Trigger warning: Sappiness

“Pyaar kya hai?” has only one correct response: “Pyaar dosti hai”.

It’s the early 2000s. I have deeply internalised the fact that I will find love if, and only if, I own this outfit -

Now it’s the mid-2000s. Bangalore’s first mall has just opened. The background score of Saturday nights at our house is provided by a compilation CD called Have I Told You Lately? which Papa bought in Music World, one of the two stores that had English CDs. Invariably, we have a huge family fight every Saturday evening, and as Roxette’s It Must Have Been Love plays in the background, all of us seethe in our respective corners. The CD had the kind of songs which you would now only hear at a restaurant whose glory days are behind it, the kind that has fish in a dirty tank, where you try to finish your meal as fast as you can because it’s all a bit depressing. Aadya recently pointed out that the reason Saturday nights felt so melancholic is not only because we were fighting, but perhaps also because most songs on that CD were breakup songs.

It’s 2010. Surya, Deeksha, and I giggle as we make a list of our ideal partners. Deeksha wants someone in the army and Surya wants someone who plays hockey.

Couple of years later, I’m 16, and at lunch break in school, a friend wisely tells me that when you fall in love, you’ll forget your list because that person will make it feel inadequate. She has a boyfriend, so she definitely knows what she’s talking about.

It’s 2024. Valentine’s Day came and went and every month another person I know seems to be getting married. I’m window-shopping, and I feel a tug in my heart when I hear an instrumental version of It Must Have Been Love. I come home and listen to it on loop. I know every single note. And although they are breakup songs, the familiarity has an uplifting effect. Back before the infinite choice of streaming and algorithms, you listened to and watched whatever you had in your limited collection, on repeat. That lodges stuff pretty deep into your subconsciousness.

It’s 2024, and I thought I’d put together some thoughts about love.

I was playing with a stray cat that visits my building, and she scratched me. According to M, the doctor friend, and the WHO, it was a category II exposure - it broke skin, minor abrasions, no bleeding. To combat the possible infection, I had to get a course of five rabies shots.

I got my heart scratched - minor abrasions, it broke skin, no bleeding. I called Deeksha up, crying, and she sighed and said, “That’s so… hurty”. It’s not an actual word, but it’s the right word. When she hears it for the hundredth time, Surya finally snaps and asks me to stop singing It Must Have Been Love. With category II breaches of love, you leave it up to time, because sadly there are no injections to help your body fight the infection. At times like this, it’s appropriate to find solace in this speech by the Hot Priest from the series Fleabag.

I’m not going to play with the cat till I finish the course of five shots, I decide.

How we wrestle is who we are

Is love something that just happens to us, something we fall into? Or do we choose to love?

Krista Tippet says that love is the most watered-down word we have. Agape, one of the Biblical Greek words for love, is not a feeling, but things you do… it’s ways of being. In the Torah, love is a verb - ve’ahavta - you shall love. Love is an action. Love requires intention.

With the people we are closest to, it's often things you do INSPITE of how you feel at the moment that holds us together - it's very rarely about feeling perfectly understood and perfectly understanding. It's not about agreeing. It's actually about how you navigate difference. You don't love because, you love despite.

“These relentless engines in our hearts”…. they are constantly working with intention and going through rupture and repair and breaking and growing. We are imperfect, our hearts are imperfect.

For our hearts are not pure; our hearts are filled with need and greed as much as with love and grace; and we wrestle with our hearts all the time. The wrestling is who we are. How we wrestle is who we are.

Brian Doyle

It’s 2024. In my experience, love looks something like:

AT saying, “time always goes slower whenever I’m supposed to meet Y”. Editing a few choice words when telling N what S said about her. It looks like having the same conversation on a Dementia loop for an hour. It looks like M switching on the geyser so the water will be hot when you get home. It looks like unabashed farts, not having to worry about how bad your foot odour is, and not feeling like you need to cover up the bald spot you are usually so conscious about. It looks like a place you can fall in. It looks like learning how to cook. It looks like doing health check ups even though you think it’s unnecessary and a scam. It looks like going out of your way to do something nice not because you are kind and empathetic, but because the person you love is. It looks like stopping yourself from saying “I told you so”, even though you DID say so, and you were absolutely right. It looks like saving that one fancy imported chocolate so you can split it even though it’s already such a small piece. It looks like the moment you decide to apologise, and also the moment you decide to forgive. It feels like an expansion in your chest, it feels like bawling at an airport, it feels like weakness until you realise - that’s what strength feels like.

Love does not diminish when you forget a birthday, or misspell someone’s name after twenty years of knowing them. It sometimes looks like falling asleep when the other person is telling you something from their heart, and it also looks like them not being offended when you do. It looks like accepting, and choosing to love another person, just as they are, not a potentially better version which they might become if only they could stop being so loud when they drink. It looks “Your pain is our pain”; like doing things you don’t want to do; It looks like not needing words.

It helps to have different templates of what love looks like - ideas of love that are different from the picture of marriage and kids and happily ever after that we usually see. Krista Tippet says about her post-divorce life -

I told myself, for years, that I had a hole in my life where “love” should be… This is the opposite of a healing story — it’s a story that perceives scarcity in the midst of abundance. I have love in my life, many forms of loving. As I settled into singleness, I grew saner, kinder, more generous, more loving in untheatrical everyday ways. I can’t name the day when I suddenly realized that the lack of love in my life was not a reality but a poverty of imagination and a carelessly narrow use of an essential word.

An excerpt from a poem I wrote which echoes this thought:

Love is when you go all in - when you give all of your heart. You can’t be on the fence in love.

I like what Daniel Kaluuya says when he talks about acting:

I also like this idea of love being the opposite of fear. bell hooks writes - “when we choose to love we choose to move against fear - against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect - to find ourselves in the other”.

The word-association with “love” may seem like poverty of imagination, and so it’s nice to know the words that exist in other languages for its many nuances. Ya’aburnee, an Arabic word, means “you bury me”, or - I hope you live longer than I do. Hyggelig in Tagalog is “a feeling of openness, warmth, and friendship as felt between two people who know each other very well”

Move over, love languages. I want to know where you stand on the Food Disgust Test. I feel a little ashamed that I am not disgusted enough.

I have been thinking about love and I found a great reminder in my immediate surroundings - in Alwyn and Lilis’ bakery in my neighbourhood. Their love finds an expression through this bakery that they run, tucked away in the lanes off a bustling market road. Lilis said - “This isn’t just a bakery… through this we built other relationships; people who have become friends and family. We are connecting with all these people… It’s not easy, but when you do something with love, you can’t explain the feeling”.

I heard it exactly when I needed to hear it. And her words have served as a reminder to continue doing things I love, with love. Because love is the ultimate meaning-maker.

We love because… Bere daari illa (there’s no other way).

Zadie Smith writes - Ottessa Moshfegh wrote this line about love: "Without it, life is just doing time". I don't think she intended only romantic love... it's Love with a capital L.
Without this element present, in some form, somewhere in our lives, there really is only time, and there will always be too much of it. Busyness will not disguise its lack. Even if you don't have a minute to spare- still all of that time ,without love, will feel empty and endless".

This newsletter is an act of love. If you’re reading this, thank you ❤️

Life is such that things will be hurty, but I hope that you try your best; that’s the best anyone can do.

Love,

Nitya