Minkathis Thakur’s ‘Lovers like You and I’:

Loves and losses of soulful voices

by Dilshan Boange

Is love all conquering or does it leave the love stricken broken and defeated if love fails to bloom to what it is thought as it ideally ought to, as dreamt in the hearts of lovers true?

What clasps love in the folds of time and chronology and what makes a certain loves timeless? Is there really a ‘together forever’ that actually applies for the love that never dies in the heart of the lover who creates a personal history of his or her truly lived love, made into a privately archived narrative of letters and lovers’ souvenirs?

These can be questions subtly raised in the mind of the reader from the stories that are built around the central protagonist Nayan and the lives and loves and the losses that unfold in Indian novelist Minakshi Thakur’s debut novel ‘Lovers like you and I’.

This is not a sweeping dreamy romance saga that builds on the pop culture romance-lit elements and storyline.

Highs and lows that rollercoaster to pump pulses of the giddy and feverish romance seeker aren’t to be found in the pages of ‘Lovers like you and I’.

The author Minakshi Thakur’s approach to love, in this novel does not deny the sombre and downcast sense of inner solitudes and silences caused by love which sometimes may seem as insurmountable and very much the painful inheritance of certain kinds of lovers.

One of the most striking lines that bespoke the essence of the approach and philosophy in this novel about understanding love as seen in this modern age is found in the love letter written in orange juice by Nayan dated 5th was wrong.

Free verse itself was never free.” The line reads out from Nayan’s letter to her lover Salil who never fully appreciates the depth of the love she has for him, and much of that love being built on her virtue of patience to allow him to be who he is despite the fact that such undemanding ways as hers only keeps doors open for him to be the wandering soul that will not commit a lifetime for the woman who loves him more than he ever fully understands.

Invisible ink

During the span of the novel, until the very last, when the love letters written in the invisible ink of orange juice become ‘deciphered’ to him as readable material is when Salil sees that part of Nayan’s love for him to which he was partly blind.

It is only the warmth of a simple candle flame that is needed as the story tells us.

But even the simplest source of warmth and light may be too distant when the heart is closed off to the possibilities of bonds that bind, which seems the case with Salil from my reading of the symbolism of the novel in conjunction with the character and the actions that drive his role in the story.

But then does Salil finally commit a life time to Nayan? That is left open as a puzzle to be concluded by the reader which can best be pieced together from the subjective character analysis each reader is entitled to do. Passing judgements on what counts as the estimable and what is the condemnable in the narratives of lovers isn’t the ways in which Thakur has delivered her picture and destination as to what and who finally counts as ‘acceptable’.

October 1999. “Whoever thought love is a free verse There is a dire sense of realism that is undeniable, built in the deeper meanings the authoress delivers to her readers in this novel.

And that realism is the understanding that the emotional state of love and the actions and ways of lovers cannot be read as easily as legible letters that profess love.

Legibility has little to do with understanding the heart of a lover.

‘Lovers like you and I’ is a conveyor of that often unrealised truth.

Inseparable melding

What place does love have in the scenario of marriage and should there always be an integral, inseparable melding of two people in attractions of both body and mind where marriage is concerned? Is marriage merely a close companionship where two people enjoy each other’s undivided company and may seek physical conjugal union with the other if and when there is an inclination towards such behaviour?

This is one of the stringent questions that Thakur brings out through the relationship between Nayan and Jeeban and where they head towards when they each find in the other a ‘solution’ to the crippling isolation and loneliness they both feel in the wake of tragic incidents that leave them both emotionally debilitated in many ways.

There can, however, never really be a love of romance between two people where the relationship is completely absent of a mutually felt and shared element of physical desire.

The chapter ‘Us together by the river’ is one that loosens those problematic knots to a great extent where the path to contemplation and honesty to one’s own feelings about the other allows silent and peaceful resolution.

In the film ‘Notes on a scandal’ the voice of Judi Dench says, “We are bound by the secrets we share”. Sometimes, perhaps the deepest secrets shared between friends who attempted discreetly to be lovers for reasons that were not fully clear to them and impelled through factors that do not form the base of a solid love relationship to begin with, are the decisions they arrived at undeclared to the world, and unspoken even between themselves in the end; for the bond they share is of a depth that even the retraction from a decision needs no explanation in words to the other.

There is in bonds a certain kind of love where a deep seated caring forms a platonic love that cannot be undermined. One must note that Thakur has perceived the importance of the love shared by companions such as Nayan and Jeeban in her discourse through fiction to explicate the human phenomenon of love for its manifold complexities.

Placid

The final chapter titled ‘Now I understand’ felt very much the end of a journey where Salil the free spirited one has felt the weariness upon his wings and was caused to find a place of rest, which is assured in the comfort of his parental home.

The reader finds the character of Salil placid in a way as if he has been placated of his need for an impulsiveness defiant to any form of establishment as his definitive attribute, and in a more amenable state to the ways of family, relationships, and the bonds and duties that arise consequently.

The matured Salil in this respect of not mere willingness to commit, but of a self driven desire to commit to a relationship, is the one whom Nayan waited all the while. In this sense what may finally unfold between those two lovers leaves one to feel that love is partly about the agonisingly sweet wait for destiny to unfold, at some point in time. But the strength to wait may not surely be an attribute everyone would possess.

As a Sri Lankan I found this novel of a distinct Indian cultural setting translating itself rather well despite the texture of a Hindi mixed English narrative.

A salutary feature in the narrative that evinces the authoress had a readership in mind outside the boundary of Hindi-English bilinguals is where the Hindi verses are presented in their English translated meaning in parenthesis.

Arundathi Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’ has this narrative approach which serves the effect of presenting a scripted form of the vernacular that is sought to be impressed on the reader for the poetic tonality that may be read off the pages to evoke the musicality involved.

In that particular point of the narrative to enhance the moment it depicts and seeks to create in the mind of the reader, while at the same time including its literal meaning in parenthesis to denote the translation to be understood as an element symbolically ‘outside the narrated timeline of actions’ or ‘moment’ and meant to function as a fixture that offers a fuller understanding of what the moment is in connection with the vernacular element represented textually.

Prose narrative

The texture of the novel shows a richness not only for the verse it has woven to the prose narrative but also for the variance in prose devices devised to narrate the story. Diary entries and letters form a significant part of the mode of the story narrative and add to the diversification of narrative voice and perspective. Another aspect of the book that may be considered as part of the texture of the story’s presentation is the pencil line sketched illustrations that accompany each chapter.

On this aspect of the book my reading experience is significantly affected as per giving direction to the reader’s mind on the schema of images to be created by the words of the narrative.

The pictures posit the tone and layer of the story as one that arises from a somewhat younger, modern generation of storytelling.

Through the cultural landscapes the author offers the reader, both through characters such as ‘the bride form Nepal’ and the scenarios they are found in and the different rituals and ceremonies that connect with their lives, interesting insights of geo-social aspects, showing diversities that create cultural richness is delivered. Living in the densely populated Calcutta and the unbridgeable divides between urban and rural locales creates vivid imagery that creates a mosaic of topography as the story takes the reader to various parts of the subcontinent.

‘Lovers like you and I’ is a story off the beaten track, charting its own path and individual voice. It may not drive you to turn page after page unceasingly but call your senses to pause and contemplate at certain junctures to reflect and wonder how much of the moods and moments crafted in words connect with you and your own world of experience.

The book will read itself out to you, in song, in verse, in snippets of poetry written on the back of receipts from coffee houses in Delhi, presenting a pulse from a new age of writing, exploring and explicating the beauties and intricacies of love.