‘The light, that lies
In woman’s eyes
Has been my heart’s undoing.’
We were in the lounge of a hotel in Goa waiting for the weather to clear up. Outside, the rain was coming down in torrents without a sign of clouds lifting anywhere. There was nothing to do except sit and gossip. Inevitably the conversation turned to women. As they say Saavan-Bhadon is the badmaash mausam - the amorous season. During this mausam, if you can’t do (we were men in our seventies), you talk about doing. ‘What, in your opinion, is the single most important item in a woman’s beauty?’ they asked me as if I was an expert on the subject, Without hesitation I replied: ‘As far as I am concerned, it is her eyes.’ I tossed in a remark I had read somewhere made by an Englishman about a woman telling her lover: ‘I would like to drown you in my eyes.’ What exactly did she mean?
A woman’s eyes, when blue, are often compared to the ocean. When black, to the waters of an inland lake. In the Song of Songs they are likened to ‘the pools in Heshbon’ (oddly enough, also to ‘doves beside brooks of water’). Dante Gabriel Rossetti in The Blessed Damozel had similar notions:
The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even.
To the best of my knowledge, Indian poets never used oceans or lakes as similies for women’s eyes. Sanskritists used flowers or animals to describe their beauty: Kamal Naini (lotus-eyed) or Mrig Naini (doeeyed). Persian and Urdu poets also lauded them as chashm-e-aahoo (gazelle-eyed) or nargisee (like the narcissus). Both Hindi and Urdu poets praise the pink-eyed (I have never seen one) as if drunk: mast or sharaabi.
The first communication between lovers usually comes through the eyes. Cervantes called them ‘the silent tongues of love.’ Likewise, Shakespeare in his sonnets:
Come, fair friend, you never can be old
For as you were when first your eyes I eyed,
Such is your beauty still.
I was under the impression that European poets were not aware of the phenomenon of eyes meeting – aankhey chaar hona - and transmitting messages of love. I was wrong. Byron on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage has this:
… and bright
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men,
A thousand hearts beat happily; and when
Music rose with its voluptuous swell,
Soft eyes looked love to eyes that spake again;
And all went merry as a marriage bell.
No one will question the Shakespearean observation that a woman has ‘language in her eyes’. She can use its devastating effect when deployed as a side-winder missile – tirchee nazar which Milton described as ‘love-darting eyes.’ He saw ‘heaven in her eye’ – presumably before he went blind. Thomas Moore ascribed his downfall to them:
The light, that lies
In woman’s eyes
Has been my heart’s undoing.
Now to the Urdu poets. Shaad Azimabadi summed up their devastating effect in one couplet:
voh chashme-mast, voh tirchee nazar maaz Allah.’ Hayaa hazaar bharee hai, magar, maaz Allah!
(Those besotted eyes,
Those side-long glances
The Lord protect us!
Full of innocence though they be
The lord protect us!)
Shah Wali-ur-Rehman wrote of both their positive and negative aspects:
Jo phiree to tegh-e-qazaa banee
jo milee to aab-e-baqaa hanee
(When they turned away,
They became the sword of destruction.
When they met my eyes
They were the elixir of life.)
Hasrat Mohani was intrigued by eyes which, like photographs in which the sitter is looking into the lens, seem to follow you everywhere:
Dekho jo yaar kee jaadoo nigahiyaan
har ik ko hai gumaan keh mukhaatib hameen rahey
(Look at the magic in my beloved’s eyes)
Everyone is under the illusion,
She is only looking at him.)
So the gossip and the sherbaazi went on and on; from gazelle-eyed Rekha to the almond-eyed Hema Malini to Greta Garbo-eyed Nandini Satpathi. The downpour continued and we adjourned to the Taverna Latina. We raised our glasses to drink to women’s eyes:
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I’ll not look for wine.