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As I think of those ambrosial
hours, the gurdwara walls washed by the generous river
and the music of the bani adding to the sweet symphony,
that face rings a soft ball in my mind. Yes, some 12 years ago
when I commenced my autobiography (which remains unfinished and
stalled because of my health problems), I did write a lyric note
on the woman who had launched my dream of love pure, Platonic
and compulsively fetching. So, let me quote a few lines written
after the experience had left but a few traces.
.....I remember
how one face with its chaste, classical features, white and pink
complexion (as though the roses and the lilies were, in unison,
lighting up the cheeks), and the light auburn hair drawn tightly
over a broad and luminous forehead held me in a trance, day
after day. I used to go to the gurdwara as a matter of
father’s religious discipline and home culture, but the
presence of a beautiful woman whose name even was still a
mystery now drew me like a magnet. I sought it incessantly in
the congregation across, and fidgeted restlessly when on some
day, she didn’t fall within the line of my vision. No, I never
followed her after the service was over, for I had a pearl of
the purest form to feed my imagination on. Anything gross never
crossed the threshold of my consciousness. So she remained, long
after, a figure framed in my memory, unbetokened, unnamed,
unknown. A romantic "she" that launched my reveries,
and could not bear sullying. Yes, it was a case of involuntary
fascination, a thing of poetic lyric response to pure beauty
such as to a sight of a field of flowers tossing their heads in
the breeze, or to a flight of larks streaking across the clear
morning skies, or to the sound of music at nightfall from a
mountain stream.... The girl turned into a woman, and I watched
her grow full and rich in figure, a married maid who went her
way, leaving me to light candles to an idol out of sight. One
couldn’t explain or understand the chemistry of such a
phenomenon, for its appeal was subliminal, even spiritual. Being
no painter, I couldn’t draw her even in outline, and one
needed the voice of a Shakespeare or a Keats to bring out the
essence of her being. So, she quietly slipped away into my
unconscious, or perhaps into nothingness, image to image,
thought to thought, nothingness to nothingness.I let the
imagination of adoration work out the problem without any
conscious construction. Perhaps, to say more would be to
diminish that glorious dream whose occurrence is beyond the
power of understanding. The rhetoric of high beauty may never be
quite my fate....".
I was destined
to come across many a beautiful woman during my visits and
appointments abroad, but I don’t think, any one of those
dented my consciousness in the manner of our lady of the Jhelum
river valley. Of course, some did put my "imagination of
loving" to test, but that’s a story not for now. It’ll
have to wait till my autobiography is, if ever, finally, done.
It may,
however, be observed that the world’s greatest love stories
are to be found chiefly in some of the novels, for no other
genre has that kind of appetite and energies which are
needed to reach down into the intimacies of amour. What’s more
significant, nearly all such novels are tragic in seed and
vision, for tragic love, unrequited, has the power to rouse the
imagination to a pitch beyond even the novelist’s own design.
However, though
the form of fiction is comprehensive enough to take in anything,
it’s not true that poetry or drama cannot even in the greatest
hands, achieve similar effects. To cite only one incomparable
example, the closing scene in Shakespeare’s Antony and
Cleopatra having the intensity of sexual love (though
Cleopatra had been a whore) has a touch of sublimity. Those
"immoral longings" sweeten even the siren of the Nile,
making her almost a ‘divine’ lover.
Beautiful women continue to
ensnare men and drive them into passionate doings and heroic
sacrifices. And as history tells us, some daughters of Eve have
caused rivers of blood to flow. AHelen’s face could launch
"a thousand ships" and destroy great towers and towns,
for beauty of that pitch and order can rouse intense emotions,
enmities and destructive propensities. It’s then, for the pen
and brush to prove the argument and enlarge it.
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THUS,
I start with an experience which today, lies some 65 years behind me, an
experience which has a dream-life quality, though it still stirs up a whole
school of memories. No wonder, I hear a murmur of running waters and sound of
soft feathers fluttering in the air.
