can never become anyone’s mask.*
“People tell such terrible lies with flowers.” How true! The heart once needed to buy a flower; now one need only have money and flowers come easily enough. So many cunning souls harbor one thing in their heart, another on their lips. How would others ever know? And sometimes, some people do know, yet say nothing, thinking of their own dignity. People use flowers to say: I love you, I’m beside you, love me in return, it’s only you I think of, everything, that’s how I’ll love you, and so much more besides. Lies that carry no consequences—the very establishment of such lies is alluring. To speak, hear, or even think of something or someone so innocent-seeming—once you’ve managed to get it said or done through such a thing or person, what more is there to say? Of course, were it otherwise, that absolution would not always lie in truth itself. The weight of lies is often lifted by lies again. And yet I cannot accept: why should a flower tell lies? Why must we suspect even the flower? Why should the flower, which hides the thorn, have its dignity crushed beneath the feet of shamelessness? At some point, whether willingly or not, we accept it. Into what shameless, multidimensional, cosmopolitan face of love—in its loud and silent exhibitions—have we not grown hideously accustomed! Thus doubt creeps in: how much does the flower’s fluent language of promise truly seek the warmth or coldness of the heart? Not every fresh flower carries the scent of a fresh heart. Well then, whose fault is this ambiguity of twilight speech? Alas! Those still unaccustomed to such claims are kept one-dimensional by all the masked people of society, wrapped in love’s moth-eaten shroud. No one loves them. There is only pity: Oh, how simple they are, how out of place! They can neither descend nor ascend without being struck and sent stumbling back. No one writes two lines for them. They have no photo sessions. They are not among the “friends.” Their sensitive hearts exist only to be crushed again and again. They are unfit to speak, to look back, even to think! They have no caste, no religion, not even a template; they are simply themselves!
I speak now of another kind of pantomime. It is the pantomime of love withheld. Why this pantomime? Perhaps because saying “I love you” would shatter the friendship. Better this way! Let the love stay hidden, behind the veil of friendship. Let something happen or not, at least the person won’t drift away, won’t be pushed away.
There are moments when someone you love does not love you in return, yet remains close—and this very feeling, this nearness without reciprocal love, keeps a person alive. This survival is like trying to keep a handful of night-blooming jasmine fresh in a wine bottle when no water jar is near. To receive love is terribly hard work. It costs far less in thought to remain merely friends. And yet to perform the role of an easy friendship while carrying an immense love in your chest—that is truly unbearable. Suppose you persist in this performance with someone. And suppose that person accepts it. Why do they accept it? Two things might be at play. Perhaps they don’t even know you are performing, or for whatever reason, they wish to keep a connection with you but refuse to name what it is. You want them to love you—or if not, at least to consider you a friend. At any cost, if necessary. But if they only regard you as a friend in exchange for that price you pay, are you not perpetually losing to that person whom they truly love, or will love? I have seen this too: no one knows whom someone loves. Sometimes even those two don’t know—don’t wish to know—seized by fear or doubt. Once love’s color fully grips the eye, the eye might blind itself before it can bear that hue, fading to pallor! Not everyone can endure love’s intoxicating shade. Yet two people together, loving well and truly, bathing themselves in love’s radiance and prismatic light, immersed in the fountain’s spray of illumination, might dissolve into that joy for all eternity.
When you cannot reach any concrete decision on a matter, or when circumstances make you unwilling to decide in that very moment, there was a phrase we heard and spoke constantly in MBA class: *Depends.* I see that same *Depends* in life’s arithmetic too! This is an account of great miscounting. This equation resolves only in riddles. This relationship bears a nameless name; on Facebook, *It’s complicated!*; in life, *Death otherwise!*