On love, from Kasol
I went to Kasol last month. My family had been planning a trip to Shimla, and when that trip was over, it was time to break the news to them that I had, in the spur of the moment, booked a bus to Bhuntar from where a private taxi would take me to the beautiful village of Kasol.
Kasol is magical. When google maps tells you the village is 1 minute away, you have to ask the cab driver to stop just behind a river-crossing, which the locals refer to as Himtrek. The river is none other than river Parvati, and by the divine mother’s grace if you find yourself crossing the river in colder months of the year, she will bless you with winds that will heal your heart. If you’re lucky, you will be guided by dogs that will not leave you until you reach the Zostel.
I unpack my stuff and head out. Cafes are not my thing, so I sit at a local shop where a pahadi girl makes the tastiest paranthas for just Rs. 80. This, along with two packets of parle-G, are breakfast. What god has for me in lunch, time will tell. I do not care. For now, I need to walk alongside the river.
At night, when the crowd gathers around a bonfire and random faces mingle, I sit in the balcony of room 208. I close my eyes, and the river flows. Locals say, in the morning even before the sun wakes up, mother divine and her other-half walk alongside her river.
Isn’t it all about love?
I like to think of the act of loving someone as having a black-box through which you process your past traumas, in an attempt to understand and hopefully heal them. The reality of the months after the initial “honeymoon phase”, when you ease into the kind of love that’s built together with vulnerability, is that you start replaying the traumatic memories on the real-life stage, much like a puppeteer. You start testing your partner in an attempt to relive your own past trauma, but this time in the hopes that you’ll navigate to the happier, right ending. In essence, love then becomes a healing process and your partner thus becomes the vessel through which you heal.
So then how do you deal with your partner’s tests? When anger gives way to emptiness, when their emotions come out like fireballs from their mouth, when all they want to do is to hurt, isn’t it all still about love?
Try it, I say. Next time when someone you love becomes the physical embodiment of rage, hug them. Tell them how much you love them. Squeeze them tight until the anger pops out like popcorn. And then come the tears. And then comes the numbness. And then? Love. Because what we call anger is rarely anything but the absence of love. The tied-up mesh of repressed feelings and longing. It’s all about love, mi amor.
With ♥️, Hardik