How We Love

1.
A Space for Love

Not everyone is in love. Nor does everyone have the courage to love. In our country, most people only love in their imagination. I wouldn’t know how it is in other places, but in India, to love is to battle with innumerable strictures imposed by society and religion. Love is a forbidden subject even within the four walls of our homes. How many parents say to their children, ‘Is there someone special in your life?’ How many ask their daughters, ‘Do you like someone? Are you in love?’ With such little support, love is not a simple matter of saying ‘I love you.’

We all learn to imagine love through cinema. Films are the sculptors of our divine madness. Generations of filmmakers, songwriters and musicians have burnt up their imaginations teaching us how to love. They have taught us the art of gazing at someone for the first time, and the trick of colliding with them by accident. In the process, films have turned us into lovers sometimes, and sometimes into lafangas.

Ek Duje Ke Liye (1981) was a powerful film. For the first time in Hindi cinema, lovers surmounted the barrier of language and linguistic culture and gave up their lives for the idea of a great India that is otherwise a sham shouted about from the rooftops day and night. Rati Agnihotri and Kamal Hasan, that unforgettable couple, can still make you cry. Perhaps for the first time, a popular film challenged the facile and counterfeit notion of a composite India that we have internalized for too long. ‘Mere jeevan saathi/Pyar kiye ja...’: to write a song by stringing together the titles of Hindi films was not mere talent; it was a way of saying that it is possible for a Hindi-wali to fall in love with a Tamil-wala. He can construct a language of love with Hindi film names. She can call out to him using the names of Tamil Nadu’s districts and cities. She can talk to him and she can sing along with him.

But films have not always made us good lovers. The films coming from Mumbai kept trying only to breach the high wall between the rich and the poor—that was the extent of their revolution. ‘Chandi ki deewar na todi, pyaar bhara dil tod diya/ Ek dhanwaan ki beti ne nirdhan ka daaman chhorh diya—She did not break down the walls of silver, she broke a heart full of love/A rich man’s daughter betrayed a poor man in love.’ (Vishwas, 1969) The pain of love! Rich women are always heartbreakers, always disloyal. In some films, rich women did leave everything behind to be with the love of their life, but the dominant narrative remained that in the world of love, wealth, too, is caste. Everyone should stay within the confines of their caste and explore the possibilities of love there.

Innumerable lovers have lit up the Hindi silver screen. But they are just two beautiful bodies. They have no caste, no religion. In the fantasy world of our filmmakers, love is also a fantasy. Lyricists have never written a song where a young man confronts his lover’s social background. All heroes are upper caste, either Kapoor or Mathur or Saxena. Heroines have been either Lily, Mili or plain silly. The heroine drops fully formed and chaste from the skies. ‘Kisi shaayar ki ghazal, Dream Girl/Kisi jheel ka kamal, Dream Girl—A poet’s ghazal, Dream Girl/A lotus in a lake, Dream Girl’ (Dream Girl, 1977).

Countless stories of Hindi cinema have put love at the service of the status quo, whereas in love you simply cannot be status-quoist. You have to first vault over the wall of caste. Films which preach Hindu-Muslim unity have very deliberately steered clear of Hindu-Muslim love stories. I cannot recall a film where a Hindu girl held the hand of a Muslim boy and said, ‘I love you.’ No hero has ever abandoned his Kapoor family for a Dalit girl. Oh, I’m now hoping for social change through films! Come on, Ravish.

Actually, our politics too cannot imagine a love that smashes the barriers of caste and religion. There are some Muslim leaders whose wives are Hindu. There are some Hindu leaders who are married to Muslim women. These were love marriages, but such couples do not display their love in public. They fear their voters’ displeasure. But is society really like that? Yes, it is, but it is in exactly such a society that possibilities emerge for revolutionary love. People bring down the walls of caste and religion. Sometimes they do so and stay alive.

You must have noticed how often I have used the word ‘wall’. That, really, is the tragedy. In India, there is no love without a wall. Love may be possible without a mehboob, the lover-beloved, but it is not possible without a wall! It’s a complicated business, love. It turns you into a rebel, it makes you crazy—a baawla, a baawli. There’s such tension that, as in Hindi cinema, you want to escape into a dream sequence: your trousers and shoes are suddenly white and shining. Your lover, in a flowing white gown, comes running towards you in slow motion. You wrap yourselves around each other, and then the song begins. ‘Maey se meena se na saaqi se...na paimaane se/Dil behelta hai mera aapke aa jaane se—Not with wine, the wine-bearer or the cup/My heart is happy only with your presence.’ We learnt from this song from Khudgarz (1987) that one’s lover can also be a replacement for entertainment. There’s no good song playing on TV. You’ve fought with your father. Forget all that and sing a song. Let’s get it written by Gulzar or Anand Bakshi. Escape is the only space for love in India.

Our cities have no space for love. For us, parks are places where marigolds and bougainvillea bloom. Where a few elderly, retired people come to jog. There may be a pair or two of lovers; they will be stared at. Love needs a suitable space, just for love. Lovers in our cities get tired standing behind pillars in super-malls for hours on end. They court danger daring to love inside a car with the windows and windshield curtained with bedsheets and towels. They hold hands in the dark in a cinema and hastily let go when the lights come on. Lovers have never really told anyone of their plight. They haven’t even written about it on Facebook. ‘Milo na tum toh hum ghabraayen, milo toh aankh churaayen, humein kya ho gaya hai—When we don’t meet my heart is restless, when we do I’m too shy to look into your eyes—oh, what’s happened to me?’ When you hear this song from Heer Ranjha (1970), don’t you feel like asking—First tell us, just where can we meet?

But hats off to all the lovers of India. There’s no place to meet, yet you don’t give up, you find a way. You pull down the plastic curtains in auto-rickshaws, you squander your entire pocket money on auto fares. In search of empty cinema halls, you raise the box-office collections of trashy films. Despite the glares from passers-by, you let your head rest on your lover’s shoulder. The long hours you struggle for a few moments with your mehboob transform you from lovers to activists. Everyone who has loved has known such hazards. If I were a neta, I would have built a love park in every city and would have happily lost the next election. Naturally, society would not have approved.

Snap out of this ‘Ishq koi rog nahi’ slumber. Of course it’s a malady, this kind of love. Demand the space for love. Sixty per cent of India, all of you young people under 35, you are not here to just make nuts and bolts for machines or open shops or sell pakodas. Your youth will one day demand to know: How much time have you given to love, and how much have you spent on work? If you have only loved work, then of what use is life? If you were never possessed by the madness to look for hours into another’s eyes, then what really have you seen? You might measure the dowry you get as much as you want, but you will not find a mehboob in there. Society does not want to lose control over the dowry economy, and that is why it does not easily yield space to love marriages. A woman must be the only commodity whose price is fixed by a man’s worth. Money along with a bride. After all, the bride is the dowry herself. Go drown yourselves, young men of this nation. Doob maro!

Love makes us human. That is ishq. It makes us responsible and slightly better human beings than we were before. All lovers are not ideal humans, nor always good, but the one who is in love can at least imagine a better world. When you are in love, you discover the many nooks and corners and secrets of your city. In some places, you hold hands as you walk. In others, you walk alongside but a little far apart. Lovers want to transform the city into the city of their imagination. The city of their memories is not the city of Ghalib’s poetry. True lovers know the city, they live it, too. The rhythm of the seasons beats in their hearts. Those who are not in love, they do not inhabit their city.

‘Jis tan ko chhooa tune, us tan ko chhupaoon/Jis man ko lage naina, woh kisko dikhaoon—The body that you’ve touched, I hide that body/The heart that you’ve seen, I don’t show it to anyone?’ (Rudaali, 1993). Ah! We cannot even express this feeling of love here. Meera, you who sang and danced in love, you lived in this country, did you not?

Love makes us a little vulnerable, a little hesitant. And if a human being is neither, he can turn into a monster. To love is not just to say ‘I love you.’ To love is to know someone and, for that someone, to know yourself. It is the month of February, don’t waste all your energies searching for a lover. Look for yourself, too, and for your city, a city where love is possible. And look for the dreams you want to realize for someone else’s sake.

Not just eco-friendly, we must make our cities ishq-friendly as well. We must make a space where we can spend a few restful moments. Where cops don’t appear, banging their lathis, when they see love. Where the defenders of honour and faith and bloodlines don’t appear with guns and knives. Where the moongphaliwala doesn’t appear the minute you start a conversation. It’s fine that there is a space for love in our dreams. And in our films. But how is it right that our cities don’t have any? It isn’t right.

2.
A Death in Delhi*

A boy has died, killed on a busy road by the family of the girl he loved. In a society that lurks in the bushes to catch lovers kissing, Ankit Saxena’s death is certainly not the last.

I silently look at photographs of him in happier times. He was just twenty-three. A life that had had so many hues to it has been extinguished. What must be the depth of despondency in a country where those who love are cut down by swords and knives?

Those who are waiting for someone to write on the incident in this time of all-pervading despair are already consumed with bloodlust. They are determined to clock every writing effort of a certain kind of person whom they watch closely, alarm in their hands—now what will he do, will he write now, about this? In a society of vultures, the act of writing increasingly feels like answering a roll-call.

How one wishes one could have seen Ankit’s love blossom. Even before he died, the lovers knew they were exchanging vows of love in the shadow of death. Why, Ankit’s beloved had made up her mind to run away forever, even locked up her own parents in their house—is it not possible to love without rebelling in India? Even today young women find themselves having to flee their homes to be true to their love. They are chased down by parents brandishing sharpened swords of caste and religion.

What must be going through the mind of Ankit’s beloved, whose desire to be with him made her leave home with a resolve never to return? There she was running towards the metro rail station, which resonates with the sound of modern India’s approaching footsteps. On the other end were heartrending images of Ankit’s mother screaming out her grief in her home in Raghubir Nagar. On both ends it is daughters who are suffering. The son, both lover and beloved, has been put to death.

Ankit was also rushing in the direction of the metro rail station where she was waiting for him. How one wishes he had reached the appointed spot that day. They would have boarded a bus together and disappeared from a world soaked in hatred, sloughing off every marker of their existing identities. But his wretched car, it had to go and collide with her mother’s scooty, of all things. The newspaper reports said her mother collided with him on purpose—Ankit was surrounded. He was fatally stabbed in the neck.

Ankit Saxena was Hindu. His love is Muslim. And to make things very clear, her mother is Muslim, her brother is Muslim, her father is Muslim, her uncle is Muslim. I have no qualms mentioning someone’s religious affiliation. Even if I were to refrain from mentioning this fact, it would make no difference to a society of trolls addicted to fomenting hatred—it will see what it chooses to see, namely a Hindu and a Muslim, of whom the Hindu was killed.

What would have happened had the story been inverted—if she had been Hindu, he had been Muslim and parents on both sides had been willing? Those very groups that are now trying to make political capital out of Ankit’s death would have been creating a disturbance outside their doors, no question. The way the trolls are going on at the moment, it is as if they would have led the wedding procession of the star-crossed lovers. We need to ask ourselves, always—who exactly are the people spreading venom against such inter-faith marriages?

This brings to mind the immense courage shown by the father of a girl in Ghaziabad in December 2016, when those who were complete strangers to the Hindu girl and the Muslim boy came determined to cause a commotion on the day of their marriage. Undeterred, the girl’s father made sure the marriage went off without any hitch, and in that very city. What happened was that the district head of a certain political party gathered a crowd outside the girl’s house to disrupt the wedding proceedings. Not only did he not succeed, his party had to strip him of his position as well.

Who are the powerful people setting rules regarding who shall love whom? What are these rules doing to our society? Who is being pumped up with hatred and who is planning a kill? You can figure these things out for yourself. We’ll let it be if you can’t. It isn’t simple, after all. Within you, too, there are layers of violence that you almost descend to before you stop yourself.

The prevailing atmosphere has enfeebled everybody. There are very few who are able to defy their weakness as the father of the girl in Ghaziabad did. Some, like the Muslim parents from Khayala, give up and become killers. How one wishes that the parents of Ankit’s beloved had not treated their daughter, the brother had not treated his sister, as their commodity. Not theirs, not of any religion. Hatred has raised so many walls around us, laid so many layers of violence inside us that it is a constant struggle to overcome them. We can win the battle—or lose and become killers.

Think about the couple from Coimbatore, Kausalya and Sankar. Both were Hindus, after all. Then why was Sankar hacked with the sharp edge of a weapon in broad daylight? Why did Kausalya’s parents hatch a conspiracy to kill her love? He was a Dalit and she was from an ‘upper caste’. They fell in love, got married. It was when they were returning home from the market that goondas hired by Kausalya’s parents put an end to Sankar’s life. This happened in 2016. The video of the incident is terrifying.

From day one, Kausalya maintained that her parents were responsible for Sankar’s murder. The investigation took a year and the case resulted in a conviction. This must be one of the few cases of honour killing to be wrapped up so soon. It would be instructive to read the details of the case, available online, for there is a great deal to learn from it. May god give Ankit’s beloved the courage to do what Kausalya did. She has certainly given a statement that her parents killed Ankit.

Add the tag of ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ to every name as many times as you want, but it will not suffice to explain away the reality of the violence entrenched in our society. Just the other day, those wanting to reap the bitter harvest of communalism were collecting donations for Shambhulal Regar, the man who hacked and burnt Mohammad Afrazul in Rajasthan and got his nephew to record the murder on his phone. These are people who want a constant supply of firewood to keep society perpetually flared up.

Honour killing is a cocktail made of prejudice, hate and misogyny to which the colour red is contributed by religion, caste, father or brother as the occasion may demand. It is not just the act of falling in love that invites honour killing. When daughters are foetuses in their mothers’ wombs, they are killed in the name of family and honour. This is the truth of a community, a religion—are we prepared to accept which one? It is the truth of a country and its society. In such a country, what can the rousing slogan ‘Beti bachao, beti padhao’ mean? Save the daughter, educate the daughter. From whom exactly should we protect our daughters? Our daughters have so many killers facing them—first and foremost, their own mothers and fathers.

Religion and caste have always condemned us to a lifetime of fear. In a customary moment of love we may sing a note or two about taking wing like birds, but the truth is we continue to be trapped in the cage of religion and caste. The way things are in India, couples invariably find little love and far more hatred in the course of their love. That they still dare to love is worthy of our salutations.

In a society with an entire arsenal of arguments against love, there will be no real grief over the killing of Ankit; it is already looking for some benefit in the tragedy. How great, then, the words that Ankit’s father has spoken—he does not want any tension in the neighbourhood. He wants justice for his son, but he won’t make it about religion.

However, tension will remain. Things will not be allowed to quieten down. Anti-Romeo ‘squads’ set up against ‘love jihad’ will roam the streets, holding our daughters captive. Every killing whets the appetite for more killings. Those who are killers themselves will keep trolling you to ask when you will write about ‘Hindu killings’ to prove that you aren’t a ‘Muslim lover’.

I was trolled after Ankit’s death. I was watched: Would I? Did I care? But it is they who do not care, for anyone’s life or love.

This is what I have to say to them: ‘Look within yourself and think about what you are doing. Aren’t you among those who get couples attacked in parks and thrashed within an inch of their lives? You do not care about a boy who died. He loved. But your aim is to kill love, isn’t it? You go hunting in parks to perform acts of honour killing. You should not talk of justice.

‘By adding the prefix of maulana or mullah to my name, what do you think you are doing? You are mirroring that against which you want something to be written. Your politics of hate, and the very idea of snuffing out the love that exists in every home, is proving to be fatal. The frenzy is rising. It will consume you, too. Why don’t you let the country breathe a little free, give flight to its youthful dreams?’

Love can save us. But we never really let it bloom in our society. Now we’ve raised an army to police love and to kill it. Youngsters who do not know what it is to be in love and marry the person of their choice remain cowards forever, timid for life. Living in a society of crores of unsuccessful and timid lovers, we have become killers. First we extinguish any possibility of love that we may have—we kill our love. Then we target someone else’s love.

*This essay is adapted from a blog I wrote on 5 February 2018, four days after twenty-three-year-old Ankit Saxena was killed in west Delhi’s Raghubir Nagar.