I may be making a living by stringing together sentences in English — decently, I would like to believe — but the truth is that expressions such as ‘past participle’ or ‘gerund’ or ‘auxiliary verb’ are all Greek to me. I know nothing about grammar and I prefer it that way, because to be aware of what grammar rules you are applying while constructing a sentence is a lot like being aware of what chemicals are at work in your brain when you feel you are in love.
That reminds me, that’s the only thing I remember from my grammar classes: love, because it would be served as an example of abstract noun. Perhaps love was given as an example because it was the easiest to relate to: we love our parents, we love our kids, we love our dogs, we love our country (very important to do so these days), and so forth.
But what exactly does love mean? Have we ever looked up the dictionary? I did that just now, before starting to write this piece, and the online Oxford dictionary defined it thus: ‘A strong feeling of affection’ and also ‘a strong feeling of affection and sexual attraction for someone.’ That’s pretty much what we already knew even without the help of the dictionary.
Since I haven’t lived anywhere abroad long enough to understand their culture, I can only talk about India, and love, in India, has so many grotesque and violent faces that it is often impossible to find the original face — that’s love. Sometimes I even wonder whether love is the drainpipe through which we let out our ugly emotions — or is it that love, like the powerful magnet attracting killer nails, brings out the nails hiding inside us.
I know of numerous couples who love-married, and who, even after years of marriage, remain highly possessive and deeply suspicious of their spouses. I know of a man — the husband of a schoolmate of mine — who takes his wife’s phone as soon as he gets home from work and goes through the messages and call lists. I know of a woman who, as soon as the husband gets home from work, checks his WhatsApp messages and call lists: she doesn’t bother checking his Facebook messages and emails because she knows the passwords anyway. Where is love here?
Then there are cases — ah, plenty of them — when the husband or the wife discovers that the spouse has been up to some hanky-panky. The reactions vary and sometimes result in murder, like in the widely-publicised Nanavati case of 1959, when a naval officer, Commander K.M. Nanavati, upon finding that his wife was having an affair with a friend, shot the friend while sparing his wife. I also know of a wife who, upon finding that her husband was having an affair with a colleague, barged into his office and beat up the “home-wrecking” woman with her sandals. Where is love here?
And nothing scars love more than one-sided love. Commercial Indian cinema always shows one-sided love eventually blossoming into mutual love. For example, you often see a worker in a mill falling in love with the mill owner’s daughter, singing a few songs with her along the way before eventually marrying her. These things don’t happen in real life, but such asinine stories do have an impact on real life.
A young man waits for his bus in the bus-stop. He spots a young woman and instantly falls in love with her. A few days later, he walks up to her and professes his love for her. The woman, who hadn’t even noticed him all this while, asks him to get lost. The young man, feeling spurned after having decided that she can belong only to him and no one else, decides to kill her and then kill himself. Where is love here?
Recently a string of such love-related deaths happened in Tamil Nadu, which is what made me look up the definition of love.
