The Art of Loving . . .
Mountbatten's daughter Pamela wrote about Nehru's
relationship with her mother in her memoir India Remembered.
Love, as we keep saying over and over again, is something we cannot really escape from. One might be a humble citizen or an extraordinary one, but that does not in any way preclude one from loving a man or woman of one's desire. Perhaps the one who loves might not actually end up in union with the man or woman he or she loves. But it is the feeling that is important. Great love or secret love has a way of making people feel good about themselves, about the world around them.
The venerable Nelson Mandela, we have been duly informed, once proposed to Amina Cachalia. The widow of the prominent African National Union activist Yusuf Cachalia has made it known, through her memoirs, that Mandela made her an offer of marriage once his links to Winnie Mandela were severed when he emerged from prison in 1990. Amina Cachalia is dead, of course, and for all one knows Mandela too might be on his way to eternal silence. But this revelation of the South African iconic leader's ardour for a woman only reinforces our belief that love takes precedence above everything. Besides, Mandela has been in love quite a few times in his life, the last instance of which came through his marriage to Graca Machel, the widow of the late Mozambique leader Samora Machel.
Men like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto have regularly fallen in love, with or without happy results. It all depends on how you look at a particular affair. Married rather early to a cousin thirteen years older than him, a young Bhutto at one point was drawn to the beauty of a woman of Iranian descent named Nusrat and actually went ahead with marrying her. In the course of his marriage to her, Bhutto of course went headlong into affairs with other women who found him hugely handsome and intelligent and, to be sure, powerful. One of these women was a Bengali named Husna Sheikh, whose hair Bhutto, in his days as Pakistan's leader, loved to play with in the profoundly deep hours of the night.
Mandela has been in love quite a few times, the latest
instance being his marriage to Graça Machel.
There was Iskandar Mirza too with his infatuation for the wife of an Iranian defence attaché at Teheran's diplomatic mission in Karachi. Already married and a father, Mirza and Nahid came together in matrimony and seemed pretty happy with each other. His first wife promptly went out of his life and her children really could not forgive their father for his misdemeanour. In his otherwise laudatory book on his father, Humayun Mirza makes it obvious that his siblings and mother were never able to accept Nahid Mirza as one of their own. In the book, he refers to Mirza's second wife rather disdainfully as, simply, Nahid.
In America, there have been reports and rumours aplenty about the affairs Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower supposedly had with women on their staff. In those days, it was considered indiscreet and somewhat unethical for people to pry into the private lives of important people, which is perhaps a good reason why FDR's and Ike's romantic tales did not quite emerge into the open. But John F. Kennedy was a different matter. He could not do without women, much like his father. JFK's conquests were legion, a tradition that would in time be followed by his admirer Bill Clinton. These days, every time we recall the man who beat George HW Bush in 1992, we remember too such suggestive names as Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky.
You may or may not like it, but the fact remains that love relationships have often given powerful people, usually men, a spurt in the way they have dealt with the world. For Jawaharlal Nehru, Edwina Mountbatten was a soul mate to whom he unburdened himself. We are not quite sure if theirs was a physical relationship of undying love, but we do know for certain that the platonic in them kept them going for as long as it did. Edwina's death in the early 1960s must have hurt India's first prime minister deeply, but he did not let his feelings show.
And no matter how disciplined, morally upright a man Mohammad Ali Jinnah was, the truth is that when he first saw Ruttie, the young daughter of a friend of his, he fell headlong in love with her. She was in her early twenties, he was in his early forties. They married and had a daughter. Then Ruttie died. Jinnah never married again, which you could take as a sign of his devotion to her. Neither has there been any hint of any secret romance wriggling its way into his life after his wife's death, which says quite something about the man, despite all the questions you may have about his politics.
Before marrying Abraham Lincoln, Mary Todd Lincoln was courted by his long-time political opponent Stephen Douglas.
Speaking of politics, rare has been the instance of politicians of as much substance as Abraham Lincoln. His marriage to Mary has consistently remained a subject of study, owing to the many interpretations historians have made of the relationship between the two. But before the marriage came the young Lincoln's passionate love for a woman named Ann Rutledge, whose death left him disorientated for a long while. It is said Lincoln would grieve for hours over her grave, to a point where his friends feared he would go insane. Perhaps his marriage with Mary was a fortunate happening, for it egged him on to a definitive role in politics. History remembers him as the greatest president of the United States of America.
You sit back and reflect on such love and how they may have shaped our world, the way we live and think. You let your mind go back to Urvashi, to Tuntuni, to Pearl, to Mongoose, to the woman who bears all these names because you have invested her with these terms of endearment. You know then you are falling in love all over again. Why shouldn't you?
The mellow rays of the declining sun add a profusion of glory to the silken beauty of your paramour. And the winds run riot in her salt-and-pepper hair.
The writer is Executive Editor, The Daily Star.
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