Sabahat Ali Wani | For Love, With Love and In Love

Lately, I have started watching daily soaps. Not for their unparalleled, sensational content but for my mother. In the beginning, I used to merely glance at her but as time passed, I couldn’t help but watch her closely, observe her changing expressions and let it dawn on me, a painful realisation. She loves romance. My mother loves romance. I saw it, I see it every day: whenever a love scene plays on the screen—a lovely, shy smile appears on her face and her eyes sparkle with a warm, simmering desire. And I, on the other hand, like an evil survivor waiting for the guilt of being alive to disappear, look at her face with a longing for redemption, a saving that only lies in her happiness. But as her youngest daughter, carrying the freckles of her face on mine, this is a painful realisation because I know for both of us—a mother and her daughter—we never have or will experience romance in our lives. It’s not made for women like us. Women like us, ruin love. Women like us are born to grab love, crush it and rub it in the dirt. Women like us are trained to search for love, crave it but only to seize it in the end, set it ablaze and dance on its ashes. Women like us, yes, like you and me, are convicted for killing love with our bare hands and then, publicly hanged—for love, with love and in love.

Sabahat Ali Wani is a writer, researcher, visual artist and critic from Kashmir. She can often be found down the rabbit hole of research but on some days, she crawls out of it to write stories and poetry. She also runs a small Kashmir-based feminist magazine, Maaje Zevwe, which you can find here.