A Tale of Love

This time let me tell you tale...a tale of love, a tale of passion, a tale of desire and beyond. But this is not a happy one. After all only the sad stories of love are often remembered, told and retold. The happy ones are usually lived and forgotten.

Once lived a young and innocent girl who had the freshness of girlhood and was also beginning to embrace the depths of womanhood. As life brought her the confluence of both these stages of life, she was met with the most fantastic man who had ever walked on this planet. What appealed the most was a personna as unblemished as the white marble of the Taj. But alas! He was not and could never be hers on the face of it. He belonged to somebody else. But if inexperience of the early youth and the passion of falling in love for the first time could enable a person to take a rational and a correct decision then the love stories of this world would not have been as interesting as they are. So she soon fell for the man who seemed to have just walked out of her dreams without caring for the right and the wrong. What followed next forms the subject matter of each famous romantic saga ever written on this earth. The strong desire to achieve each other transended all man made barriers and rules. Hand in hand in the soothing spring of life they walked through the beautiful garden of life. In the entire universe were left only two beings she and her beloved.

But soon the times changed. There rose a furious storm…as if the entire universe was lamenting this sinful love. Everything fell apart. Amidst the catastrophe, they lost each others company. Horrified and lost she was longing for her man, her love, her savior. Wandering aimlessly, she finally came to a palace where she found traces of his presence. As she tried to open its door, she found her man resisting her efforts all the time. She took his resistance to be betrayal. She assumed perhaps betrayal was the worst pain that can be inflicted on a person. Her dream like lovestorry was shattered. But she still went on knocking the door. Finally, the door gave up to her relentlessness and there she saw her beloved being beheaded right in front of her. Ahh!! How painfully she remembers those eyes which were once charming enough to make their way straight into her heart. Always brimming with confidence, they had put everyone under spell. But now drained of all the charm, they were quivering with signs of guilt. The Lords of the world had punished him for having taken the wrong path. He was condemned of unfaithfulness. It was then that she realized that all his resistance was to protect her and not to betray her. But now she was to have the same fate.

In the last moments of her life, it dawned upon her that there was a greater pain than betrayal. The guilt of having destroyed your beloved’s life and sorrow of having tainted his preciously maintained unblemished persona is awfully agonizing. More than that what can be most unfortunate for anyone who claims to abide by the promises of love, is her inability to trust the loved one in the time of need. If on one hand it is important for two people in love to earn the trust of each other then it is equally important for each other to honour that trust. All her life she had thought about fear, pain and about winning and loosing battles. Little did she know that this was how her ultimate defeat was planned.

The lamp that fell in love with the fly was beautiful enough attract a it but consequently it did burn it. The most unfortunate lovers of this world are not the ones who don’t get to live happily ever after in the end, but they are the ones who unknowingly hurt and harm their loved ones. All the warmth and affection that they claim to have for their partners goes to waste. Failing to do the right thing at the right time can’t be worse than anything. Not always does one gets a chance to apologize or to undo the damage. At the end what remains can be put in the words of Ghalib :

    “That lamp that I lighted without oil was my heart burnt by the fire of sorrow.”

Before drawing the curtains of her sinned life the merciful Lords asked her for any last wish she had. And all she wished to have was her tale to be told and retold to the world...So that no other lover turns out to be as unfortunate as she was.

All I wish to know now is what was her beloved’s last wish….Some day if I meet the lords I shall ask them.