The Forest of Enchantments

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Write our story, too. For always we’ve been pushed into corners, trivialized, misunderstood, blamed, forgotten—or maligned and used as cautionary tales.

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.

Love was full of contradictions. Sometimes the person you loved weakened you and sometimes he or she made you a stronger person.

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.

Forgive me, Sister, I said silently, you who are the unsung heroine of this tale, the one who has the tougher role: to wait and to worry.

I learned a new fact about love that day: it could kill. Sometimes it could kill instantaneously.

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.

I pondered the word endure, what it meant. It didn’t mean giving in. It didn’t mean being weak or accepting injustice. It meant taking the challenges thrown at us and dealing with them as intelligently as we knew until we grew stronger than them. That was what I’d work on.

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.

‘I forgave you a long time ago,’ I say to Ram. ‘Though I didn’t know it until now. 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.’