Short Stories >> Bhoori >> Love and Pain (Pyaar Pyaar Peedha Peedha)
Love And Pain
Written By: Smt.Sundri Uttamchandani
(PYAR PYAR, PEEDA PEEDA)
Menka,
On receiving your letter, my mind was lost in the wilderness of deserts, in search of truth and falsity. You have refered to me as 'friend'.Gulab is not your friend, then how did he appear at our meeting? I also consider that your love for me has grown one more step from friendship. I agree that you repeatedly must be thinking that "it is not enough to stay only as a friend" But I may ask that is there no love between friends? And acknowledge that you don't love me. If not then with right do you go on filling my plate with food in your house? Or at times, lifting your eyes full of pain, you keep conveying your suffering into my heart, looking into my eyes? Or that you inaugurate each of your new sais with the touch of my glance? What right do you have to send me so many of your photographs, forcing me day and night to see them...?
Even now you sit in your stubborn pride, don't write to me, and don't say "I love you".
- Arjan.
Arjan,
I could have never ever imagined that our meeting after such a long wait would be so short and so irritating. But I feel like asking for forgiveness for whatever has happened.
You are aware this cousin Gulab is very close and familiar to me. Not just me but the entire the family. Our house would be nowhere without so many of his favors and this house has done me a favour by giving me shelter. You don't know all this...
How would I know that Gulab would follow me and disturb our beautiful, loving meeting? He is a strange man. With what authority did he overpower me? I don't understand in which dictionary he has read that by giving help to a woman he has a right over her and that too over a woman like me who desires to be free for all bondages!
I'll tell you one more amusing incident. At that time when he told you "You have no right to meet Menka", he looked a ferocious lion, but when he returned home at night, his face was worth watching, like ugly small pox marks! I pitied him. The poor fellow has done so much for me. He took out a letter from his pocket which I am sending along with this.
You were adamant that I write something on a piece of paper, you may have changed your mind about that. Is it important to say everything in words?
- Menka
Menka,
I received Gulab's letter too along with your letter. My mother was serving me food when your servant brought it. She was coaxing me to eat, just like you and I was thinking of you. I wish my beloved is always with me!
I know Gulab too may have expressed such a wish and perhaps…but now that you are only mine then I would not like to remember anything of the past. As it is I do not consider character as only sex, but character for me means mental understanding and strength of the heart.
Reading Gulab's letter I came to know that his wife has lost her identity due to his behaviour. Doesn't he realize that just as he wants to drive me away from your heart, his wife too is trying to drive you away from his heart? If love cannot help one to feel the pain of the other then how can the word be called love... Well.
The yellow flowers brought by your gardener reminded me of Krishna's Gopis in orange saris, in the spring season. These are the days of Holi festival too. The same flowers…I shall wait for you at Andheri station today evening. We shall go the Versova beach.
- Arjan
Arjan,
What is all this? After the storm receded I was thinking of my past that there is a stubborn woman within me who is arguing loudly and saying, "Whatever is done under the spell of lust and loss of control over self is basically wrong". I have deliberately done everything on meeting you... I wished to merge my thirst with your infinite thirst and this woman is repentant about whatever happened. But the other traditional, weak but simple and social woman asked from within me, "If you don't feel bad for whatever has happened then why don't you accept it and convert the sin into virtue? Why have you felt Arjan's marriage proposal as bondage?"
But this inward proud woman is really very helpless. I wish I had not seen you talking so excitedly in college, and how I wish our car had not broken down at Juhu and I did not have to return back with you in a taxi. While Gulab was repairing the car, your wild and excited talks were repairing my scattered mind and making it whole and complete. I was sitting on your left in the taxi. I don't know, but I suddenly realized that a bride always sits by the left side of a groom. It was an amusing thought but I shall not deny that it was a sweet thought. But leave these thoughts aside. The mind will always keep flying in the valleys of imagination. There is no place for these thoughts in the real world. Our paths have never met anywhere excepting in the fisherman's lonely cottage on the Versova beach. The mind is tensed in Hamlet's confusion of 'Do or not do'. But marriage is bondage of lust. There is no love in that. If it was not so then why would I have left my husband's home?
I only desire to see the entire world as a witness…Come every day and tell me stories of this colorful world! Just fill this deserted and lonely life with strange colors. There should be an infinite ocean of love in which there are millions of waves of pure bliss that would fill my entire being with an endless pain!
Picture of love and pain,
- Menka
Pranam Mrs. Menka,
You have replied to my offer in such beautiful words. One day you had told me the story of your maid Smiti.You mentioned that during her childhood she loved her cousin very much. He suddenly deceived her and got married to another girl from his village. Smiti just threw him out of her mind. When she got married her previous lover landed there to create trouble, but Smiti courageously showed him the door and fell at her husband's feet and confessed the whole story to him.
Menka, tell me is there not such a courageous woman within you? You have don't have to feel sad about what happened in an emotional storm. The more you resisted the forces of nature's laws, the same forces destroyed your false self created walls. It was all natural and it is called marriage by society but you have called it bondage of lust.
The facts that added color in your life were the things about other people's struggles against love, pain and circumstances. And when such things want to come into your life you are closing your doors to them. It is right. Like the heartless rich people you also often watch quietly the poor struggling for food because you want to see this as a witness.
When stand on the rooftop and watch down at the passing by world, they appear mere to you. Perhaps you have even shed a couple of tears at their plight…And when you look upwards at the sky you can everything deserted. At that time you desire some one's company and it is my company that you like. But even that too you want to keep under some limit although you have been unsuccessful at that once before...
But what picture of yours is this? Why only you? Even the CID reports that I see now show young boys and girls from upper class doing the same thing. They enjoy each other's soft touch and later create a hard cover around each other. But Nature will be destroyed in this way Menka!
You are an educated woman and it is your duty to offer something back to society. But do don't want all that isn't it? You desire just secure love- softer than the Lotus flower and cooler than ice. A woman in her palace deprived of open air! Unaware of the Sunshine and the Moonlight! I don't want to accept a flower withering away. I don't have a palace but I have life. A life which is filled with a fragrance of the earth and in which the flowers of hard work and health are always blooming.
But I have been unable to rekindle the flame of life that gone off within you while you lived in riches. I accept my failure. But how one save somebody who is shouting for help but when being offered help refuses?
You have broken free all social fetters like a silken thread but you have not fully accepted the nature of the mind. Love, which the eternal flame of light was considered by you as a mere glass of water and you considered yourself satiated by drinking a sip here and there. Truth has not been found and even silence did not come in useful. This is how you have lived your life. But my soul does not agree to all this. My soul will always be in search of truth and will achieve truth. My desire a courageous life partner who, like me, has the courage to deny falsity and deception. I find that 'Smiti' better who has not got stuck with falsity and deception.
I don't know what all I have written. I did not want to tell you any truth because your ears are ready to hear description of pure love. You don't want Creation and life in which there is struggle and immortality You want to become that lady who keeps repeating love, love, pain, pain and then becoming the a symbol of unfulfilled desires, separating from the tree and falling like a dry branch and dying.
Whatever I have written in this last letter is the bitter truth but to imbibe this is health and life.
- Arjan
- Translated by Arun Babani
The End