Love in our times

How does love churn you? Does it remind you of the movies? Or does it leave you disoriented because of those movies? For those of us who do not find any reference to the idea and experience of love in mainstream narratives, Eleven Ways to Love is a mini treasury with painful reflections and remembrances of love.

The 11 voices covered here share their struggles with love - their journeys and their experiments. These thoughts on love, its presence and absence, talk about how the beloved comes in different genders, numbers and shapes, and there are as many ways to love as there are lovers and loved ones.

The focus on the loving self - how it connects to the other, and its consequences - is a theme that cut across all essays. One gets wiser with the knowledge that love is not a thing that one has or doesn't. As Sangeeta puts it, "Love is an effort. Love is knowing that someone is worth your time and energy and apologies and forgiveness." Or, "Falling in love with someone hastens the process of falling in love with yourself." So, you are who you love!

The other theme is love in the context of hierarchies. Women, and their expression of love, or the choice to steer clear of it, are not accommodated in patriarchy. Preeti Vangani talks about how choosing to stay single comes loaded with the ugliness of being tagged as 'loose' or 'easy'.

Shrayana Bhattacharya discusses how when women assert their right to a  career, or even ideas, or right to be offended, it is ridiculed, ignored and resisted as 'overthinking'. She sums up love situations in places like Delhi as "males with unwarranted self-confidence and females with unwarranted self-doubt." Their essays, along with Maroosha Muzaffar's, are pieces of agony of being single and women, of a  litany of failures in romantic relationships.

Homosexuality, and our inability to deal with the diversity of bodies and desire, appear in quite a few essays. Sreshtha puts it painfully, "Queerness is mourning, mourning is queerness." Dhrubo Jyoti adds caste to the dreaded, anxiety-ridden homosexual desire. Anushree Majumdar talks about the Indian ways of stigmatising Africans and black male sexuality. Nadika Nadja probes the love in the fuzzy boundaries of body-sex-soul or sex-gender-sexuality.

Nidhi Goyal considers the disabled body and its possibilities of loving and receiving love. Colour (black, brown), caste, queerness, transgender, disability, size and shape, and even asexuality are thoughtfully-made cases of the right to love, and the right to be loved, in the book. Bodies as love, bodies as sites of love, and bodies as means to love.

The essays are nothing like the colour-corrected love we see in its stylised representation in Bollywood. One confronts the possibility that love is such a depressing thing, and that confrontation is a very desirable outcome of reading these essays. For every song and dance situation we see, there ought to be many more discussions of love, and loneliness in the quest for love. For every image of perfect hair and skin and belly, there ought to be many more conversations about body-shaming or rheumatism or disability. For every conclusion of a happily-ever-after, there ought to be ways to register the pain of things not working out, of incompatibilities, of rejections and sadness thereafter.

What's love in our century without technology and its algorithms of matchmaking/fixing, for dating and for marriage? Several essays in the book involve dating apps or matrimony sites as ways of meeting people, connecting with them. They may not find soulmates for us, but they do assure us that we are not alone. That like ordering food, finding love is a few clicks away.

HowAboutWe, for instance, uses ideas of exploring the city, instead of algorithms, as ways of putting people in touch with each other. Technology makes room for choices - straight, gay, transgender, bisexual, curious. Finding sex, if not love, is getting easier!

The One But Not the Only  is the most intriguing piece in the book. Here is a polyamorous man, D, who is forced to "stay in the closet." As a society, we have found ways to talk about the so-called unnatural sex, and even with disastrous consequences, some of us find the  courage to identify ourselves as homosexual beings. But it looks like nothing beats the 'unnaturalness' of finding love in more than one relationship! Sharanya Manivannan, in the poem before the essay, writes: "there's already space here, / for one candle to light / another / and another without extinguishing / its original blaze."

Love might be seen as plural in terms of the ways of loving, but it remains a monolith in its construct of the beloved as a singular identity. But it's heartening that such challenges to love are brought together for our times.