The Simplest Love

"I am certainly not an authority on love because there are no authorities on love, just those who've had luck with it, and those who haven't."

- Bill Cosby

Recently, a friend of mine said love is nothing but a bunch of lies and promises that were never kept.
She says there is no other outcome to it other than hurt and pain and a broken heart. She sounded knowledgeable and pretty sure about it, I was sure from the serious look on her face she actually believed in what she said. What is more surprising that she like me was just nineteen, a very very young age to have such dark thoughts on something that most people think is a basic necessity for a happy life.

Many people would agree with her, I personally know a lot of such cynics. Maybe I am one of them too. I knew for sure that I was one of them, until I met someone who said something very contradictory and made me think otherwise.

I was coming from my tuition classes at the usual time minus a usual friend who used to come along with me those days, he skipped class today. Lucky brat, the class was torture anyway. Too much calculus can rot anybody’s brain. Ours was just about half way there. But there wasn't much you could do about it, except verbally abuse mankind for being so intelligent to make up something this complicated, and torture us innocent students. He and I usually cursed our math teacher together but since he was not with today I was doing it by myself in my head, hoping my telepathic powers could somehow blow the teacher’s head apart. And wished dearly that I wouldn't have to go jail for that. I would plead that the crime was committed for the good of all humanity. I was also beginning to think up arguments to my defence.

That was when I saw him first. At the depot, where the bus for Ganapathy, the number 3, halts. He was wearing his usual gray uniform of a peon or janitor with the name tag & emblem of a local state-run hospital. I had seen him before in the stand. Like me he too went on the number 3 bus daily. What caught my eye was that he was talking animatedly to someone on his mobile phone. God! Here even an aging ancient janitor has a mobile, and here I have been nagging and badgering my dad to get me one for months. The bus arrived and I was still fuming over this newly discovered injustice, how everything was wrong in the universe. I somehow blindly under auto-plot boarded the empty bus succumbing to the crowd's push and shove . The emptiness of a bus doesn’t matter to us Indians, we simply just have to push and shove collectively at the doors. After that inevitable ruckus ceased I got inside, spotted a vacant seat and quickly sat there before the guy with heavy trunk could reach it. He in turn cursed under his breath and pushed the heavy trunk forward to find another seat. Sorry mister, no manners and etiquettes when it comes to the bus seat. Rejoicing at my success in getting a seat for myself, and smugly looked around to see the disappointed faces of the ones left standing who did not get a seat.

Thats when I saw the janitor next, he had just boarded the bus quite leisurely taking his time after the rush had decreased still talking on his phone. What a loser. Now he’d have to stand the whole time. The bus was filled with passengers, there is now way he could have got a seat coming in this slow. Considering our reputation with regards to population, this was inevitable. The bus finally started. Driver shifts the gear and the bus moved forward. By the time the first two halts had been completed the conductor had come near me I bought the ticket. The conductor noticed the janitor while I bought the ticket. The conductor smiled at the janitor who in turn grinned at him.

“The wife?” he asked.

“Who else?” the janitor mouthed, rolling his eyes.

The conductor moved on to the next passengers smiling, the janitor still talking on his phone. He had now leaned on to a rod and placed the old bag that he was carrying below between his shoes so that they won’t slide away when the bus brakes. I looked at him more carefully now. He looked old around 50 (58 really, I would know later). Had a short white beard, white hair and constant smile on his face. He was talking to somebody, his wife he had said, who had just bought an expensive sari that they can’t afford, to gift a couple who they did not know all that well, on their wedding to which they were not invited. That much I could make out from what he was saying. I was not exactly eavesdropping, I really wasn't! I couldn’t help it. He was standing close to me and frankly its kind of fun to eavesdrop on someone else's conversation.

Shortly the fifth halt had been reached, the shopping centre. The man sitting on the seat beside me got up to leave. I moved while still seated, to make way for him (if you get up from your seat it means you have abandoned it and others can now pounce on it, which they will. Unless you want that, keep your backside glued to it until your destination comes). The old man saw the vacant seat he picked up the bag and came towards it. Since he was an older person no one else objected to it or even tried to catch the seat. Ah, the famous Indian respect to the elders of course. Guess he wasn’t a loser after all.

He sat there beside me talking on phone, and me still hearing his side of the conversation. He still objected to the purchase in vain but with a teasing smile on his lips. The smile was what had got me curious. The call went for a couple of minute more and then he ended the call saying they will discuss it when he reaches home. He put the mobile in his top left shirt pocket. He sensed my stare and explained,

“I knew she wanted to buy a sari for her niece. Thats precisely why I had kept that money in the drawer. But she doesn’t know that yet. She thinks the money was for something more urgent. So is afraid I might scold her. Quite a dumb one she is. But their stupidity and naivety is what makes them so very lovely no?” he had said all of this looking out of the window at the traffic turned to look at me at the very end.

“I wouldn’t know what makes women lovely Anna (big brother). They are all very strange and confusing to me.”

“How old are you?”

“Old enough.”

“The young.”, he chuckled, “When you are young you want to be older, when you get older all you wish to be is younger. My wife spends hours in front of the mirror when we have to go somewhere trying to look younger than she is. I don’t really think she needs to though. She is still as beautiful as she ever was. Do you want to see her?”

He did not wait for an answer. Before I could say something he put his hand in the same left shirt pocket and removed a small book and from it a photo turned yellow with age, its edges tattered and dog eared around the corners by long use. It looked ages old.. He was handling it with utmost care like it was something very dear to him, something priceless, which it obviously was.

“I like to keep her close to my heart.”

The photo was of a very young girl still in her late teens. She was wearing an old fashioned two piece sari. Her hair stark black and long, reached till her knees. The smile on her face, mysterious, shy but still warm and welcoming. I thought she was a very pretty girl and I told him so.

“I knew you would say that. Everyone said so in my village. This was the only time I had seen her, before we got married you see. She was from a neighboring village, I had never met her only seen this photo when my parents arranged the alliance. Fell in love with her by just seeing it.”

I was a bit taken by surprise. My parents never talk of such stuff. They were also an old version of Romeo & Juliet and also had an arranged marriage. But they never talk of love and stuff. They are way too nervous and shy when it comes to things like this.

“You fell in love with a girl in a picture? It might have been just a crush. You agreed to marriage with just that?”

“Crush. Infatuation. Flings. You all have way too many new words for love. New definitions too. Maybe thats what that causes so much confusion for you kids these days. But in our time, we had just one. The lifelong kind. Back then love came naturally, you didn't have to plan for it. And thats what it should be like. When you are in love you shouldn’t be thinking about whether it is a crush or a fling, or whatever is the new word that you guys come up with. It is what it is. It will be what it will be. You can’t change what’s supposed to happen. But at least you can enjoy what is happening. People don’t enjoy love these days. They judge it. By judging it and you strip it of its innocence, its beauty. Thats your sin.”

“But love always seems to hurt people. Break families apart, break people hearts.”

“Oh, it is not love that hurts people. Its the people who hurt people. They cause the heart break themselves. Don’t blame love for it. It doesn’t break families. If at all anything, it brings families together. It creates new families, new affections, new bonds.”

“But you were fighting with your wife right now. What kind of love is that then?”

"The simplest kind.” He said with a benign smile. Looking at my expression he smiled knowingly and said “Two people are truly in love.. Truly in love with each other, when even after a long tiresome fight they still find things in the other that they still love and adore no matter what. They still love the other person the way he or she is and accept his or her short comings, or even think they make them all the more endearing. Thats the simplest love. The best kind of love. It is also the rarest one. More rare to find these days than during my time.”

We both stayed silent for the rest of the way. Him gazing out of the window towards the passing streets, probably thinking about his wife waiting for him back home. And me, busy with my own thoughts. What he had said stayed inside my head. I kept repeating it in my mind all through the night. And I am still pondering over his view of it all. Maybe his definition of love was right. He had been married for 40 years. Obviously his definition of love had worked well for him. His dreamy gaze when he looked at the photo, the glow on his face when he talked about his wife was proof of it. He loved her so. They were soul mates. Made for each other. The perfect match. All those titles that people give for other people deeply in love. This couple was all of them, and much more. I was and am dazed at their love, this simple love. If it worked so well for this illiterate janitor from a remote village in South India, it should work for others too. Others who have been much luckier than he was, in other ways. Maybe many of us who still curse love for all the pain and heartbreak that we go through, got it wrong. Love is not to blame. May be we are the ones at fault here. Maybe this definition might also work for us too.

We might all have a lot of things that we might be proud of. Our job. Our car. Our home. Our stashed away monies. But none of that really matters in the end. What really matters is the love that we have in our lives. Thats really the only wealth that we have on this planet, the only one that really counts. In the end he beat us all to it, he is the wealthiest person I know. He had found his simplest love.

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