Momin Mubtala August 8, 2003

Tags: love

href="/tag/love">love. Love, for me, then, was what the hero probably felt for the prettiest girl around (or at least, we were expected to believe she was the prettiest). If you are in love, you are supposed to chase after the girl, singing songs for her and for the audience’s benefit. The girl always, as a rule, plays hard to get in the beginning. She would come round, eventually, after a couple of songs and one fight. The reward being that now you can sings duets instead of solo. But a girl, in these circumstances, is always a liability and not an asset. The bad guys would definitely kidnap her to blackmail you into submission_ which would mean the final showdown, read one song and half an hour’s fight in the villain’s lair. (One note of caution: for the final showdown, do not take along any friends who are single or they probably would end up dead.) Somehow love sounded synonymous to a lot of hard work. It was still just a novel idea for me, though; a concept I thought only existed in films.

As a teenager, I came to realize for the first time that love stories can transpire in real life as well. It happened after one of my school friends fell in love with a girl in another class and started sharing his thirteen-year old fantasies with everybody. Soon enough, his coterie of friends leaked the story and the entire school knew about it. Our Principal made a big fuss out of it, probably hoping to scare back the other prospective lovers. It all seemed to us just like in the movies: our hero falls in love with a girl; the big bad world is jealous and tries to bring him down; the fair maiden betrays him in the hour of trial by denying any knowledge of the affair; the villainous Principal takes the opportunity to try and humiliate him; but, battered, broken-hearted and deserted, our hero admits his love to the world and stands up to face the music alone. Add eight songs and we have a super-hit movie! Anyway, the publicity only served the opposite purpose_ now we all wanted to make our own story. I, for one, started falling in love with a new girl every day. Every cute girl was the prospective heroine of my love story, and the cast changed quite regularly. What can I say, Karachi is full of choices. My ideas of a love-affair had transformed a bit too. I believed love was all about taking a girl to a restaurant; about solely discussing the prospective marriage; about bragging among friends; about parents who would never agree; and, if you are lucky enough, about eloping away with the girl.

Finally, somehow, with time I came to settle on loving just the one girl. She was smart, sweet, beautiful, shy_ in one word, she was perfect. Until, of course, she got married. Surprisingly for me, though, I did not quite feel like I thought a ‘nakaam ashiq’ should feel. Instead, I came up with the genial idea that to fall ‘out’ of love you have to fall ‘in’ love again. So, all through my undergraduate years, I successfully fell in and out of love time and again. Of course, I never said a word about love to any of those girls; perhaps, never even said any word to a few of them! The main purpose behind love still remained marriage, the details of the affair changed shape though. You are supposed to love somebody smart and attractive and marry her before your mother marries you off to one of your ugly or fat cousins.

Then again, for the last couple of years I was taken by yet another notion, what someone termed as ‘mohabbat fee-sabeelillah’_ a love just for the sake of love, without any expectations, without hoping for love in return, a love in the name of God, if you would allow me to put it like that. It appealed to me as a romantically superb philosophy. I, therefore, religiously loved a girl, a cause lost even before the beginning. But now, my love was without any expectations or hopes, so such a girl seemed like a perfect choice. I played the part of shaheed-e-mohabbat almost to perfection for more than a year, until she finally faded out of my memory.

At this point, I would like to say that it feels strange to have bifurcated my life into phases. After all, life and its experiences are a continuous process. But the story does not end here; there still remains one last phase. There was one common thing in all the above phases _ I was always sure I understood perfectly well what exactly love was. I thought I had figured out all its nuances. But now, for the first time in the twenty-five years of my ignorant life, I feel confused, not too sure of my own definitions, baffled by questions I do not have answers to.

What is love? How do you define it? How does it actually feel to be in love? How can you be sure if you are actually in love or it is just a passing infatuation? What is the litmus test for love? Why, of all the people in the world, does one of them assume so much importance all of a sudden? Can you stop yourself from falling in love? Can you, ever, possibly fall out of love? Can you love somebody without a desire to be loved in return?

I wonder if you have ever had to wait. I wonder if you have ever gone through a time in your life when all you want to do is to lie down on the bed and stare at the fan rotating above your head; when you constantly feel nagged by the feeling of something soft and feathery stuck in your throat, and then very slowly and almost perceptibly, it slides down your throat into your stomach; when you wake up at nights to weird dreams; you look at things but you’re not watching; you hear words but you’re not listening; when you feel obsessed with thoughts of somebody; when you can’t bear the company of even your loved ones yet you do not want to be left alone, scared of the thoughts that would come crowding into your head; when you wish that you would lose your senses and your mind would go blank so that you would not be able to think; but when, of all the things in the world, you actually just want to lie back and think! Think, think, think_ over and over and over again, because that might be the only thing you can do. A single day seems like a lifetime; a whole week, eternity. This whole week is so terribly agonizing, that at the end of it, you are only too happy to take the blow and drop dead.

I question myself, is this love? Is it love or a mere obsession? If this is love then why does it persecute my soul instead of bringing it to life? Why does it not bring joy to my heart but suffering? Why can not I make myself fall out of it by falling in love again? Why can not I make myself to give up my expectations, which, I know, would never come true in any case?

At the expense of moving out of line with the topic, I would like to make an observation here. I believe that we, Pakistanis, suffer from a deadly affliction as a nation: Hope. We keep clinging to the last thread of hope, waiting for miracles, even when we know better. Each night we hope that tomorrow will bring a future better than the past. Every three years we pin our hopes on a new government to turn things around for our country. We switch on our television sets hoping to see Pakistan beat Zimbabwe by three hundred runs and qualify for super-sixes even after it rains. I suppose at least three-fourths of us are seriously afflicted by this. I can not help but feel that the remaining one-fourth make a happier lot.

‘Hope sustains life’, they tell me; but then, why does it torment the dead?

Oh well …

Sometimes I think I am a hopeless romantic; at other times I think I am just hopeless.