سرائیکی ڈیجیٹل لائبریری

Two lines about love, one from a Siraiki kafi and one from a German letter, have been sitting side by side in my mind. The first is from Khwaja Ghulam Farid.

نازک چالیاں من موھن دیاں

حُکمیں برہوں بچھاؤندیاں

Delicate are the moves of Man Mohan, spreading separation by design.

The kafis are not dated, but this one belongs by its subject to Farid’s last years, when a poet formed in the Sufi tradition of Wahdat ul Wujud was reaching for the Indic stories around him. Farid died in 1901.

In that same year Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a friend who was about to marry. He said he held one thing to be the highest task of a bond between two people, that each protects the solitude of the other. Three years later he found the sentence that has been quoted ever since. Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.

Both poets say that love needs distance, and that the distance is nobody’s whim. It comes with love. Both also give the lover something to do about it. Rilke’s lover has to keep the distance. Farid’s lover has to understand it. That difference is what I want to think about here.

Man Mohan is Krishna, the enchanter of hearts, and Farid’s line remembers a story from the tenth book of the Bhagavata Purana. On an autumn night Krishna played his flute on the banks of the Yamuna and the gopis, the cowherd women of Vrindavan, came to him. He multiplied himself so that each woman danced with her own Krishna, and each believed he was hers alone. Pride entered them. They began to feel that he belonged to them. He vanished. The gopis wandered the forest all night calling for him, and only when the pride had gone out of them did he come back.

Farid’s word for what happened that night is birhoo, separation, and in his Diwan birhoo is never simply something a beloved does. Elsewhere he addresses himself about it as a power to be reckoned with. Samajh Farid, birhoon bahoon sarzor. Understand, Farid, separation is very strong. So the design in the couplet need not be Krishna’s own. His moves are delicate because they are under birhoo’s command. Even he vanishes when love requires it.

The gopis did not know this. They thought love could be held, and when the holding failed they took the separation for abandonment. In the forest they learned that birhoo belongs to love, and his return is the moment the understanding arrives. Samajh, the word Farid uses to himself, is what they were missing when the night began.

Another couplet of Farid’s describes their night more exactly than the Bhagavata does.

برہوں بَھنوالی اُلٹی چالی

سُکھ ٻوڑے ݙکھ تارے

Separation is a whirlpool that runs backwards. It drowns ease and floats pain.

In an ordinary whirlpool the heavy thing sinks and the light thing floats. In this one the weights are reversed. And the verb for floating, tarey, is also the word for crossing over, for being carried to the far bank. Separation drowns your ease and ferries your pain across. The gopis’ comfort, the sense of having him, went under, and their grief was what carried them through the night to his return.

Rilke had watched young people rush at love, wanting to merge and to make the other their own, and he thought it ruined both of them, the one who gave everything and the one who received it. His remedy was distance. Each person should remain a whole self, and the two should meet along the edge where the selves touch. His three verbs say how. To protect is to keep the other’s solitude from being invaded, one’s own included. To border is to come right up to the edge of another person and stop there. To greet is what two people do who meet across a distance and recognise each other. There is no verb for merging.

So far the two poets are together. Possession is what ruins love, distance is what preserves it, and the lover has a part to play rather than a fate to suffer. They separate over what the part is.

For Rilke the work is protection. Two equals guard each other’s solitude, and the guarding is done in advance, so that neither self is lost. It is the discipline of people who had each become someone before they met. Nobody has to vanish, because the knowledge that the other cannot be held is built into the love from the beginning.

For Farid the work is understanding. The distance comes whether the lover consents or not, because birhoo is stronger than she is. Her task is to grasp it from inside the loss, so that the loss becomes part of the love instead of ending it. The lover who has understood this is not drowned by the beloved. The one who has not is still out in the forest, calling.

Rilke wrote that those who really love find that the more they give, the more they possess. It is a reversal of ordinary arithmetic, in which giving leaves you with less. Farid’s whirlpool is a reversal of ordinary physics, in which ease floats and pain sinks. Both are describing a place where the usual laws run backwards. Both call it love. The gopis lived through both reversals in one night. Those who claimed Krishna lost him. Those who wept in the forest, having given up every claim and with nothing left to keep them afloat but grief, were carried across, and found him standing among them again.