That day of January 1994 is the day that still gives jitters to her, the day that still has the ability to take life from her body. It is the day when she went with her heart in her mouth to meet him. That day something broke in her forever. ‘Something’ was perhaps the hope she reposed in their relationship that no matter what happens they will always be together. She is the Jaan of the story and he is her Sahib. A world where momentary happiness is the key, where relationships vanish more quickly than the droplets of water evaporate they chose each other forever. She met him and fell for him instantly. It is how Sahib came into Jaan’s life and changed it forever. He was there only for her, for her wide mysterious eyes that had oceans hid in them. Sahib and Jaan’s story moves backward and forward, it is a juxtaposition of past and present. It experiences its present through its past and that’s how it settles down in her life like an essential entity to live. Her day begins with the idea of love and ends with tears in eyes thinking “if only he knows”. He has not gone anywhere, they met they fell in love and they made it forever. He is there in the smallest element of her being, in those twenty-four hours, in her worst and in her best and that is enough for her to be able to feel alive.
The subconscious is powerful, it keeps on coming again and again just to remind us what we have left behind and what we still crave for. While living in her present, in her subconscious she still craves for a life that she always wished for. She is leading a lifeless existence as her mind, heart and body have surrendered to love. When one falls in love there are no terms and conditions and a timeline of being in love. It is a process of continuity till eternity. The same happened with these two youngsters who were destined to be in love and to feel the warmth of the most beautiful emotion in the world. Literature, art, music are the tools to let out what we have kept buried inside us for a long time. She begins her day by listening to Nida Fazli’s ghazal as a daily ritual. Something melts inside her whenever she listens to this song. She had always dreamt of loving, laughing and crying together in their life. And as they say when we love someone it is the purity of the heart that attracts pure minds. Jaan was a simple girl, a girl who was in love with her books, with herself and with her surroundings. She still doesn’t know what attracted Sahib towards her. Like Amrita and Imroz, Jaan and Sahib also surrendered themselves to each other. It was poetries of great poets like Shakespeare, Keats, Browning that inspired her to experience life as a whole. Slowly, they became each others world and in that small world there existed dreams, love’s music and solace.
She still remembers the day she first saw him on one fine day of November 1991, the day when she experienced love getting personified, the day when her poetries were incarnated into a human being. In that heavenly moment of joy, she found her lifetime cause to be alive. That single moment was enough for her to feel God through love. The chapters of her life kept on changing but its essence is still the same which she wants to experience again and again. But ah! Life is nothing if it is predictable. Its unpredictability is the reason why the word ‘hope’ exists. And the life which they thought would be a bed of roses suddenly came to a halt. But love is forever. It lives in the heart of the lovers. Their separation is just a wobble in their journey as she believes that they will someday meet in this life or the other. But one thing is for sure that they will not let destiny write such an abrupt ending of something that was so beautiful and magical. In those innocent times when the world was not familiar with the internet, letters used to be the soul of communication. These letters played a very prominent role in keeping Jaan and Sahib in touch with each other. They were not just letters but two hearts melting into an ocean of love and tranquility. She was just lost in those oceanic waves when the bell rang and she came back to her present where she was reminded that she had to teach the poem to the class. As she leaves the cup of tea, there is a smile on her lips as tea transports her to the voyage of memories. This oscillation between the past and present is now a part of her life, of her existence because that’s what keeps Sahib with her in all her tenebrous moments. There is certainly something so magical about Sahib that even after so many years she still longs for him. There must be something extraordinary in that man that is not letting her go anywhere away from him and that’s the beauty of their love. Every girl, when she is in a transitional phase, has dreams and expectations of entering into a married life. Jaan also had dreams and hopes and they sat together to imagine those dreams turning into reality. The imagination was of entering into wedlock with utmost fidelity and joy. In that series of fancies and imagination they went a step forward and dreamt of bringing an innocent and beautiful life to this earth, the memoir of their love in the form of a beautiful daughter. She was in their imaginary world as their inspiration and the symbol of their love. Jaan was so much in awe of that little creature that she went on making frocks for her in reality. But alas! Imagination remained imagination, fancies ditched them and she got married not to her Sahib but to someone else. Those veiled thoughts, veiled love always keep returning in her life. She is reminded of everything they shared. Whenever she keeps Karwachauth’s fast she remembers him in every bit of it because she kept her very first fast for him. Whether one calls it destiny or the test of love, Jaan definitely was now into a relationship with someone for whole life. Her dreams were shattered, that excitement of entering into the marriage was crushed as she could not accept whatever was happening to her. She could not even try to be happy in her new life as her heart always belonged to her Sahib. Those frocks that she made for their daughter still have a secret play in her heart as well as her cupboard. She still feels her presence in her life when she looks at those frocks and through her she still feels Sahib. Their separation and the formation of their separate world was because we attach too much importance to our principles than to our inner happiness. But as we know love is beyond the physical realm, it transcends through one’s soul and lives in the surroundings till eternity. The winds, the sun, the sky, the earth and the moon all have stored in them different parts of her identity which she has mingled with Sahib so well that he is there in nature, in its minute particles and in its essence. The Purnima’s moon gives her satisfaction that at least they are breathing under the same sky. Sahib, she thinks might also remember her while looking at the full moon with all its radiance, its scars and its own flaws but still shining there in an imperfectly perfect way because it was not only she who experienced love so intensely, so madly but also Sahib who was equally involved in that madness, in that purity of action. To quote E.E. Cummings that a lover is never alone he/she carries the other person with him through his highs and lows as he says,
“I carry your heart with me, I carry it in my heart.
I am never alone without it anywhere
I go you go, my dear;
And whatever is done by
only me is your doing, my darling.
I fear no fate, for you are my fate, my sweet, I want no world for you are my world, my true
And it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
And whatever a sun will always sing is you.”
He always has an undisputed sway over her heart. His love is the reason for her to live. They imagined their life together surrounded by love and books. Today they both are aware of each other’s life in which they have no physical presence but in their heart they still live together. But what about the void that they both experience in their lives. After her marriage, Jaan came to a new home just life Shakespeare has described the last stage of man’s life, “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” One must wonder how a human being can survive in such a situation but one thing that kept her alive is her hope of not dying without telling him how passionately she is in love with his being. It is a story of purity, sanity, madness, joys, cries, ups, downs, loving and letting go. It is the story of those two unnoticed hearts who decided to be in love and let love take them on an unplanned journey of devotion. Do all true love stories have a conclusion? The answer is in the hearts of the lovers and only they can better explain it. It is not betrayal or big blow ups that would put an end to a relationship. Sometimes, a quiet conclusion of a relationship can be more painful than a chaotic or messy split. She knows about him, his whereabouts, and one thing she knows is that they will meet one day or the other. Until then all the answers lie hidden in their shells. The story has not concluded yet. It is love that will keep her going and pouring her heart out whenever there is a way. To sum up such magical tales full of love is an injustice to them, let love take its turn and produce a poetry of their loving each other and give them their conclusion. As in the words of Jallaluddin Rumi,
“Bring to you Hand
The Practice of Love!
Keep concealed it’s mysteries,
For only love itself
Can explain love.
The proof of the sun
Is in the sun itself.”
Let them unfold what destiny has stored for them and till then let past and present together keep them falling in love and hoping to complete their story together.