A touch of romance

Valentine's Day is not about roses and chocolates; true romance means being thoughtful every day

Valentine’s Day is behind us and it is safe to come out from hiding without being bombarded by offers to buy roses, send chocolates, make dinner reservations, book a mini-break, or propose marriage to your significant other. It is has now become de rigueur to complain about the ‘commercialization’ of Valentine’s Day – and I do, in fact, complain about that – but what annoys me most about the V Day ad blitz is that I don’t really recognize the version of ‘romance’ that is being sold to us. Not only is it needlessly performative, it also doesn’t resemble anyone’s lived reality.

 

So, what, you ask, do I consider to be romantic? What would make the cut if I were looking for romance in a relationship (and who isn’t?). Well, here are just some gestures that epitomize ‘romance’ to me; and the best thing is that you don’t need to wait for Valentine’s Day to come around again to make these gestures for your better half.

 

·       There is nothing more romantic in my book than making a cup of coffee (or tea, or hell, even a martini) for your partner without being requested to do so. It could be first thing in the morning so that they wake up to the aroma of freshly roasted beans. It could be to greet them when they come home after a long day at work. But no matter what the time or occasion, there is nothing quite so lovely as having your partner do something thoughtful for you (and this is crucial) without being asked.

·       Spontaneous gestures of affection don’t get the importance that they deserve in most long-term relationships. Just stroking the back of your husband’s neck as he works in the study; stopping to drop a kiss on your wife’s head as she reads the morning newspapers; hugging your spouse goodbye and hello; every one of these gestures makes the recipient feel loved and cherished. Do them often enough and they will not just strengthen your bond but also deepen it in crucial ways.

·       Surprise your partner as often as you can. You can, of course, make the grand gesture and book a weekend getaway or even a music concert without letting him/her get wind of the fact. But even smaller surprises do the trick as long as you put some thought into them. Buy him croissants from his favourite bakery for Sunday breakfast. Gift her a subscription to a flower delivery service that will send fresh flowers every week. 

·       Most of us fall out of the habit of telling our partners we love them every day. But even if we don’t verbalize our love, there are plenty of ways in which we can express it in daily life without saying those three little words. Covering your partner with a blanket as she falls asleep on the couch watching TV. Giving him a shoulder rub as he finishes a long stint in front of the computer. Making his/her favourite food over the weekend, even if it needs hours and hours of prep. Or just holding his/her hand as you sit in the doctor’s reception waiting for that tiresome yearly check-up. All of these gestures spell romance more than a bouquet of red roses ever could.

 

Listen to the falling rain...

Yes, there is no sweeter sound than that of the Indian monsoon pouring down

As I sit down to write this, the skies have darkened outside and the rain is pelting down. There is something intrinsically hypnotic about its rhythmic cadence. And despite my best efforts to stay indifferent to its charms, the downpour draws me in.

I find myself staring at the raindrops like one mesmerised, tracking the progress of each fat droplet, watching as it splatters down on my window-sill. I watch fascinated as the areca palm on the balcony gets wiped clean of all its dust and grime, emerging from this cleansing looking greener than ever. And that evocative smell of petrichor – as the rain hits parched ground and releases the scent of the vegetable oils absorbed by it during the heat of summer – brings back memories of monsoons past.

As you can probably tell by now, I love the rain. I love its sounds, its smells, and its sights. And I love the fact that it comes around faithfully every year, bringing us respite from the dusty, dry heat of the Indian summer.

Even if you are a city-dweller who is no great fan of Nature, you cannot deny that there is something ineffably reassuring about the arrival of the monsoon. Its annual visit, at roughly the same time, give or take a week or two, tells us that the world is still spinning around nicely. It signals the end of summer and takes us through to the balmy nights of autumn. And no matter how sparse or bountiful the rain, it lifts our spirits, which have been wilting under the incessant, unrelenting heat of the sub-continent.

It’s no surprise, then, that nobody gets the romance of the rains quite like we do in India. Almost everywhere else in this sunshine-obsessed world, a rainy day is always a matter of some disappointment. Generations of British children have grown up on the nursery ditty, ‘Rain, rain, go away; Come again another day...’ In America, people aspire to retire to the sunshine states of California and Florida. And in the cold climes of Europe where warmth is always at a premium, the arrival of rain is not something that is ever celebrated.

Not so in India. In part, this is because of our peculiar climate conditions. Summers are hot, dry and punishing. And then, just when you think that you simply can’t take even one more day of that scorching heat, the monsoons come with their dark clouds, their thunder and lightning, their sharp showers, and their gift of lower temperatures. How can you not dance with joy at their arrival?

But that’s just part of the story. Far more important is the fact that there seems to be something unique in the Indian psyche that responds with blissful ardour to the sight of those grey, gleaming clouds that come bearing rain.

Our literature bears witness to that love. Probably the most famous Sanskrit poem ever, Kalidasa’s Meghaduta, is about a cloud. A Yaksha who has been exiled importunes a passing cloud to carry a message to his wife on Mount Kailash. He tries to convince the cloud to take on the task by describing the many beautiful sights it will witness on its way.

Ever since, clouds and the rains have been a recurring theme in our history, literature and legend. Emperor Akbar’s court musician, Miyan Tansen is widely credited with performing the Raga Megha Malhar to bring the rains down (he is also supposed to have sung Raga Deepak to make the candles light up spontaneously – but that, as they say, is yet another apocryphal story).

More recently, Hindi cinema has done its bit to shore up the tradition of ‘rain songs’, celebrating the arrival of the monsoons with an obligatory sequence of a curvaceous heroine in a sari getting soaked to the skin. But the most iconic scene ever remains that of Raj Kapoor and Nargis in Shree 420, nestling under one black umbrella in the pouring rain as they look deep into each other’s eyes and sing, ‘Pyar huwa, ikrar huwa hai; pyar se phir kyun darta hai dil’.

The rain gods were evoked to great effect by Dev Anand in Guide, with the S.D Burman number, ‘Allah megh de, paani de’ becoming something of a classic. And that same tortured longing for rain and the joy when it finally arrives was portrayed decades later in Aamir Khan’s Lagaan with the haunting A.R. Rahman score of ‘Ghanan ghanan ghir ghir aaye badraa’.

And now, in the days of social media, my twitter timeline comes alive with tweets extolling the rain as soon as the first drops fall. My friend, the journalist Smita Prakash, has a particularly evocative phrase for it; she calls it ‘Clooney weather’ in honour of her heartthrob George Clooney. Former RAW chief, Vikram Sood, crows about how his ‘gulmohur is singing’ in the rain. Even Pamela Timms, food writer and a Brit – not a people generally not known for their love of wet weather – tweets a link to a Bollywood rain song as the skies pour down.

As for me, I can’t quite explain why (or how) but a rain shower has the power to transform me back into the little girl who would strip down to her chemise and run up to the terrace to get a good old dousing the moment the first drops hit dry ground. Of course, being all grown up now, I desist from such childish antics – but God, how I wish I was six again!

Soul mates

They are mythical creatures who exist only in romantic fiction

It was a sad day when the words ‘soul mate’ entered the lexicon. For ever since then, both men and women have spent fruitless, frustrating years looking for this elusive creature, enduring much angst in the process, and ending up sad and lonely at the end of it all.

But how could it possibly be otherwise? Soul mates are like unicorns, mythical creatures who only exist in our fevered romantic imagination. They are the staple of soppy movies, pulp fiction and mediocre poetry. And like fictitious happy endings, they don’t really translate into real life.

So those who are looking for a real-life soul mate to share real life with are just setting themselves up for heartbreak.

Put away those rose-tinted glasses for a bit and think about it. It is such a huge ask of another human being, isn’t it?

A soul mate: quite literally, a friend of your soul. Someone who mirrors your personality; who shares your deepest thoughts and darkest fears; who understands you instinctively; who knows what you are thinking even before you do. Someone who is your other half; someone who completes you; hell, someone who can even complete your sentences.

Yes, I think I have covered every cliché of romantic fiction.

And yet, such is the grip these clichés exercise on our imagination that we are primed to start looking for our own soul mate from the moment puberty kicks in. We want someone who shares our every interest, who enters into our every thought, who thinks like us on every subject, who has the same prejudices, watches the same movies, reads the same kind of book, even likes the same ice-cream flavour.

Popular culture only reinforces these stereotypes. We are constantly being bombarded with images of picture-perfect celebrity couples who seem oh-so-much in sync with one another. Right on top of that list are Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, traipsing the world with their brood of rainbow kids and cuddling up for the benefit of the cameras in every country they pass through. Nearer home we have Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor, who have achieved the ultimate prize in coupledom with their own proud monicker, Saifeena (a la Brangelina, of course).

Is it any wonder then, that as we feast on these pictures and lap up the stories that accompany them, we want to find our own soul mate with whom we can conjoin our names to create a brand-new joint entity?

And when we don’t find such a person – as is inevitable – we do the next best thing: try and change the person we are with so that he or she fits into these ridiculous parameters.

Hard as it is for me to admit, it is usually women who are the biggest culprits in this regard. Most of us tend to see the men in our lives as works in progress, whom we can improve upon as we go along. Whether it is something as minor as buying them new clothes so that they fit in with our idea of how they should look or something major as forcing them to watch chick flicks in the hope of converting them to the joys of Nora Ephron, we have all been guilty at some point of this kind of social engineering.

Not that men are entirely blameless in this regard either. Many of my braver men friends have forced their wives to accompany them to wrestling matches, have tried to introduce them to the joys of video games, and even (Shock! Horror!) made them sit through hours and hours of Batman re-runs on television.

Women are, of course, a little better at playing along having being brought up to be people-pleasers, but men tend to react very badly indeed to this sort of thing.

But despite the unhappiness this engenders all around, we still stick to our ideal of a romantic relationship, in which we do everything together with our significant other, right from the moment we wake up in the morning to the time we turn out the lights at night.

Not surprisingly, most relationships tend to flounder under the weight of these expectations.

The truth is that no single person could possibly fulfil all our needs or share all our interests. So, the only way we can ensure that our primary relationship flourishes is to reduce the pressures on it. The best way to make that happen is by having a large circle of friends and family who can take up the slack, a whole bunch of soul mates, so to speak, rather than just the one.

Mothers take on the role of soul mates when you’ve just had your first baby, bolstering your confidence in your child-rearing skills at a time when you feel overwhelmed by it all. Siblings can be soul mates when you are in the mood to bitch about your spouse. Friends are the ones who fall back on when you want a stress-free evening at the movies, or just kicking back with a beer while you watch the IPL.

To fall back on another cliché, it takes a village – not just a single soul mate – to get through life. To expect any different is to set yourself up for disappointment.