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.

The power of love. It fascinated me from an early age. I thought about it often, even though I didn’t quite understand what it was.

To see awe in a parent’s eyes—it is a strange, lonely feeling.

Because a trained mind is your strongest ally—and an untrained one your worst enemy.’

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?

Was a man’s pride more important than the truth? Why should I have to strategize if I was in the right?

what you can’t change, you must endure.’

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.

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

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.’

They receded into mist, leaving me with another lesson: 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.

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.

The war had devolved from a righteous cause into gleeful carnage. Perhaps that’s the way of all wars.

I 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.

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.