Day 280 & 281-A Love Story

5th October 

Today, I want to tell you a love story told to me by my grandfather.  The story may be a simple one, he said,  but the love it depicts is no less epic in proportion than the best fairy tales. 

This was how the story began.

She was a most beautiful Banjaran gypsy girl who could make a hard man cry with her sitar. Talented with her hands and gifted with charisma, she was sung in countless songs and the subject of mysterious portraits. Men wanted her and women wanted to be her but all who met her, loved her. 

He was a poet, an artist, a hardworking man; he could speak to flowers and make them smile. A voracious reader, a keen listener, he was also a problem solver and nobody's fool.  It was no exaggeration when I told you, he was every fellow's best friend and every woman's dream. 

It was a sunny day when he first saw her in a painting from across a busy street and in that instant, he knew he had found his one true love. He begged the vendor to sell him the painting but the vendor kept saying no. So he came back to the same sidewalk three days in a row until the vendor gave in. 


When he took the painting home, he wrote on its back , the time and date and place they 1st met. 

The vendor could not have been more wrong if he thought that was the last he saw of our man. He returned the next day and everyday since and each time he would ask: have you seen her, my friend, have she come by yet?; to which the vendor would invariably answer: I have never met her, I don't know who she is. One day, the vendor asked him why and he told him it was her eyes. Those eyes that could read his deepest secrets and see his darkest fears. The eyes that spoke without judging to assure him that all would be right. 

It was exactly 3660 days and 110 matchmaking attempts later that he finally found her. NOT that his father approve of any of these matchmaking, my grandfather was quick to add. That was the day the vendor told him with an excitement the vendor could barely contain : I have seen her today;  she finally came. 

He knew straightaway it was her. The years did not lessen her beauty; in fact,  the wisdom only enhanced it.  

And even though she had never met him, it was as if she knew he had been looking for her all these years. 

At first, grandfather did not approve. He called my father a crazy romantic and my mother a fool. Him for loving a woman in a portrait, her for agreeing to marry a man she hardly knew. It was not long however, before she won grandfather over. She reminded me somewhat of my own true love, grandfather mused,  a mother my son never knew for she lost her life so he could have his. 

They married with his blessings and a year later, they had me. And so they live happily after, this unconventional union borne of love but that was not the end of the story. 


Grandfather told me that if I only have one purpose in life, it will be to tell the world what great love is. 

The kind that exists between my ma- who once told me when I ran away crying in my room after seeing their first quarrel that it is alright to disagree sometimes with the people we love;  that I must not be afraid of it because love always prevail and forgive-

and pa-who stands firm without insisting and is never shy to show the world he loves ma dearly even when she is wrong.

They were two people who could not have been more distinct from each other. Yet, they seemed together even when they were apart because you could no longer see one without the other. To me, great love is really as simple as that.