سرائیکی ڈیجیٹل لائبریری

I

I begin with a small sentence: I love her. The grammarians call this verb transitive. It takes an object. The action, they say, passes from the lover to the beloved. But sit with the sentence a while and the passing dissolves. The beloved receives nothing. The beloved may not even know that the sentence has been spoken. The grammar promises a giving; the heart that merely feels gives nothing. To speak thus is only to report the feelings of the lover’s own heart.

Why is this so? Because love, spoken thus, is a state and not an act. A state has no hands. A stone that is heavy breaks nothing until it falls. So the question rose in me: where is the love that falls, that touches, that does?

II

The answer came when I turned the word. Not love but loving. Loving is not a condition one suffers; it is a work one performs, continues, can fail in, can perfect. The moment love becomes an activity, it becomes capable of causing. It acts upon its object. It produces.

این جهان و آن جهان زاید ابد

هر سبب مادر، اثر از وی ولد

چون اثر زایید آن هم شد سبب

تا بزاید او اثرهای عجب

(مولانا رومی، مثنوی)

This world and the other world, Roomy says, are forever giving birth. Every cause is a mother; the effect is the child born of her. And when the effect is born, it does not rest. It becomes a cause in its own turn, so that it may give birth to wondrous effects of its own.

The wise psychologist Erich Fromm saw this play of causes in love itself. Love is a standing in, he said, not a falling for. Its first expression is giving, and giving is never a loss. In giving, the lover brings something to life in the other. The receiver of love becomes a giver in turn. Love is a power which produces love. Is this not Roomy’s circle of birth and re-birth, turned toward tenderness?

Our own elders knew it without books.

رہیمن دھاگا پریم کا، مت تورو چٹکائے

ٹوٹے سے پھر نا جُرے، جُرے گانٹھ پڑ جائے

(رہیم)

Rahim calls love a thread. Do not snap it with a jerk, he says. Once broken, it does not join again; and if it joins, a knot is formed where the break was. Mark what this means. A thread is not a feeling that visits the breast. It is a thing held in the hand, tended from day to day. It can be let slack. It can be cut by a careless act. And the cut leaves a mark that no mending wholly removes. This is love as work, not as merely feeling or weather. Does not the modern talk of love fix its gaze only on the feeling i.e. attraction, mood, possession, and forget the hand that must hold the thread?

III

Yet I must be truthful. There is a grief in this teaching. The lover may give for years and produce nothing in the beloved. The beloved remains unmoved, and the circle appears broken. Was the labour then wasted? At first I was captured by this sad and melancholic thought. Then a harder truth shone to me. Loving is a sowing, and the sower does not command the harvest.

انسُوَن جل سِینچ سِینچ، پریم بیلِ بوئی

(میرا بائی)

With the water of tears, says Mira, the lover waters and sows the vine of love. The sowing belongs to the lover; the watering, season upon season, belongs to the lover. The verse claims no command over the harvest.

The act of loving guarantees its effect upon one person with certainty: the lover. The causation runs inward first. The beloved is free. Freedom is the very respect loving owes to the beloved. But the lover who works at love cannot remain unchanged. The lover is the first soil the verb tills.

And this tilling is not only suffering.

مثل سمندر آتش اندر

سو سو عیش لدھیوسے

(خواجہ غلام فرید)

Like the samandar, the fabled creature whose dwelling is fire, we have found a hundred upon hundred delights inside the burning. Mark that Farid does not summon the moth, which flies into the flame once and is finished. He summons the samandar, which lives there. The moth’s burning is an event; the samandar’s indwelling is a life. So too loving is not a single consummation but a continuing habitation, and the fire that appears to consume becomes, for the one who stays inside it, a strange and unparalleled pleasure.

So I offer this small talisman. Whenever you are in doubt whether you love, do not search your feelings. Ask instead: what has the loving caused in the growth of the beloved and in the becoming of the lover? If the answer is nothing, the love has only been only feeling or state. If something has been brought to life, however small, then the verb has finally done what it always promised and you will find your doubts melt away.