Aditya Seal is Aditya
Seal to the world, but to some of us he is our ‘bachcha,’ and bachcha in Hindi
literally translates to ‘my child.’ A dear friend, who happens to be a heavyweight
lawyer representing the who’s who of our country, was having coffee with me
last week. Customarily, I refrain from taking telephone calls when I am with
friends, but considering this was from my office, there was no recourse than to
answer it. While I was on the phone, my mate sat brushing his index finger vertically
across the screen of his iPhone. At a point he stopped and directed the screen
towards me. I narrowed my eyes and discerned that it was a post on my Facebook wall
that displayed ‘My bachcha Adi looking dapper yesterday at the Star Screen
Awards’ accompanied with the picture of him at the awards. “Have you changed
his diapers?” asked my friend, in his lawyer-like air once I was free from the call.
I grinned and replied; “One does not have to change their diapers to feel the
love one feels for them like they are our own kids.” My friend smiled. “How old
is he?” he enquired studying Adi’s photograph carefully. “Would it suffice if
I’d say that he’s fifteen years younger to me?” I added with utmost calmness. “Aha,”
he exclaimed, as he leaned forward and patted me on my shoulders, “now, you are
justified in saying that he is your bachcha, old man.” I chuckled and thought
to myself that indeed the love for ‘your own’ is rather an extraordinary
feeling to feel. You meet. You click. Without any anxiety. Without any fuss. And
it continues that way indefinitely. Similarly, you don’t love your people with a plan. You love them because
you love them with all that you have, and that is all that matters – that
unconditional and infinite love. “What are you thinking?” quizzed my friend as
he gave himself up to a sip of coffee. “That the one thing that people never
tire of is love, especially, when they are at the receiving end of it,” I made
known. He raised his coffee cup up as if to give me a toast across the table,
and I raised my coffee cup too in order to return his gesture of faith and
cheer.
Debate it as much as
you may, but I think that the love between friends and family members is rather
the purest variety of love. For that matter, any type of love where there is no
involvement of sex is the purest form of love. It is what I would label ‘greedy-love’
as we derive a certain sense of high in loving them for our own pleasure, but
when it comes to the opposite sex, then the equation changes completely. As
much as we Homo sapiens live for sex, it is sex alone that sometimes culminates
in destroying our peace and health. That is why we feel crushed when we lose a
lover, because love of the opposite sex is selfless, but mind you, in the most utterly
selfish way. How so you may ask? Well, the single pretence of ‘I am like this
but I am adapting myself to this’ that each of us perform is primarily to remain
loyal to our subconscious primal instinct, i.e., slip into each other’s skirts
and pants at the swiftest available opportunity. That was the law of survival. For
that ultimate moment we play-act, and in turn fool ourselves into thinking that
we are being selfish, when in actuality we are being selfless. I say this most
confidently since despite what your friends or your family members do, if your
bond with them is strong, you will survive anything in a blink, but when it
comes to your lover, the moment she slips, or the moment you slip, the world,
for both, turns upside down. This is where love with the opposite sex is
nothing but a thin kind of predetermined ‘give and take’ love, something that
can be replaced with someone else, when we feel that the time is up with the
one’s we are involved with, whereas, the love we feel for those whom we call
our friends or family members, is everlasting.
Given that we are on
the topic of love, let us delve a bit deeper into the realm of love with the
opposite sex. I apologise if I am making it sound one-sidedly stiff here. I am
heterosexual, and therefore, I would not be in a situation to enlighten what it
is to feel such intensity for someone of my own sex (like some are known to
feel), so I urge people of that nomenclature to kindly read this without
holding any prejudice against me.
Call it happenstance,
or a design of nature, but while I was mentally scripting this piece this
morning, I happened to stumble into a poem about love by William Blake at my
library at home. Blake begins with giving us a warning.
Never seek to tell thy love
Love that
told can never be;
For the
gentle wind does move
Silently,
invisibly
I told my
love, I told my love,
I told
her all my heart,
Trembling,
cold, in ghastly fears –
As, she
doth depart.
Soon as she was gone from me
A
traveller came by
Silently,
invisibly –
O, was no
deny.
I read that once, and
then I read it once more, and I knew that it was an unhappy poem that meant
quite literally that if you happen to be in love, then it is best you keep it
to yourself. That you can talk about that love, but the instant you talk about
it, you aren’t actually talking about it. He means that love is quite a mystery,
and if it isn’t a mystery, then it is nothing otherwise. He also states most
vividly that in the joy of love there exists a strange desire for the death of
such love, and that is what we see so unrestrainedly around us nowadays.
Love comes in various
shapes and sizes; nonetheless, the love we seem to celebrate in the society these
days is anything but such a magnificent example of it. We are living in a world
that is more visual than cerebral, where our attention span is nearly zero, and
where our imagination is prohibitively restricted owing to our inability to
read and wonder. The digital generation perceives the human body, or the
feelings that it evokes in them in the manner of a graphic interpretation,
where there is an unswerving obliteration of the mystery associated with love,
the feelings it evokes, or what the body feels when our love explores it like
one explores the expanse of a prosperous garden to discover that one likes this
spot and that flower, this fragrance and that mood. Feelings are vocalised with
such insensitivity, and so much of the bare body has been exhibited to everyone
in the media that the modern child knows everything the child needs to know on
the subject of food, sex and love, but does not know what it is to actually
feel what it is to appreciate the taste in food, savour the enticing engagement
of sex, and surf the undulating waves of love.
Not that the current
decade alone is responsible for such an erosion of the feelings of love. If you
turn back the clock, you will see that when reading was the chief luxury of the
day, novelists have spoken about sex so frequently that it has lost its mystery
and become no less pornographic. The work of Henry James, as critics claimed,
was highly pornographic simply because he tirelessly revealed the details of
the sex life of his characters. Leo Tolstoy, whom one admires for his range,
was one of the most saintly sinners. His Anna Karenina made everyone fall in
love with her, despite that she was selfish, pleasure seeking, avaricious, reckless,
insensitive, had dreadful tastes in the men that she loved or married. Even
then she upheld a mystery that was fortified in her beauty and charm, and it
made it impossible for any man, who read on her, not be able to feel himself
not falling entirely in love with her. It is this precise inability to grasp
the mystery of love that leads her to her own suicide, wrecking her husband’s
career, and in the probable death of her lover as well. In no other work of
literature is the depiction of the mystery of love so very mysterious.
Whether or not you
think that it is one of mankind’s greatest stories ever written, Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita is nothing but another attempt at refined pornography. However outstanding
the directors, or impressive the actors, both the movie versions that were made
could not feature the heroine in Lolita’s actual age. If the girls chosen were
to be twelve years old, no matter how beautiful they were, the very idea of an
old man with a girl that young would make the idea sickening. When the novel turned
into a sensation, and the movies went on to become legendary, societies began
to act them out in real life. A girl of Lolita’s age was kidnapped and murdered,
and one suddenly realised that the book had such a devastating impact on the
reader and viewer that to talk about it, or recommend it to anyone after that
murder had become revolting. Don’t we see a little bit of that in the state of
love these days? Hasn’t it turned into something frivolous? Where its very sanctity
seems misplaced. Let’s not go too far, when parents go looking for respective
partners for their children, it is not based on compatibility or the idea of
love, but on appearances and wealth that they select the partners. This is
where I feel that it would not be inappropriate for matrimonial websites to cut
out the crap and merely advertise in big bold letters – Cocks Searching For (Wealthy)
Cunts.
If I were to ever be in
those matrimonial spaces, my profile would read thus – “I am talking about
love. You know, real fucking love, like walking along the banks of a river
holding hands.” And if ever there were a female soul out there who could pick
up the nuances in my declaration, then I would know at once that she was the
one–my soul mate–and I would delete away the double-standards I harbour in me
for that race, or for the way they manipulate us men, and place her, at once,
in the same ‘greedy-love’ list of people in my life that meant the most to me.
The Swiss writer Max
Picard once said something that sounded rather like the poem by William Blake:
Lovers are the conspirators of
silence. When a man speaks to his beloved, she listens more to the silence than
to the spoken words of her lover. “Be silent,” she seems to whisper. “Be silent
that I may hear thee!”
What I infer from those
words is this: she is not asking him to ‘shut up’ but is only asking him to ‘stop
talking’ and the difference in that is everything, just as it is in art and it
is in love. Drawing from that you can see, love of the opposite sex, and sex
with the opposite sex, appear with a plethora of absurdities and complexities. No
love comes without sacrifice, and no poems without suffering, and after having
fallen into numerous pits of abject despair with women, I am today in a zone
where I am happy with engaging in it with the women I want to, and most decisively
at my yearning, than to do this dance of life that lends it no concrete meaning
really, merely for the sake of pleasing the world, or that someone with whom,
once the lust starts to diminish, one will eventually learn to despise exactly what
one went ‘head over heels’ in them.
To conclude I would say
that we must always take sides. Neutrality helps the autocrat, never the
victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Hence, the side
I am taking is of my bachcha. Agreed, I might have to forego the daily comfort
of a woman’s warmth, or if I am to put it blatantly, a well to dip my stick into
at will, yet, what provides me more bliss, when I weigh it on a scale of checks
and balances, is in taking care of my bachcha, who I know is irreplaceable, who
I know might need me, like he would need each of us who are his support system
to be there for him, regardless of the fact of whether he draws upon us for
support or he doesn’t, the day he opts for the daily comfort of the warmth of a
woman. And that would be a moment tougher than changing diapers. A diaper is
like the unsaid mystery of love; you take out the shit and throw it away, but
the heart is what stands to test when you see your kids in love, and that is
where, we, the big brother’s have to be resilient for our kid brother’s, even
if we are to find ourselves deeply dented inside on seeing them endure the
normal course of life until they are each ready to write their own poetry.
