Often, when someone breaks a promise, it’s because at the time of making it they believed themselves to be the kind of person who could keep it but eventually came to realise that they could not.
It makes me ponder over the remnants of unfulfilled promises and the true nature of love.
A few months ago, I picked up “all about love” by bell hooks. I feel sorry for myself in retrospect because I dismissed it as an inconsequential piece of made-up hypotheses based on my “understanding” of love back then. It sits on my shelf now, ignored and humiliated. And it’s about time I picked it up again, for my understanding of love and in turn, this world, seems to be changing yet again.
Anyway, here’s a picture of a magical sunset in Mumbai from August:
“Sunset in the ethereal waves: I cannot tell if the day is ending, or the world, or if the secret of secrets is inside me again.” - Anna Akhmatova
We live on a planet that happens to be a spinning pale blue dot in the fabric of *everything* with a thousand different colours and flowers with scents-god-knows-how-they-got and little winged birds and enormous mountains and tiny insects and sunrises and sunsets and the moon and stars and deep green forests and volcanoes as old as time and adorable four-legged beings (one of them jumping around my room right now) and you and I and the magic of being alive and able to experience it all. And it bothers me, I could scream that it bothers me that we try to find the *sense* and the *math* behind it all. But what before this and what before that and before that and before that?
There is no way that this isn’t by design: I’m convinced; and it is the product of Love, yes, with a capital L, and that if there’s any kind of magic in the universe we need not find it in bedtime stories because it is here and we’re experiencing it right now.
We’re just too used to it.
Poetry is another reason why I believe in this “magic by design”.
This academic year, I am teaching a poem by Nissim Ezekiel called “Island”, which is essentially about Mumbai and its bittersweet personality as a city of dreams — some fulfilled, but most broken. True. But what’s also true is that Mumbai is *still* a city of Hope. The students never fail to bring this up, and Ezekiel kind of confirms it:
“Unsuitable for song as well as sense
The island flowers into slums and skyscrapers.”
Well, suitable enough, I say. He still wrote a song about it, no?
And then there’s a girl who says the poem reminds her of the song “Seoul” by RM.
And then a bright-eyed sharp young girl slips a little scribbled note in my hand after the lecture, which reads:
“A person of good intelligence and sensitivity cannot exist in this society very long without having some anger about the inequality - and it’s not just a bleeding-heart, knee-jerk, liberal kind of a thing - it is just a normal human reaction to a nonsensical set of values where we have cinnamon flavored dental floss and there are people sleeping in the street.”
George Carlin
Poetry is proof that we’re all connected and sharing a magical experience, born out of Love. And most of us may never quite fathom it but that’s okay because what else have we got?
So, I forgive myself and the world for all those broken promises.
Love,
Jhelum
Nice to read and engrossing writing by you