Those Who Don't Want to Call

There are some people who never feel like calling anyone. Unless absolutely compelled, they rarely call anyone at all. They don't want others to call them either, to check up on them. They have no expectation that someone will call them regularly; nor do they want anyone to expect regular calls from them. Unconditionality is the only condition of their lives.

Let's assume you belong to that tribe.

For studies or work, you live somewhere far from home—meaning the demands of time or livelihood keep you away from home. When you visit home, you see clearly before your eyes that your father is growing older day by day, your mother's body no longer moves as it once did. Their capacity to work, their ability to remember, their ease of movement—nothing remains as it was. They have aged. Age never heals with treatment. You know that one day you will suddenly lose them. On that day, when you reach out your hand, there will be only emptiness.

Still, after returning from home, you don't remember to call them or don't feel like calling them. You do call, but only occasionally. You're not the type to call anyone regularly. Making or not making calls, receiving or not receiving calls—for you, these are not measures of love or lovelessness. Close people and phone people are two separate entities. Must proof of keeping someone in your heart be left on the phone? (I can't even bring myself to write about the love that lives and thrives on Facebook, so I won't write about that.)

But yes, this trait of yours is somewhat irritating to those who wait for your calls, though you don't wait for their calls. Parents eventually accept that this is just how you are. Even if you don't call, they don't make a fuss, and when you visit home, they still pull you to their chest. When they're about to eat something, your face floats before their eyes. You are always in their prayers. Love here is nurtured in the heart, not maintained on mobile phones. This is not fear, this is love. You won't find such completely expectation-free love anywhere else. Keeping anger alive or making it win is not called love. Where's the room for so much ego in love?

That's not the point. The point is that this same you are again compelled to call someone every single day as a matter of routine; you answer their calls every single day (and with the compulsion of religious observance, you pick up immediately in one rush), and if you can't answer, your heartbeat nearly stops from fear until you can call back; if they call when you're on another line, you break into a sweat worrying what they might think—even though urgent or non-urgent calls can certainly come to your mobile, and you have absolutely no interest or concern about when and how long their mobile is busy. There's no love here, only fear. Fear of what? Of dealing with trouble, of enduring pain, of going through unrest. They want attention out of love, you give attention out of fear. How wonderful!

At the end of the day, people want peace, not love. In the interest of peace, they have no objection to accepting even death.

It's often seen that in loving relationships, there's more helplessness of an escapist person than actual love. Torment when you don't get love, and torment pro max when you do!

You have to maintain a thousand times more contact with someone you've known or been involved with for just a few months or years than with those who've been connected to you since birth! Following the grammar of natural death, you will lose your parents long before your beloved (real or obligatory). Yet, those who let you sink into your preferred state of non-communication are precisely the ones with whom your connection will naturally be severed relatively sooner. This is perhaps what love is called. What doesn't teach you to keep your loved one unburdened is not called love. You feel like showing love to some people, and you have to show love to others.

In the name of loving people, people unknowingly start keeping people like pets.