Love in the time of cholera

I decided to finally read, from the first page to the last, Gabriel Marquez’s “Love in the time of cholera”, as a novel way to inaugurate my new Kindle. It was an exhilarating experience to say the least for a few vital reasons. One; this was the first time I have ever completed reading a novel using a hand held device. Two; this was the first novel I had read by Marquez after reading the first few chapters of “One hundred years of solitude” a few years ago (something I intend to remedy soon). And three; had I read this book a few years ago as an unmarried man my thoughts about the characters and their decisions would perhaps have been radically different. What I also realized was that I would definitely like to re-read this book in another ten maybe twenty years to see if the journey of marital accomplishments would have given me enough fuel to rethink my beliefs about the basic idea this book seems to project.

So: what is it all about? The central theme of the book is the story of two stories – one of Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his wife Fermina Daza and the second of Fermina Daza and a man who calls her the love of his life Florentino Ariza. On the outset it appears to be a love triangle that has been done ad nauseum in Bollywood but once my knees got wet with the word pool emerging from the pages some interesting perspectives began to surface along with them.

The concept of love is often tied to relationships. The ones defined by society, the ones of marriage and the ones we are so often told are “just the right way to go”. But in these opposing stories, with Fermina being the common entity, love’s landscapes seem to go beyond mere definitions. On the one hand there is the unplanned and unrequited love that Florentino finds in Fermina as a teenager. That whole phase of their initial wandering as fresh seekers of love’s eternal potion seems to set up a premise that only marriage would be the ideal end for. But when Fermina, in true masala movie style, is married off to the sophisticated Europe-returned Dr. Urbino it appears her phase with Florentino was “a phase” after all. A harmless little adventure in finding physical union by masking it with the garb of “true love”. But as the married couple begin their fifty year journey together love’s meaning is once again re-defined. From being absolute strangers they manage to strike a relationship, through the caged limits of a marital union, which brings a sort of stability to the concept of love. A sort of evident closure to whatever it was Fermina experienced earlier.

The orthodox part of me felt this was the right way to go. Yes – Fermina needed to understand true love not by the vagaries of a nobody but by the stable hand of an educated, well established man who could bring to her much needed perspective to what real love is all about. In parallel, Florentino’s unending physical exploits in his mad panic of having lost Fermina and using those adventures as a sort of pain killer to his aching heart seemed ludicrous. How on earth could a man who was so easy to be lead into the carnal world of infidelity be faithful to Fermina even if he had ended up with her? But this is where my dilemma as to who I was supporting started to get muddled.

We see Florentino go through one physical heist after another but never once either a) sharing his sorry tale of grief with anyone or b) truly surrendering his heart to any of his liaisons. But as a man brought up by the popular norms of what is ethical and what isn’t I found myself despising Florentino for, without even having touched Fermina, being so monstrously unfaithful to her. But as the story progressed I began to see just how tormented, lonely and pitiful Florentino became as his thoughts, regardless of where he was and what he was doing, eventually found their way back to Fermina. Even after fifty long years, in his twilight age, Florentino still had shivers in his spine when he finally did find Fermina in his radius of existence.

My sympathies to Dr. Urbino (despite his questionable morals eventually) stayed the same through his struggles as a husband, a son and the man of the world. He represented to me a world where everything is pre-planned. A land where every event has a pre and post condition. An institution where even love has a certain rhythm no one can venture to adjust.

But my repulsion towards Florentino, the opposing viewpoint in the concept of love, began to decrease. But why? Once my fury for his predictable behavior of using women as pawns to rid himself of self-inflicted pain grew low I began to admire his consistent need to be in and around Fermina’s life. She was no mere conquest for him – no. She was the one he had given his heart to. Both Dr.Urbino and Florentino were strangers to Fermina when she found them but despite being practically away from her for most of his lifetime, it appeared he knew Fermina better than the good doctor who had stayed with her all the time.

In my days as an unattached man I had often wondered about the various manifestations of love. The way relationships are made and broken based on the changing (and admittedly often misused) definitions of love. And at that time had I read this book then I would have, purely from the viewpoint of someone who thought he knew what was morally right, supported Dr. Urbino without a shadow of doubt. But now, having taken a few steps in the shoes of a husband, I found myself wanting to examine Florentino’s point of view more than the doctor’s. What was his motivation in waiting half a century for just one word of acknowledgement from his love? What made him pretty much throw his life away in mostly meaningless exploits of the flesh? When seen from his eyes the story elevates itself from being a black and white categorization of ethical and unethical and goes into a region I am still not completely familiar with. To tie one’s inner identity with another person to such an extent as to lose sight of everything else and, with age, not letting that lamp of hope to diminish even a bit…yes, love perhaps is that. Something that doesn’t require the square and circle of marriage to stand within. Something that doesn’t need a complimentary force to fulfill itself into reality. Something so independent and random that finding a pattern in it would be just as hard as to stem the rabid cholera outbreak the doctor strives to conquer.

A million songs have been sung in our country that compare love to an incurable disease. This book gave me a first-hand insight into the days of a man who chooses to live with it, grows along with it and finds salvation in his own unmaking. It challenged me to question my belief system on what I thought about love as an emotion. It provoked me to explore absolutely outrageous scenarios by contradicting, in several places, my decisions had I been either the doctor or Florentino. And just for these reasons, I do hope I get to read this book again in a decade or two to check if I am still left with more questions or if I have found answers to a few of them.

..ShaKri..

The seventh steed of the sun

e, in Denmark, began daylight saving today – March 28, 2010. What this basically means is that our clocks will now be set to an hour ahead. Why is this done? Essentially to get more out of the sunlight what with spring almost here. Once the days start getting darker and sunlight begins to shrink, somewhere in October that is, then we will stop the saving and switch our clocks back an hour again. Yes – to those of us who do not live in places that require this, the entire exercise may seem quite futile. But nevertheless, here we are, supervising the timetable for the sun and his seven horses.

It is curious how this day coincided with my viewing of Shyam Benegal's 'Suraj ka saatwa ghoda' (The seventh steed of the sun) last night. Based on a Hindi novella by the same name by Dr. Dharamvir Bharti, the movie starts with Raghuvir Yadav introducing us to a few afternoons from his life where he knew a man called Manek Mulla (Rajit Kapur in his debut venture). Manek, we are told, was a master story-teller. A man who could blur out the distinct lines between reality and fiction purely by his talent at peppering his tales with metaphors aplenty. Working with the railways department, Manek had acquired the knack of keeping the three young men (of which Yadav is one too) occupied during lazy afternoons with his tales of love, deception, social imbalance and immorality within the lower middle classes of India.

So, with this premise, a question is thrown – 'Should love stories be built at being relevant to the socio-economic growth of a society?' A bizarre, albeit thought-provoking, reference is made to the literary importance of 'Devdas' where, Manek says, there is no room for any sort of social relevance or optimism towards love as a public emotion. A definition, he claims, is what makes love so wonderful. Its lack of being a private, mysterious and almost forbidden concoction. So, in an effort to tell a tale of love lost connected with the complex fabric of social strata, he starts speaking of Jamuna. He speaks of how he was in school back then and Jamuna, the attractive next door girl, was in love with Tanna, another neighborhood fellow. Jamuna's and Tanna's love story was dated given the venomous relationships the two families shared due to lack of consistency in the Indian economic balance. As a result of this, Tanna is married off to a more educated Lily and Jamuna ends up with an old man knocking on the door of his grave.

As you might have realized, there is nothing new or refreshing with this piece. What starts making this short story more interesting, is the way Manek describes his role in it and carefully begins to uncurl the tiny strands that were knotted during the narration of the aforementioned tale. For instance, the fact that Jamuna is unable to conceive from her old-man husband and so chooses to go on a bizarre religiously aligned but emotionally maligned detour with the tonga-wallah is brought to surface. Also, the fact that the girl Tanna ends up with – Lily – actually was Manek's love/friendship interest and how a mutual separation was finalized in both their interests is unearthed. Connected to this colorful mix as well, is the story of Tanna's lusty father (Amrish Puri in a truly memorable role as Mahesar Dalal) and his wile desires towards the lowly gypsy-woman Satti (Neena Gupta) who befriends Manek purely for his intellectual skills. Her eventual fate against an adamant Mahesar Dalal and the decisions young Manek makes form the twisting portions of the climactic sequences. All of these is documented from various angles aimed at the same scene. So, it isn't so much that Manek is narrating different short stories but essentially narrating just one story but from the perspectives of various characters in them. In some of them, the characters seem like the victims, while when seen from the view of another person's tale, the same character in the same scene will suddenly appear to have acquired some gray shades. Shades one would see in a predator. Truly – if a movie can accomplish this level of intellectual worth, then it has certainly defined itself as the best example of meaningful cinema.

What makes this movie greater in its worth is the fact that such a unique feat was written by Dr. Bharti in the 70s and narrated by Benegal in early 90s! Today we sit in awe at the intermingling of multiple stories in Hollywood and, of course, in their remade versions within Bollywood, and applaud them as being 'masterpieces'. But to compare this work to any of these would be nothing short of a huge disservice. In fact, I would call 'Suraj ka...' a work of meta fiction which successfully attempts to expose the fictional aspect of the illusive world woven by Manek Mulla.

I also read some reviews that compared Manek's character to that of the holy trinity in Hindu mythology – Brahma, Vishnu and Maheshwar – and as to how he slips into these roles, albeit with varying degrees of subtlety. In the first tale with Jamuna, Manek is Brahma, the creator of a relationship that he knew was meant to be doomed. In the second tale with Lily, he became Vishnu, the preserver of her sanctity and an upholder of a more mature and practical relationship. In the final tale with Satti, he turned into the destroyer – Maheshwar – who ended up putting an end to what could have possibly been the redeeming factor of his life. I suppose it is in spectacular interpretations like these, that 'Suraj ka...' stands out as a truly unique piece of work.

So, as I sit here looking out the window, watching the sun rise to his zenith, I cannot help think of that seventh steed in his collection. That one horse, the slowest and the weakest of them all, who decides the fate of the day. Could it be why daylight saving times even exist? Is it that seventh horse who is making all of us wind our clocks back and forth so that we can amply cater to his variant of a speed? I know, a pretty outrageous interpretation this. But undeniably misleading enough to ignite a thought. Something, I am sure, Manek, a lover of literary giants like Flaubert and Chekov, would probably agree with whilst keeping you guessing about his real stance in the affair.