27.02.2024

She is one of my favourite friends in museums and art galleries. She is a special person. She has helped me a lot. She promised that she would tell me this famous love story from her culture because she is as interested in psychology, people and relationships as I am. And now I have heard it. And I will share it, just like she shared it with me. Originally, her grandmother shared it with her, alongside many other folk tales.

Once, a man asked the woman that he loved how much she loved him. She answered that she loved him like the morning breeze on the flowing meadows in the mountains. He was angered. He thought himself rejected. Did she have a love for him that was like the wind, nothing, meaningless? Was he no matter at all to her? When he loved her so much? He struck her down. He killed her. It was an act of revenge for the rejection that she had given him. It was an act against the failure of reciprocity: she could not love him like he loved her. He had become ego: he thought that only he could love, that she was heartless, that only his love was important.

It happened after this – who knows how long after? – that he went up into the hills in the flowing meadows. The sun beat down on him. It punctured his skin, it vanquished his eyes, his whole body hurt from the heat. But then, like the kiss of a loving mother, the morning breeze washed over his body in a balmy embrace. And then, the tears sprung into his eyes. This. This is how she had loved him. This was the love that he could not understand. Her love for him was the love of solace, cure, repair, protection, shelter, caress, survival, everything that was needed, everything that was wanted. Her love for him was her life entire. There could be no love greater.

The ego of love was vanquished. What was his love for her compared to her love for him? Her who he had struck down and killed was the true lover. It was him that could not love in the right way. He had been a monster of delusion and insecurity. He had thought the wind had no weight, no form, no appearance, no reality. In fact, the wind was everything. It was the heart’s and the body’s greatest desires. His disbelief in the love was like the disbelief of the invisible God in the old days: he had been seduced by the devil and become an infidel, doomed to hell.

The man’s egotistical interpretation and its form of closure was a form of violence, a murder of the other. Of love and the lover.

When I was a child, my grandfather would tell me stories like these. Not about love. It was not the story of a grandmother to a beloved granddaughter. Tales of folk wisdom. From our culture. From cultures around the world. And then, when we had finished listening, he would ask us to tell him the moral to be found in each treasure. When we had interpreted the story, he would tell us the morals that were in it.

I watched my beautiful friend speaking, imagining her as a child listening to the woman that she loved so much, the storyteller. I loved my grandfather most for his stories, for teaching me. And when she finished, and I was still looking at her, we talked about what the story meant for us.

My initial thoughts were that the story was about the different languages of love that women and men speak. As someone who has had troubles himself, it seems that there are two different styles of expressing love. Some people – I am not saying they are exclusively women – express love in a veiled or concealed manner. They cannot say what they feel out loud in direct language. They think that would be too coarse, that it would expose their inner self too much. These people are scared. They are scared of love. These people – like the woman in the story – believe that their lover should be able to read their minds, know exactly what they are talking about and saying, feeling in their inner core. They imagine their lovers as the most gifted of communicators, as people able to interpret their every gesture, every tone in their voice. They forget about ambiguity which is structural to language, mistakes which are endemic, difficulties, lack of comprehension stemming from culture, background and socialisation, the gendering of people in every manner. These people feel that their lover is an extension of themselves and that communication doesn’t have to travel across a distance and a medium. For these people, the lover is an unquestionable expert in them: someone who cannot ever be wrong.

The man is like me. He wants a clear, unambiguous declaration of love that he can understand because he has difficulty understanding women. He hasn’t experienced the same world as women – the flowing meadows in the mountains and the wind there. He is not scared. He never fears. He is a man of violence, a fighter – he comes from the culture of fighters who act first and then think afterwards. That is why he speaks bluntly. He does not allude to things, he does not compare. He wants simplicity. And he does not understand people that are scared of their own love. He does not think it is coarse to share your feelings. They are what you are. They are what you experience. They are the way that you see other people and the world.

Then, while I write now, I see the story to be about the egotism of the man’s love. He cannot understand that the woman loves him in a different kind of way – the superior kind of way – and expresses this in a different kind of way. He feels he is not important to her because of this. He is insecure. He is wrong because ego has taken over. He is insecure because ego has taken over. How could he ask her how much she loved him in the first place? It is not a contest. He does not accept the love that she gives him by being with him. He has to question. Then, he makes it into a contest. For her, love truly is everything. She cannot say it out loud. It is a realisation that he has to come to later on in his life, in the solitude of the mountains, when he is close to heaven and the angels. For him, love is not everything. Because how can you lay a hand on the one that you love like that? How can you kill her? Even if she does not love you, that is her choice. Even if she loves you and for some reason, she cannot do anything about it, that is her choice. The man cannot respect a woman’s choice. He does not have respect for women. He does not understand women. When someone doesn’t love you and doesn’t return your feelings, you can’t kill your own love for them. No matter how hard you try. But that is what he tried to do by killing her – he tried to kill his own love for her.

And finally, the moral of the story is what love means to the lover. It is what only the lover understands. Love is everything. Love is the protection against this hard world and the suffering within it. Love is the greatest comfort that you can experience. Whatever happens in life, I have been protected by the love of my mother. No matter how difficult things have gotten in life or the serious problems. Other people have money to protect them. Or their race or status or class. What we have had to protect us is love. In this one area, we are the powerful. Because the love of an Indian mother from the village is the breeze in the mountains in the morning. It is the love that the Indian man looks for in a woman romantically. So he looks for kindness, comfort, release from suffering, release from the brutality and arbitrary despotism of this world and its weathers. The happiness of comfort. And the man in the story killed the one that gave him all that. It is a story about ingratitude, the privilege and complacency of the men that get that kind of love and can’t appreciate it, the men who have no value for how lucky they have been, how destiny has embraced them. The selfishness of their love, the smallness of their hearts and their minds. And also – the reality that, nonetheless, the women will be with them anyway and give them the most precious thing in the universe – their hearts and the comfort that comes with it.