Love, Religion, and the comma in between…

Aarish Ali
PaperKin
Published in
6 min readMar 26, 2019
Source : https://tessa-kyren.com/all-categories/2017/12/29/sonnet-vines-of-forbidden-love

How long have you been in the PaperKin team? A year? Two?
Well…almost.

Have you written One article? One?
Yea, I did! I made them the playlist.

You make playlists for your crushes Aarish!!
Well….

Well, what! Have you had any published?

No… I know that I've all the time in the world but... I’m busy? See, the thing is, I make myself believe that I've got a ton of other things to take care of, which I probably do, but then I end up leaving everything halfway through.

So you do know yourself good enough!
Yes. I am obligated to be aware of everything running in circles in the insides of my head.

Are you sure that you know you’re talking to yourself?
For the moment, yea. I’m glad I am aware of that. Can you just shut up and stop making me feel so conscious?

Okay!!

Why don’t you write about movies? You’ve been wanting to put the word out about how underrated dramas were.

Maybe next time?

But you don’t even have a first time to begin with!

My brother got married for the first time! Married supposedly.

First time?!
* shrug *

Apparently people get married to random people out of nothing. No feelings, no connection, no memories shared, nothing shared as a matter of fact, except for space and oxygen and water .

Hmm?

And they’re fine with it. Because people are logical. They know things will be fine in time and that they’ll adjust no matter how hard, because that’s how things have been here, since forever.

To be okay with getting along with a total stranger who never in a million years got married to you because he loved you or the person that you are, but probably with what you brought along, and obviously that he belonged to the same breed of people who believed in a man who could do wonders and fly and fought all evil and died, brought peace on earth, who are very very different from the breed of people who believed that it was a bearded guy who did all of this and brought peace who in turn are again very different from the other breed that believed in a 1000 men and an unreachable being that communicated through telepathy to be the one that brought about all the same.

Peace and happiness.

See, there were the Australopithecus and they were happy, then came the homo habilis with their stone tools too crappy, then the homo erectus (because they walked straight, mind you!) and the Neanderthals and the sapiens, and evolution thereafter seems spontaneous.
I thought it ended there. We all did.
But then came 20 more.

The law of spontaneous evolution (picturised)

20 very very different breeds with very different fundamentals regarding life and beliefs, having totally different biologies.

People find comfort sleeping with strangers than love, because the God that brought peace for the stranger wore clothes different from the God that brought peace for love. One preached in Sanskrit and the other in Arabic. Both spoke in the same language, the language of love, and we messed up with the translation on purpose so that some day, somewhere along , that 50 year old horny grandpa could gratify his primal needs of reproduction, lust and desire, on a 12 year old . And what’s the best cover if not for religion and ‘it says right here in this book..’ ?

It’s never about the guy that loved you to the moon and back and knows you more than most, it’s about those stars that lie in the middle of nowhere, aligning perfectly on a piece of wooden checker board with beads, and lines drawn in chalk … Something as earthly as the chalk.
In chalk! Come on!? Now don’t tell me that this chalk came out of the throat of a pan-dimensional hyper-galactic super being because you are the same ones that literally take the literal meaning of honour killing.

Want but can’t …

But people are fine with this.
Almost as if they want this…

Every other person that I talk to would tell me that when you ‘decide’ to ‘fall’ in ‘love’ with someone, you check whether you guys share the same religion and if that’s a yes, the same caste, and if that’s a yes, the same sub caste and ironically if that too returns a yes, the same first letter of last name, the same first pet, the same tooth paste brand (has got to be a yes because 9 out of ten dentists recommend Colgate) . If so much has got to be similar for things to work out, why don’t you just marry yourself!

I thought you were smart enough to know that go f**k yourself is not literal just because it sounds Aarish…

Earthworms can.

But people can’t, what’s your point ?

The point is , People talk about reservations being unfair when it comes to exams but then they’re fine with reserving themselves.
They’re fine with reserving their hearts and souls and something as universal as love, in the name of a God who we all have been raised up to, to believe as the epitome of love.
People are fine with reserving their hearts but not marks.

We push ourselves away

First of all, You don’t decide to fall.
You can’t decide to fall. Very very logically speaking, falling hurts. And your brain knows this. It’s one of those very few survival instincts inbuilt in the lizard brain that you’re born with.
And when it comes to deciding to fall in ‘love’, that’s a whole different ballgame. You can’t possibly decide to fall in love with someone, it just happens. That’s how love is. You can’t place conditions on love. The day that you do it is the day it dies.
It’s pretty much the same as choosing to abort when you find out that the child in your ‘lady’s’ womb is a girl. It’s exactly the same and ironic. And I’d be glad she never saw this world of ours because we don’t live free, we live a life full of restrictions.

But people are fine with this.
Because people are hypocrites.
But people are fine with this.
Because this is the way it is.

And if you tell me that love in this generation is irrational then I’ll tell you that the religion that restricts love is. And them hearts too selfish to love one other more than they love themselves are….

All this just because she said no? :p

And marriage is! Why do people even get married! Why is that… What? What ‘no’ !?

No, You still don’t have an article to publish Aarish.

Darn it. See, I told you that I’m a busy man.

P.S.

Would it have been wrong of me to have written all of this if I were a woman now?

Can you just shut up ?

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