Kalimullah speaks on love

Post-writing of mine on love I discovered an interesting article by Kalimullah Hassan who is the writer for The News Straits Times Malaysia. I was amazed by the hygiene views from him and read it, you may.

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defences, you build up a whole suit of armour, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life ...

You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostage. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you- and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.

OUCH! This passage is from Neil Gaiman, the English-born American novelist, screenwriter and children’s book author.Love or shattered love both evoke strong emotions and reactions. Those who were young once can empathise with Gaiman’s spurned lover for surely, like most teenagers, they, too, went through such heartbreak.

It’s like this. When you are in love, nothing can go wrong. The freckles on your loved one’s face "add to her striking looks" and the wispy moustache on his face "makes him look macho".

But when love turns sour, the "freckles and all" bother you. When love goes bad, that wispy moustache, actually, makes him a wimp.

Strange thing, love. It’s understandable why Gaiman hates it so much.

Some time ago, Donny Osmond’s song Puppy Love was the favourite tune of many a teenager. Osmond mirrored the views of teenagers then — and now — when he sang that the elders don’t really understand.

And they called it puppy love
Oh, I guess
They’ll never know
How a young heart really feelsAnd why I love her so
And they called itpuppy loveJust because we’rein our teens
Tell them all it isn’t fair
To take away my only dream

That’s what my kids tell me now. I don’t understand. What is there to understand? I have been through it.

Didn’t my Standard Five trainee teacher break my heart when she went back to Day Training College after two months and never contacted me?

I still remember her house in Lahat Road in Penang. That’s how smitten I was.

Didn’t my Form Three teacher do the same when she upped and went and married that dentist in Bukit Mertajam?

And I still remember her white Datsun 100A and that she used to take off her shoes when she drove it.

(I used to jostle with a few other lovesick classmates to carry her bag when she drove in. That’s how I knew she took off her shoes when driving.)

And my first "real" love — someone my age — forsook me when she became engaged to that engineering student who won a scholarship to Brighton University.

Of course, I understand. There is time for love and there is time for studies. Now is the time for studies. Love can come later, I tell them.

The problem with kids is, like Benjamin Disraeli said, they don’t realise that "the magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end".

End it surely does. Rare are those who say that they married their first love and have since lived happily ever after.

The reason everyone talks about their first love is because there was a second and a third and…

So, logic dictates that, in time, you will find your lasting love.

Why, therefore, forego the "more important" things in life now like your books, earning a degree and getting a good job instead of "wasting time" on a romance that in all probability will not last?

My friends, too, have this issue with their children. So we must be right and the children wrong. Right? Well…

After one such discussion with the children — they’re all in their teens or early 20s — I was reminded by my wife that we, too, were young once.

She’s the smart one in the family with her worldly wise views. It’s just that when you are set in your ways, like I have become, you don’t want wisdom to interfere with your ways.

When did I stop being a child and become a father? And a father like my father who, when I was a child, I thought did not understand me either.He didn’t like it when I borrowed his car and took my college-bound girlfriend out till late.

He didn’t like it when his friends told him that I was seen in town holding hands with her.

He didn’t like it when I tore pages from my schoolbook to write love notes which were never sent to her.

He didn’t like it when I went to the bachelor parties thrown by Munusamy and Goh Beng Huat, where the music was made for slow dances.

He didn’t understand.

I actually thought that he didn’t love me and I once ran away from home for five days, staying at a friend’s house in Penang.

Even when he came looking for me and found me and burst into tears when he saw I was safe, I didn’t realise that he loved me.

Now I know better. Because I am the father that he was — always meaning well, loving the kids very much, yet, sometimes forgetting that I, too, was young once.

It takes us a long time to realise that our sons will grow up to love someone else because that’s the way life is, and that’s the way it should be.

It takes us a longer time to realise that our daughters will one day find another man in their lives — besides their father — and will go away.

Now, the fear sets in. They have new loves, they are going away to college, they are going to get married — so who’s going to be with us when we are old and frail?

These are the real worries but, I think, we sometimes just don’t want the kids to be hurt because we know that their hearts will be broken.

We cannot bear it when they pine for a love that could not be.

The last two verses of Puppy Love go thus:

I cry each night my
tears for you
My tears are all in vain
I’ll hope and I’ll pray
that maybe someday
You’ll be back in
my arms once again
Someone, help me, help me,
help me please
Is the answer up above
How can I,
how can I tell them
This is not a puppy love.

Didn’t we go through that as well and isn’t that why we want them to focus on real things such as studies and college?

No. Not really true, is it?

If we really are honest with ourselves, we have never forgotten our first loves.

We can remember the shape of their nose, the colour of their glasses, the wave of their hair, the smell of their soap and shampoo….

Each time we fell in love, it was a great feeling.

Our friends would call us stupid, love-sick puppies and we’d think they envied us.

Our fathers would rant and rave and we’d think the old fellows don’t know what it’s like to be in love.

Walking in the rain was so much fun; the scorching sun was a good excuse to go to the waterfalls in Sik (Kedah); the cold nights were an excuse to sit close together; the warm nights were a reason to spend a longer time in Ponniah’s ais kacang stall.

We could find an excuse for everything — as long as we were together.

Really, really, really… don’t you relish the memories of those days of puppy love? I do.

And it would be sad if we deprived our children of such memories to live on when they get older.

The important thing, though, is our last love, I must tell them. And I found it with their mother. (It’s true.)

For my late father, if he is watching me, I want to say:

"I became the man I think you wanted me to become. I know you loved me very much.

"But like you, after my episode as the runaway kid, I, too, will let the children be children.

"Because as you learned, I have learned. That’s the way it should be."

Just like what my father told me when I was in school indulging in the same scenario. Now I understand. God bless you father.