Love, Romance, Relationship: Some Poetic Scenes!
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder! True.
Let us try to understand the terms love, romance and relationship from some poetic scenes from Sanskrit and Tamil literature.
First from an anthology called Kurunthokai from early Tamil literature.
A hero on seeing the heroine fell in love with her. Love at first sight. She also felt the same.
The hero tells the heroine, thus:
"Oh! What could my mother and father be to yours? How did you and I meet ever? The hearts filled with love mingled together like the drops of rain that mingle with the red sand on the earth and becomes one and cannot be easily separated.
The moment the water mingles with the sand nobody can separate the red colour or the sand from the water".
Like this two hearts mingled together and become one. There may be two bodies but both have only one breadth.
They can not bear the separation. Such is the nature of real love.
One more Scene from a Sanskrit poem. This poem very much attracted the great King Bhoja who is a very great scholar. He quotes this poem in his famous work titled "Sarawsathi kandabaranam"
A friend of the forlorn wife to the enquiring lover replies to his questions like this:
"Is she well and cheerful?"
"She lives".
"I ask you, "Is she well?".'
"I have replied, "she lives".'
"You are saying the same thing again".
"Am I to say she is dead when she still breathes?"
Such is the condition of his beloved wife.
The lovers think about their union.
They embraced each other in the bed room which is their sports ground. In the tight embrace her breasts were pressed, her skin thrilled. And then what happened?
Between her pretty thighs, the nightdress slipped as the oil-smooth sap of love overflowing. She started whispering, to her lover, 'Let me rest please, my darling, not again. Don't make me". She pleads very softly. She sighs again. The hero started thinking, "is she asleep? Or dying? Or else completely melted into my heart? Or, am I seeing all these things in my dream? Is she a dream?"
The hero is lamenting thinking her beloved lover thus:
"Such are her thighs, her loins and belly,
Such are her breasts and such her smile,
Such her sweet words, her waterlily eyes, the chignon of her hair,
And such her face, distilling drops of beauty's nectar.
Many's the time I sit in the meditation thus
Of a single feature of my fawn-eyed love."
How can we illustrate a beautiful woman?
Here is a Sanskrit poem:
"Her body is a pond,
Her face thereof a lotus and her arms the lotus stems,
Her loveliness the water and her triple fold of the wave.
Therein a strong young elephant,
No other than my heart has plunged,
But caught fast in love's quicksand will never rise again".
Yes, love indeed is a quicksand. And a real relationship cannot bear the separation.
This is being revealed in our Sanskrit and Tamil literature.
There are thousands of such poems and let us read them to understand love, romance and relationship!
The scholars like Daniel H.H.Ingalls have selected, compiled and translated these poems in a fitting manner.