By Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar author of Love Comes Later
St. Valentine may be horrified by the cherubs touting candy,
flowers or jewelry. The overemphasis of eros, or romantic love, may have merged
out of rampant marketeering. Between Christmas and Easter, after all, is a lot
of retail silence. In modern society, with women marrying later, and partners
divorcing earlier – not waiting for children to grow up – does love still
exist?
I had a great idea in 2009; I would write a book about how a
modern person with traditional values would find love. I didn’t think this
would be so difficult. After all, I’d managed to resist the pressures of my own
South Asian culture until the spinsterly age of 26, when, as my father put it,
“to find a good man who would make a commitment to me” even if he wasn’t
Indian.
Fresh from an unlikely, whirlwind romance in the desert, I
sat down to explore in fiction the difficult choices facing young Qatari men
and women amongst the myriad dilemmas of love, choice, honor, and duty.
The Qatari characters were based on a meld of dozens of
stories I knew of real people; but the insertion of a South Asian girl into the
love triangle was all my own.
I put Abdulla, the male protagonist, and Sangita, the
unexpected loved interest, in a small London apartment. And waited for sparks
to fly. In a Disneyesque-romantic genre, move, they were on a countdown; three
days.
But nothing was happening. There they were; young, attractive, in close proximity, and I couldn’t believe that they were falling in love. All the elements were there but the emotions were missing.
I started asking everyone: “How do people fall in love?”
My older Indian friends were surprised.
“Didn’t you have a love marriage?” They asked me, products of
the arranged marriage system. “Don’t you know?”
“Seems so long ago,” I muttered, well out of earshot of my
husband.
“I loved your book,” another friend said. “I’ve never known
what love is…” she said, with a dreamy look in her, having been arranged to her
husband.
“It’s all the same after a while,” I said to her dryly,
watching our husbands on their mobile phones while we mothers ran after our
children.
“But how can they fall in love,” I asked my Qatari friends,
growing desperate for realism as the book entered a seemingly endless cycle of
revisions.
“She has to be hot,” one of my male beta readers said, in
all honesty.
Chemistry. Right. I forgot that part, somehow, settling into
comfortable domesticity.
Abdulla and Sangita did eventually find their way in the
story. The sequel to the book is in progress and explores an equally murky
area: what happens after the spark? Are the chances for survival of ‘falling
into’ love greater?
I grew up with the idea that no, falling in love did not
guarantee romantic success; making allegiances between well researched partners
was stacking the cards in your favor. My parents’ anti-falling in love argument
was the 50% divorce rate in America.
We’ll see what happens for Abdulla and Sangita as they try to grow their spark into a fire to heat their home.
What do you think? Do you fall in and out of love? Or do you
choose to love?
