I Will Love You as the Sunflower Loves the Sun
I will love you as the sunflower loves the sun. I will long for you like a raindrop for the sea. I will reach for you like the tides for the moon. I will love you, silently, mourningly. I will love you when I wake up, I will love you when I go to sleep and I will love you every moment in between. I will love you till it consumes me, baptises me, chews me up and spits me out. If I am a husk of everything I used to be I will still love you.
I will love you as the sunflower loves the sun.
Not the pretty kind of love , - not the kind they paint on cards and sell in markets. The real kind. The kind where the sunflower does not choose to turn. It simply does. It has no say in the matter. The sun rises and the flower moves, helplessly, completely, as though its entire existence was architected for this one act of devotion. That is what you are to me already , - and I have not even found you yet.
I will love you the way Layla lived inside Majnun , - not as a memory, not as a wound, but as a religion. Majnun did not merely love Layla. He became love itself. He wandered the desert barefoot, writing her name in the sand with trembling fingers, pressing his lips to the dust she once walked on, composing her into the wind so that every traveller who passed through the desert carried a piece of her without knowing it. The world called him mad. He called it the only sanity he had ever known. I understand him now , - this man I once pitied from a distance, I now envy completely. To love that catastrophically, that without remainder , - what a terrible, magnificent, irreversible thing.
তুমি আমার লায়লা, আমি তোমার মজনু হতে রাজি।(You are my Layla, I am willing to be your Majnun.)
And like Rumi, who loved Shams-e-Tabrizi so completely that when Shams disappeared, Rumi did not grieve , - he wrote. He poured the missing into the Masnavi, into the Divan, into every spinning circle of the dervish. He said , - "I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I have been knocking from the inside." That is where I live. On the lip of insanity. Knocking on a door that has your face on the other side. And the door is already open , - I simply have not walked through yet.
Bulleh Shah sang , - "Ranjha Ranjha kardi ni main, aape Ranjha hoyi." Calling Ranjha's name so long, so devotedly, that Heer became Ranjha. That is what love at its deepest does , - it dissolves the boundary between the lover and the beloved until you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. I am already becoming you, yaar. In my wanting, in my waiting, in every better thing I am trying to be , - I am being shaped by the outline of someone I haven't touched.
I will love you the way Radha loved Krishna , - not with the safe, sanctioned love of rituals and arrangements, but with the love that aches in the marrow. Radha loved Krishna knowing he belonged to the whole universe. Knowing the flute would always call him to distant places she could not follow. Knowing she could not keep him the way you keep a thing , - cupped in your hands, guarded. She loved him in the missing. She loved him standing by the Yamuna at dusk, watching the water go dark, composing his name in her breath like a prayer with no specific address. She loved him so completely that the universe refused to separate their names , - Radhe-Krishna, Radhe-Krishna , - as though saying one without the other was a kind of violence.
That is what I want. I want our names to belong together the way theirs do. I want the world to feel incomplete saying mine without yours following softly after.
রাধার মতো অপেক্ষা করব, কৃষ্ণের বাঁশির মতো তুমি আমাকে ডাকবে।
(I will wait like Radha, and like Krishna's flute, you will call me.)
And Savitri , - God, Savitri. Who followed Death itself to the edge of existence. Who argued with Yama not with weapons or cleverness but with devotion so absolute, so immovable, that Death had no answer for it. Love as the only logic that outlasts every other logic. Love as the force that makes even the inevitable negotiate. I am not half the lover Savitri was. But I am learning. Every quiet day of becoming better, every morning I choose patience over despair , - I am learning.
But it is Rabindranath who understood it most , - this particular Bengali ache, this birahh, this longing that is almost its own form of pleasure because it means the love is real.
In Shesher Kobita, Amit looked at Labanya and wrote her poetry that was too honest for comfort , - love so articulate it became dangerous. He said what most men spend their whole lives swallowing. I want to be that honest. I want to love you with my whole vocabulary, not just the safe words, not just the manageable ones , - but all of it, the embarrassing depth of it, the parts that make me sound like a fool and a poet at the same time.
"আমার সোনার বাংলা, আমি তোমায় ভালোবাসি" , - Tagore wrote this for a land, but I understand the feeling. To love something so deeply it becomes indistinguishable from your own breathing. That is how I will love you. Not as something outside me that I admire from a distance. As something that becomes part of the air I need.
In Nastanirh, Charulata sat by the window watching the world outside while the world she truly wanted passed her by unaware , - loving in silence, loving in the margins, loving in every small unnoticed gesture. There is a particular tragedy to that love and yet , - she felt it fully. She did not halve it to make it safer. I think of Charulata often. I think , - I will not be the one who passes by unaware. When I find you, I will see you. Not the version of you that is easy to look at , - all of you. The edges. The contradictions. The 3 AM version and the crowded-room version and the version that is tired and unglamorous and completely, heartbreakingly real.
তোমাকে দেখব , - শুধু দেখব না, চিনব।(I will see you , not just look, but truly know you.)
And from Tagore's Gitanjali , - "You have made me endless, such is your pleasure." That is what love does, doesn't it. It makes you feel, for the first time, that you contain something infinite. That your chest is larger than your body. That you are capable of more tenderness than you ever gave yourself credit for. You have not yet arrived and already you are making me endless.
Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay knew something Tagore expressed in poetry , - he expressed it in flesh and consequence. Devdas loved Paro with the kind of love that had no survival strategy. Pure, reckless, gloriously stupid. But it was Paro who loved better , - quietly, permanently, even after the world buried her love under a married name and a different life. She carried it anyway. Like a river that has been dammed , - it does not stop being a river. It simply finds another way to move.
I want to love like Paro, not Devdas. With the stillness of it. With the permanence. Not drowning in whiskey and self-destruction but carrying it , - upright, forward, making something of myself because of this love, not in spite of it.
And Shrikanta , - who loved Rajlakshmi across lifetimes of separation and reunion, who kept finding her in different circumstances, different disguises of fate, and kept loving her each time without needing an explanation for why. That is the love I believe in. The kind that does not require conditions. The kind that recognizes something in the other person that predates memory.
নদী জানে শুধু বইতে, আমি জানি শুধু ভালোবাসতে।(The river knows only to flow, I know only to love.)
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay gave us Kapālkundala , - a woman raised by the wild, by forests and tides, who loved with a love that had never been domesticated by society's expectations. Raw. Elemental. Honest to the point of being almost terrifying. I want to love you with that honesty. Without the performance of it. Without the careful management of how much I reveal. I want to love you the way the forest loves the rain , - entirely, without holding back a single leaf.
And in Bishabriksha, the tragedy of Nagendranath , - who loved and lost and was destroyed not by hatred but by the unbearable tenderness of what remained. Love that outlasts its circumstances. Love that has nowhere left to go and so simply stays, settles into the bones, becomes part of the architecture of a person. I will be that architecture. I am already that architecture.
I do not know your name yet. I do not know if you fold your hands in a mandir at dawn or lift them in dua before sleeping. I do not know if you are both, or neither, or something this world has not yet found adequate language for. I do not know if you take your chai sweet or if you make a face at sweetness. I do not know the specific way you laugh , - whether it escapes before you can stop it or whether you try to hold it in and fail.
But I will learn. God, I will learn every syllable of you.
তুমি আসোনি এখনো, তবু তোমার জন্য বুকের ভেতর একটা জায়গা রেখেছি।(You have not come yet, and still I have kept a place for you inside my chest.)
I will love you when the shiuli flowers fall in the October morning, white and orange on the wet ground, and the whole city smells like the beginning of something. I will love you when the kash phool sways silver in the autumn fields and the sky turns that particular shade of blue that has no name but makes your chest ache for no reason you can explain. I will love you in the monsoon when Bengal drowns beautifully and everything smells of wet earth and the Hooghly swells with something that feels like feeling.
I will love you drunk on the rooftop with Kolkata humming below me , - the trams and the chaos and the adda and the poetry all bleeding into each other. I will love you sober at 4 AM when the city finally goes quiet and I am alone with my pen and too much feeling and nowhere adequate to put it. I will love you in every unfinished sentence, every poem I began and could not end because no ending felt worthy.
I will love you the way the monsoon loves Bengal , - without apology, without restraint. Making everything it touches smell like beginning.
My life is already your temple, constructed in your absence, decorated with all the becoming I have done while waiting. My longing is my ibadat , - my worship, my daily practice. My grief for a love not yet arrived is my sadhana , - my discipline, my penance, my proof that I am serious. Every scar I carry from the years before you, every sober dawn, every night I chose to keep going when giving up felt elegant , - all of it is my bhog, my offering, laid at your feet before you even knew to arrive and receive it.
I will be your Amit and your Devdas and your Shrikanta and your Majnun , - but I will be better than all of them. I will love you without the self-destruction. I will love you without the running away. I will love you standing still, standing upright, standing here , - present, whole, entirely and terrifyingly yours.
তুমি আসবে। আমি জানি তুমি আসবে।
(You will come. I know you will come.)
Because the sunflower does not doubt the sun. It does not lie awake wondering whether the sun will bother to rise. It simply turns, and waits, and turns , - in total, irrational, magnificent faith.
The fire knows only to feed. The wind knows only to blow. Majnun knows only to wander toward Layla. Radha knows only to wait by the river with her anklets still. Paro knows only to carry what she was given. Charulata knows only to sit by the window and feel everything. The sunflower knows only to turn toward the light.
And I , -
আমি জানি শুধু তোমাকে ভালোবাসতে।
(I know only to love you.)
I will shout it into the Hooghly and let the current carry it wherever you are. I will breathe it into the evening air when the bel phool blooms and the whole neighbourhood smells like something holy. I will press it into the red soil of this land so that every road you have ever walked on already carries something of what I feel.
And when you arrive , - when the universe, in its infinite and unhurried and slightly theatrical wisdom, finally places you before me , - I will not have a single word left. All these letters, all this preparation, all these years of composing you in my imagination , - and I will stand there like an absolute fool with my heart sitting visibly in my hands, embarrassingly exposed.
But you will know.
The way the sun knows the sunflower has been turning toward it all morning. The way Krishna knew Radha was by the river before he even arrived. The way Layla knew, somewhere in the desert wind, that a man was writing her name in the sand. The way Labanya recognized something in Amit's eyes before he'd spoken a single clever word.
You will know.Forever. Only you. Only ever for you.