The Forest of Enchantments

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

This was my first lesson on the nature of love: that in a moment it could fulfil the cravings of a lifetime, like a light that someone might shine into a cavern that has been dark for a million years.

But we both knew that was wishful thinking. Girlhood was as ephemeral as a drop of water on a lily pad.

But always they forgive each other—for without forgiveness what love can there be?

Perhaps I should have been more worried, but I wasn’t. I was in love, and love is wild and optimistic, especially in the beginning.

even the strongest intellect may be weakened by love. This struck me as paradoxical. Shouldn’t love make us more courageous? More determined to live according to our principles?

If you want to stand up against wrongdoing, if you want to bring about change, do it in a way that doesn’t bruise a man’s pride. You’ll have a better chance of success.’

Remember this, too: sometimes our ill luck has consequences that bless others.’

We come into the world alone, and we leave it alone. And in between, too, if it is destined, we’ll be alone. Draw on your inner strength. Remember, you can be your own worst enemy—or your best friend. It’s up to you. And also this: what you can’t change, you must endure.’

The land of our childhood is a special place, where we are cherished without question or expectation.

Perhaps duty was a kind of love, after all.

This incident taught me that the more love we distribute, the more it grows, coming back to us from unexpected sources. And its corollary: when we demand love, believing it to be our right, it shrivels, leaving only resentment behind.

Ah, what a chameleon thing love was, lifting us up one minute, casting us down the next.

Such was love’s magic—the giver gained more than the receiver.

I was looking at another of love’s many faces. It made us ready to wreak havoc—even on people we cared for—in order to protect those whom we cherished more.

So this, too, was true of love: it could make us forget our own needs. It could make us strong even when the world was collapsing around us.

This is what Kaikeyi failed to see: it’s not enough to merely love someone. Even if we love them with our entire being, even if we’re willing to commit the most heinous sin for their well-being. We must understand and respect the values that drive them. We must want what they want, not what we want for them.

When you put your hand in the fire, knowingly or unknowingly, do you not get burned? Such is the ancient law of the universe. Of karma and its fruit. The idea of motive is irrelevant to it.’

once mistrust has wounded it mortally, love can’t be fully healed again.

Such is the seduction of love: it makes you not want to think too much. It makes you unwilling to question the one you love.

That’s how love stops us when it might be healthier to speak out, to not let frustration and rage build up until it explodes.

Loving someone didn’t necessarily mean you understood them. In fact, remembering Dasharath and Kaikeyi, I wondered if loving someone too much prevented you from seeing them less clearly than an objective bystander.

I blamed love, too, for my silence. How it makes us back down from protesting because we’re afraid of displeasing the beloved, or because we’re afraid that our disagreement is the symptom of a greater disease: incompatibility of values.

How entangled love is with expectation, that poison vine! The stronger the expectation, the more our anger towards the beloved if he doesn’t fulfil it—and the less our control over ourselves.

Truly love is the strongest intoxicant of them all, the drink of deepest oblivion. Else how could I have forgiven him so quickly for what he’d done? No. Love is the spade with which we bury, deep inside our being, the things that we cannot bear to remember, cannot bear anyone else to know. But some of them remain. And they rise to the surface when we least expect them.

Forgiveness is more difficult when love is involved.

At the same time, though, I was saddened. What I’d taken as admiration all these years had really been a kind of indulgence, the way one might praise a child for her childish achievements. The womanly skills I’d mastered were important and intricate, and by no means easy. They required deep intelligence, an intelligence of the heart. But Ram didn’t understand that. He didn’t understand the complexity of the female existence.

knew now that love—no matter how deep—wasn’t enough to transform another person: how they thought, what they believed. At best, we could only change ourselves.

How, without detaching ourselves from the spell of the past, can we focus fully on the moment that faces us?

Motherhood taught me something new about love. It was the one relationship where you gave everything you had and then wished you had more to give.

And this is one of the final things I learn about love: it’s found in its purest form, on this imperfect earth, between mothers and young children, because there’s nothing they want except to make each other happy.

And finally, I bless my daughters, who are yet unborn. I pray that, if life tests them—as sooner or later life is bound to do—they’ll be able to stand steadfast and think carefully, using their hearts as well as their heads, understanding when they need to compromise, and knowing when they must not.

Because this is the most important aspect of love, whose other face is compassion: It isn’t doled out, drop by drop. It doesn’t measure who is worthy and who isn’t. It is like the ocean. Unfathomable. Astonishing. Measureless.’