LOVE IS NOT ONLY THING IN LIFE

Love is always revelation and risk. In order to find out if she has really fallen in love, the subject submits to some (truth) tests and, to find out if that love is returned, subjects the potential object of it to tests of reciprocity. This delicate process can lead to misunderstandings or even destroy the nascent state altogether.

When one falls in love the beloved is transfigured, because each partner is the charismatic leader of the other.At the same time,\

 the fusion process is always balanced by a desire for self-assertion.This conflict lends a dramatic, passionate character to the love process. If the two persons in love fail to create a common project, or if their individual projects are too dissimilar, too incompatible, the love process may founder.

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For as long as my father lived in Kathmandu, he spent his Sunday mornings in Dayaganj, buying second-hand books off the pavement, and for dozens upon dozens of those Sundays, I went with him. My father’s protocol for book-buying was pretty simple: I identified something I wanted to read, and he bought it for me. Champak and Mad magazines; William stories; collected science fiction (including a couple of really chilling books by Nicholas Fisk that I recommend to everyone but lend to nobody); the hilarious (and tragically out of print) Bagthorpe Saga by Helen Cresswell (which I did lend to somebody, and then spent a year getting back, my friend and I strategising with all the stealth of military manoeuvre); a battered old Richard Armour called The Classics Reclassified, the loss of which I mourn even today (though I read it so many times, I have much of it memorised) — those Daryaganj Sundays taught me the rewards of browsing, of picking out books I’d never heard of by writers I might never read again, with no expectation, not even pleasure. It made me believe, with almost mystic faith, that the books you’re going to read wash up at your door. Somehow.

But, of course, some don’t. In my case, it was a love story. The blurb was explicit on the point: there was a beautiful woman and a rakish man, and they didn’t like each other, but who knew what the turn of a page would bring? I handed the book to my father, barely glancing to check if he was performing the customary function of fishing out wallet and handing over money. He, instead, coughed. I suppose saying ‘No’ to his children didn’t come easy to him — it still doesn’t — so maybe that’s why he looked so uncomfortable as he shook his head and said, “Not this”.

I was so surprised, I barely mumbled a query. And maybe he was embarrassed, because all I remember him saying is something about “Mills & Boon’s…” and trailing off, letting the disdain in his voice complete the sentence. It must have been really top quality disdain, because not only am I yet to read a Mills & Boon, I’ve never so much as skimmed a Jackie Collins, or, blithely spreading prejudice across genres, a Sidney Sheldon or Jeffry Archer. (Only recently, I read my first few John Grishams, and was entirely taken aback by how good he is.)

Instead of paperback romances, then, I was reading the collected works of Jane Austen. But Pride and Prejudice doesn’t quite satisfy the romantic aspirations of an 11-year-old, so you can imagine my delight when I read my first real love story. It was called Ladyhawke. And Ladyhawke was just wonderful. (‘Soppy’ is my sister’s technical term for it. But then, she was eight, and therefore hardly equipped for grand passion.) Basically, it’s a story of love first nursed then cursed (secret, then black magic), in which ethereal woman and gruffly handsome man must wander in exile — from their kingdom and their bodies, both. She is a hawk by day, he a wolf by night, and so they will never truly meet, unless… Well, unless is the plot, and it’s a fantastic plot, full of twists and funny dialogue. (Also, until half an hour ago, I thought Ladyhawke was the book on which a rather insipid film of the same name was based. Google tells me it was actually the other way round, but no matter, because this does, in a roundabout way, bear out another of our family snobbery: The book is always better than the film.)

I finished reading in one breathless gasp, and then I wandered into the living room, where I declared to my poor mother, “I want to be in love!”

She reacted with a wry mixture of bewildered worry and subdued encouragement — though I don’t know what she said, exactly, because I was too busy imagining myself united with Perfection, us, unassailable and one against the world.