I remember reading about Dil Se a few years ago, and how it depicted the seven stages of love – attraction, infatuation, love, faith, worship, madness and the final, death. I scoffed immediately. This may have something to do with how love can be very singular in our imagination. Our parents love each other, so they wed. Our parents love us, so they raise us. We love our friends, so we hang out with them. Love is flowers, incense, and wine. Love is a tall strawberry milkshake glass with two straws in it. Love is the teenagers kissing on their skateboard (America, 28) in Donna Reed America. Kollywood had told me so, the Hugh Grant rom coms from the 1990s affirmed it, popstars sang about it.

I have outgrown the movies and the pop songs. I have known madness. I have known love. And I see the tragic, tragic truth in how ‘love is one of God’s most bitter medicines.’ The anthology, The Book of Blue by Professor Atreyee Majumder (Red River, 2024) can be read through that phrase. I’m thinking about the poem, I once met a Poet. The title evokes the classical elements of love – a fateful meeting, and aren’t poets great romantics? Indeed, the poem is about love. But it is stripped clean of any romanticism, any of the ornaments that come with it. It is a love of ashes, and jungles, and scratchy ballpoint pens. Or consider, Lovepoem (35):

Petrol bombs like ripe oranges
In the hands of the men
Walking along the death valley.
A red river passes along
Calm as the poesy of Radha
Forceful as the nightly love of Krsna.

The play here inverts the aphoristic tilt of those blockbuster opening lines from The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock. Instead of tantalizing you with a calm, beautiful evening, only to compare it to a patient etherized upon a table, it draws you in with imageries of violence and hushes the reader into visions of seeming calm. Love and war here are fraternal twins. They are distinct but inseparable, like salt in water. It is ‘bitter love, this hateful love.’  If the juxtaposition is difficult to comprehend, it is even more so to experience it and worser still to live with it and live after it. Love is a totalitarian ideology. This is not love that can be contained within cinematic clichés. This love has no patience for platitudes from self-help books like, ‘if you really love them, let them go.’ The poem Colony (40) brings that out best:

In my balcony, as my colony, mine own, mine only.
Maybe colonies are a strange form of love.
Territorial. Complete.
You are my prisoner.
Prisoner of desire.
My art, my poems, my morning cigarette
All for you. But you won’t speak.
You don’t get to speak. You get to blossom.
You get to die.
Mornings will come and melt eventually
Into sultry, purple evenings.
And you will scream inwardly.
And that is my love. Complete. Absolute.
My territory, my rude obsession, my illiberal type of love.

I read the comparison of love as a blossoming bougainvillea in this poem with the evocation of love as a ‘fable’ in I once met a Poet. Both are deceptive in appearances. The bougainvillea tells us of summers and welcoming homes within a fence, with colours that sing of freedom; the fables delight children with their world of talking animals. But the bougainvillea is potted, it peers into the world, but does not belong to it. Its roots are still tied to someone, and the fables’ didacticism is much darker.

This attempt at making someone yours cannot be simply explained away in categories of ‘control’ like patriarchy. It is not about whether one is ‘allowed’ what to wear, when to go out, when to come home. It is about whether we can tame our loves and retain it within ourselves, in our palms. It is about whether we will ever be able to measure ourselves up to the godawful business of love. The poem Date Knight talks of old, possibly lost, love. The poet commits the ‘sin’ of unveiling Radhika – the love – by removing the curtain of time. Time and counting becomes a desperate attempt at taming love, by putting it in manageable categories of days, hours, minutes. It is beyond the vocabulary of proprietary ownership. It is all-encompassing, a blackhole.

But blackholes suck out light. Love, despite its unceasing chaos, illuminates. Solstice (56) is appropriately titled. This poem suggests a different possibility of love – one that is slow, that is warm enough but does not burn. Possibly. But even here, there is the invitation to “come into the crevices” of one’s soul, to become “one.” Even as we try to establish our sovereignty over another, we are losing ourselves, our sovereignty over ourselves. It does something similar to what the English language does those of us here, [t]hat bastard, alien tongue slits my throat, and stitches it back together (For Shahid, 39). But we still yearn for it, we spend our lives waiting for its arrival, knowing that it will forcefully take us by the throat and pull our guts from within. We have all gone mad.

In all of this, there is a constant invocation of the imagery of Krishna. Krishna’s association with love is well-known. His divinity is forever associated with the devotions of Radha and Andal and Meera Bai. In dance, in song and popular imagery, we see Krishna as curly-haired, lotus-eyed, and coral-lipped. But in these poems, Krishna does not appear as the magnificent Giridhara or the pleasant Mana Mohana. The metaphor of the Lord lends itself to devastation. In Song of the Sweet Lord (58):

Krishna enters the wall of the mausoleum
as it sobs through the night.

He is a spectator to the “crazy, silent dance” in the Taj Mahal drenched in acid rain, by the polluted and frothing Yamuna. In Biraha (42), he is not present in the alleyways of Mathura in the youthful, flittering notes of the flute but in the mournful notes of the tampura. He is not the sweet Lord here. He suffers from an all too mortal loneliness. Perhaps, some of our loneliness is shrunk by thinking of God as sharing the same grief. I am reminded of the haunting song, Mathuranagarapati from Raincoat, of a King leaving his kingdom to dust as he departs to return at midnight to Radha.

What does all of this have to do with the form of poetry? I think I agree with the poet – this is too terrible a truth to reveal in the candidness of prose or bury it in the facades of fiction. It can only be veiled in poetry, its verses hiding more than they suggest. 

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Niveditha K Prasad is an undergraduate student and has previously published in Café Dissensus. When not preoccupied with a seemingly inane law school to-do list, she spends her time watching movies, re-reading TS Eliot and Joan Didion and trying to scribble words. You can find some of those scribblings here.