Love, simplified.

A journey from the roads of Kashmir to the roads of love.

The wind brushing back my hair. Earphones plugged. An orange sky and ivory blue clouds to accompany me as I walked downhill in the valleys of Kashmir. A state and a state of war and love. Perhaps the only place where the two meet quite often. Not knowing much about war, the khushnama weather flooded with my re-verbed slow romantic music, got me thinking about love. The more I thought about it, the more I felt it. As the sky transitioned to pink, the wind purple, the noises and voices around me faded by the moment- I lifted and flowed like the water in the Dal lake as the Shikaras paddled through it. I increased the volume of my music realising I had been in love all this while. The feeling written about for as long as people could write, sung for as long as people could sing and thought about as long as people could think. But I was thinking, writing and singing not to a particular person. Rather about items, and feelings, and other materialistic things and living beings. All the music and scenery combined made me fall deeper in love with my past. My future. My family. Mothering my furry babies back home. Sushi. The cork I got from Cambridge as a promise to take it back one day. Or the wooden souvenir the old man gifted me once. My ability to write half-phased poetry. The chaos with which I think or talk or write or photograph. Or the feeling of my grand-parents’ hand on my head. Or the letters my parents write me on my birthday. My addiction for debating. The Ghats of Varanasi. Or the jungles dawned by Arrowhead in Ranthambhore. The nazakat with which Kashmiris speak. Or the moment I first went paragliding in Interlaken. The second I knew I was getting to keep my rescued cat for the rest of her life. Or when I exercise and eat healthy. With my ambition. Or with history and philosophy. The magic with which my body functions without a flaw. Or the butterflies I have around babies and animals and when I’m given a compliment. Or when I run to my therapeutic swing. The feeling of getting onto a midnight flight. Or a late-night car ride. Don’t we really complicate the notion of love and romanticise one person instead of the moments that have made us. Maybe the years of literature and music are all wrong. Or maybe they were right all along but we just didn’t open ourselves to interpretation that is the simplest. Maybe we indulge too much in our love for intricacies and reading too much in a thought that was meant to remain Sufiyana. I think it’s time to un-learn all that we think we know about love because it much more and much simpler than we are willing to admit. It’s only then that we will realise that we’ve felt this beautiful feeling from the second we took our first breath- falling in love with the mother’s and father’s warm hands which held us. And we will experience it till our last. Only then will we stop waiting for it- for the person. Because the sky has always been pink and the wind always purple.