We have debated much on what makes love, love — and also what makes it so beautiful. For many years, I was content with the simple explanations that concerned themselves with the biology and the science around it. Since then, a world of literature and art has flowed through me. As years go by, accreting nostalgia adds a layer of incredulity to everything that we otherwise consider as authentic and unequivocally true. Even our registers of emotions, once lived fully, slowly subside and lose character. As memory slowly but certainly discards pieces we once held safely inside our hearts, we realise that love, just like everything human, shifts shape within us.

At this stage, it is almost impossible for me to just explain away the beauty with science. This is not because science is inadequate. Rather, it stems from a desire to develop frameworks that would help us explain most — if not all — people we come across us in our lives. Their love is no less than ours and their experiences are valid. To write them is to understand them and to satiate this perverse desire to write people with love, one needs to explore this facet of the human condition.

One of the biggest allures of love is the spectre of losing it fully. If there is no uncertainty, love fails to captivate. Even in the most mundane of domestic settings, if a cascade of events pushes things to a precarious precipice, love is suddenly back in action! It is almost as if being on tenterhooks could save any relationship from turning stale.

After all, what is love if we don’t fear losing it?

Modern discourse could perhaps scoff at this obsession with uncertainty and dub it toxic (perhaps rightly so). But it is almost impossible to celebrate love without it. The longing, the shadow of loss, the confusion — all of this is necessary to push the human mind into a stupor, which is required to tolerate the absurdities that accompany love.

And hence, the mind should keep asking — Anjaam Hamara, Kya Hoga? [What will be our fate?]

Repeating this desperate, ominous plea exposes the way love shakes the foundations of a stability that the human mind so hopelessly desires. This stability is synonymous with death, much like a thermodynamic equilibrium equates to biological death. Love is an antidote to death not because it shuns mortality, but becuase it is life itself. Love cannot live in the same sentence that sports certainty.

Now listen to this loverboi passionately asking his beloved about their fate. He should know that he won’t feel half the pain if his question is answered. And losing that pain will steal the charm, his beloved, his love, and ultimately himself from him. That would be the end of love.

To be in love is to hopelessly wander across these unsure realms till one is completely lost.

Sufis of all hues will agree. They could never see their shapeless beloved, with a large ocean of light and dark sky preventing them from merging with their beloved. And they chose to seek, and not just believe, eliminating the need to bring any sort of stability into their chaotic lives.

Therefore, they never saw their beloved. The beloved was always a step, a hand, a breath, a dream, a whisper, a sujood, and an ocean of wujud away. And it is impossible to corrupt that kind of love.

Enough for now. I will let this song stir you further away from certainty and towards the shores of love.

Refer to this for an English translation.