Romantic Stories

There is an age for reading love stories. The love stories that one reads in teenage life, particularly one that is read just after a heartbreak, leave an impression that stays for ages. At least this is true for me and for many of my friends with whom I have discussed this. The wonder and the romanticism remain even up to a comfortable middle age.
In my teenage days two love stories made an impression on me that still persists, I cannot re read the books even today, long after my (and for that matter my daughter’s) teenage is history without feeling a pang of romance, a whiff of the spring breeze and without hearing the sound of Rabindrasangeet playing very softly from far away. These novels still cause a shiver to pass down my aging spine and I can remember enchanted gardens and the music played by angels all of which never ever existed except in my imagination.
Whenever I think of a love story I think of two books in particular, One of them has enchanted romantics since the thirties, I refer of course to Tagore’s Sesher Kobita which has been the gateway to romance for Bengali teenagers and youth for the least century or so. Another is that old saccharine sweet story of Erich Segal’s, probably out of print today, appositely named Love Story. I don’t quite know why but it still evokes in me a sense of a lost love, a pain that is my own and can still draw tears to my eyes. It was turned into a hit movie of the seventies with Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw which drew large crowds in Globe for months in those days. Somebody reading it now will probably be left cold, my daughter was totally unable to find much magic in it, but I cannot to this day read it without crying for the love that ended in death. I can even quote from it and the lines “Love means never having to say you are sorry” still has a meaning for me that is probably a lot more than the author ever gave to it.
Everybody must be having some such story that brings to them the lost romance of their youth. It will no doubt be different for you than it is for me, but if there is no such book in your life, you are the loser.
All these reflections came to my mind as I read a story that Buddhaddev Bose had written in the sixties, it has been recently reprinted by Ananda Publishers in an anthology of his novels. Halud Basanta is a love story that I wished I had read when I was a teenager. It would have, I felt then occupied a place in my heart that Sesher Kobita and Love Story do. It has been a long time that my atherosclerotic heart was so moved by a love story. It relates the story of a young man who loves the sister of one of his friends. He tries to make her see that he loves her, but never dares to say it out aloud. It is never clear whether she reciprocates his feelings; his love stays untold and unrequited. Or does it? I recommend it for everybody who can still remember their younger days and the thousand heartbreaks that seem so far away today. And of course to all younger people who can read Bengali.
(Please do not think that I am rating these novels as equally great literature, I am merely recording the impression they left on me)

Comments

Nipon said…
Yes that's very true. I have been moved by many books especially Fountainhead, Srikanta, Great Expectations. Great Expectations I read in class 9. I will not read it again probably. But it is one book that has left a lasting impression on me. Fountainhead I read in early 2008. It is tremendous! Also books like Srikanta by Sharatchandra, Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas. Most of these I read when I was still in school when life was not so complicated and that is probably the reason they occupy my heart like no other book.
January 25, 2009 at 11:43 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alexander Grothendieck: Mathematician Extraordinaire

Image
                                    The lion in winter: Grothendieck in old age  Mathematicians and theoretical physicists fascinate me. This is because, I can imagine myself, if I work hard enough, sometime solving a biological conundrum, or evaluating a chemical compound. But the idea of sitting with a piece of paper and pencil and calculating away for days or months or years and then coming up with a proof of an esoteric mathematical problem, or a theory to explain an observation made in deep space seems to me to be more like magic. Anybody who can do this, in my opinion is made of stuff that I cannot even imagine, let alone ever to hope to emulate. There are several such mathematicians. One of them passed away last November. I refer to Alexander Grothendieck who passed away on the 13 th of last month. Grothendieck was the mathematician par excellence. He embodied all that i...
Read more

The Uttar Banga Anath Ashram ( North Bengal Orphanage)

Image
Uma Mallick looks like an ordinary Bengali Housewife. She wears a standard cotton sari, vermillion on her forehead and travels clinging to her husband’s motorcycle as he whizzes past in Siliguri’s notorious lanes. However she is anything but that. Uma is the founder and the livewire of the Uttar Banga Anath Ashram (North Bengal Orphanage). Lest that makes you conjure up an image of a gleaming building full of well dressed children being looked after by an army of attendants, let me disillusion you. Her orphanage looks after girl children (she only takes in girls), and they are housed in a tiny postage stamp sized piece of land that was donated to her by a kind soul. Or perhaps not so kind soul, because the land was already occupied by a group of Mastaans, ( local goons) who could only be induced to vacate by a long and desperate struggle, involving a hunger strike by the children, and the help of local well-wishers. The house is basically a brick structure covered by a tin roof. There ...
Read more

Mamma Africa: Miriam Makeba and Malaika

Image
Today is the fifth death anniversary of singer activist Miriam Makeba. In our school days her songs were immensely popular; especially Malaika and Pata Pata which used to be bring to our staid Calcutta school the romance of Africa. She was one of the singers who made the sixties one of the most significant decades of revolt in the twentieth century when challenges to authority seemed to be a way of life. Miriam "Zenzi" Makeba was born in a suburb of Johannesburg in one of the crowded and deprived black townships of the apartheid era. Her father, Caswell, was Xhosa: her mother, Christina, was Swazi. Her given name Zenzi was derived from the Xhosa word Uzenzile, meaning "you have no one to blame but yourself". This was a traditional name intended to provide support through life's difficulties. When she was eighteen days old, her mother was arrested for selling umqombothi, an African homemade beer distilled from malt and cornmeal. Her mother was sentenced to a ...
Read more