Love Song

I fell in love with you as only a writer could. Those words speaking of hesitant fingers of love and offering an outstretched hand. Written with a scrawny hand that started out neat but by the end those very words, jam-packed, jostling each other for space, were hard to decipher. And the letter surreptitiously tucked away in a book of songs that you presented over lunch – songs about the beloved? Songs about God? Songs about yearning.

And I knew yearning like the back of my hand.

From the start you have flummoxed me. You begin your meals with a toast to the good things in life – a celebration and hope rather than a straight prayer. You leave portions of food in your plate so I can dig into a share of what I like at the end. I find ends and bits, last bites of food, that you left for me in the fridge. They are like those little love-notes, tucked away in different places. Surprising and charming like fortune cookies. You enjoy my bare cooking style just as much as you relish elaborate meals.

I’m not a poet, merely a hack, a hired hand, otherwise I would have written an ode, a series of poems about ordinary but epic love unfolding under rose-fingered dawns. About the ordinary heroes, epic in their own ways.

As are you – an epic hero in our lives. We are Narcissus and Echo as much as we are Odysseus and Penelope: Heer and Ranjha as much as Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal. We twirl through the intricate maze of this world we share with others, dancing to their tunes, carving out our space as much as we offer space to others. All the while, you hold me close, enduring my misplaced steps on your toes. And I laugh and cry at your bosom, always coming to you for reassurance, almost always assured. I hope you never fully assure me about anything for I want to be compelled to come to you for refills. Quite like a boozy, drunk on love.

If Lord Kama is looking from above, I wonder whether he is pleased with our dance. He has, in conspiracy with Aphrodite and Cupid, caused us to meet, to crash into each other like two jelly Frisbees from two different worlds, inexplicably altered by the encounter, locked together like tangled hair, never really freeing of each other.

If I were a poet I would articulate exactly what your eyes – stone-hard in anger, soft with love, glassy in boredom, heavy as black pools with desire – do to me in the middle of my gut. I would tell you how my limbs drag or become light as a feather, feel crushed or are watchful of a single twitch of your eyebrow. How the only person’s opinion that matters is yours. How I feel brave if you are there with that outstretched hand. How you compel me to stretch taut, to amend, transform into something other than me – perhaps something better, sometimes something worse. Continuously a force to reckon with. How you cause me to be courageous to bare who I am – lovable or not. How I dissolve into your solid presence, like mist in a forest.

The grass, the flowers, shrubs and trees know the mist in their own way. You know me now, through different lenses, times, pasts and presents pretty much like the back of your hand. Your hands – if you peer at them carefully enough – will seem both familiar and strange. Like well-worn clothes, we are part of each other’s very being, used and abused, tattered but loved all the same.

Were I any good at writing, I would be able to tell you, to get across, to communicate just how much the last five years have meant to me.

How each month, each day has racked me with warmth, cordiality, affection, blooming desire, compulsion, responsibility, disillusion, pain, guilt – a range of emotions laid down choc-a-block like bricks in the making of a home. And as we all ultimately find out, home-making is as delicate and arduous a task as baking a batch of gorgeous cupcakes. (See? I’m beginning to falter. Having written for so long on so difficult a subject. What kind of comparison is home-making to cupcakes! I’m better at writing the horoscope forecasts of the day.)

But you are generous. You would even make a quiet sort of fuss about this letter and tuck it away to read at another time. And you have patience, especially when it comes to my skills as a writer.