A remarkable true saga of love

As the world celebrates Valentine’s Day with great fervor every year, spins fantasy tales on immortal love and comes up with new and innovative ways to showcase popular love sagas like Romeo and Juliet, one remarkable real life love story has been unfolding in a remote hamlet in Kerala for the past 60 plus years. The world outside the hamlet didn’t know about it till someone heard and went to find the truth. Today, the same man has shot a documentary about it and made a magnum opus blockbuster movie that is enthralling the people from Kerala across the world. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennu_Ninte_Moideen)

Unsurprisingly, the common thread this story shares with all the other love tales is, this one is also tragic but in a very unique way. It has all the ingredients of classic forbidden love. It’s the 1950s, Muslim boy, Hindu girl, both from rich and well respected families known to each other. Friendship from childhood turns into something more as adolescence blossoms. The families get wind of the blooming romance and the girl’s family snaps its wings. She is put under imprisonment in her house for 25 long years. They keep communicating through secret letters smuggled in and out of her house. At the age of 44, he tragically drowns in the local river when he was trying to save people from a capsized boat. She lives on in his memory, saved by his mother’s words from suicide and dedicating her life to charity. Without writing more about it, here is the link to the documentary with English subtitles. It is truly heartbreaking. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFQm8nBvY2c)

There is something very important to learn from this story. Before we talk about love, we need to know how love can endure and stand the test of time. Their friendship started during childhood, when they had no expectations from each other. When such a relationship grows, there is no physical desire. They simply accepted each other as they are. But the key was to understand each other’s feelings and the need for togetherness and companionship they had for each other. Consummating their love by getting married and having kids was not paramount. If that was the case, one of the two would have had surely lost patience with time and slipped out of the relationship. Most importantly, they chose to be good friends and companions to each other. This is why their love has endured, because it was free of expectations and desires. I can vouch for this. Even though my feelings were never understood, they still live on inside me. Most people who claim to be in love are in illusion because their love is loaded with expectations. That is why we speak mostly about divorces, separations and breakups and couples still together after many years are looked at with curiosity. When more people believe in the 7 year itch theory, this is not the world for true love anymore.

Well, they say if we truly desire something, the entire Universe will come together to fulfill it for us. Then why were these two kept separated all their lives? It is really hard to fathom. Love is an extremely complex emotion. Maybe our souls do know true love but the constraint the society enforces on us suppresses most of our natural abilities and true desires. That is probably why true love is far and few because most people do not understand true love when they see it and maybe why all those love stories end in tragedy. Our bodies are just physical vehicles for our souls to learn and evolve. Science says everything in the Universe is a manifestation of the vibration of the sub atomic particles. If this is true, then true love has to bring two souls into synchronicity. Then I need not despair about the lonely love bird in the hamlet. Her soul is just waiting for time to take her to be with his soul. I am yet to watch the movie but this is one I will not miss.