Desire Without Disguise, Devotion Without Delusion
I listen to songs, more often than not, to fill the silences in my life.
I know, I know. I’m supposed to find silence comforting. Peaceful. Sit with myself and all that emotionally evolved bullshit. But silence scares me. It makes me feel lonely.
Not that songs completely dissolve the loneliness either. They just make everything so noisy that, after a while, the noise itself becomes bothersome and I get irritated. And irritation, conveniently, gives me something else to focus on.
The loneliness doesn’t disappear. I know it’s still there underneath the irritation. Maybe it’s even one of the reasons I’m irritated in the first place. But at least irritation becomes the primary emotion.
Sigh.
I know. Very pathetic. Blahh. What to do? Such is life.
I do want to work on it, and we’ll see about that later.
Right now, I want to talk about a song I recently paid attention to. Because that’s how it happens with me. I hear songs without really listening to them, sometimes for months, and then one random day I actually hear the words, and suddenly the meaning takes over my emotions.
It happened again.
The song is “Dekhha Tenu” from Mr. & Mrs. Mahi.
Not the entire song, though.
For the most part, it is a pretty generic declaration of romance. The music didn’t particularly blow my mind either. I don’t know whether it is actually average or whether my ears and brain are simply done with it after hearing it approximately seventeen billion times on reels when it was newly released.
The picturisation doesn’t help. A couple being all sunshine and rainbows, doing the usual romance things.
So when I heard:
“Dekhha tenu pehli pehli baar ve, hone laga dil bekaraar ve, Rabba mainu ki ho gaya…”
I could only roll my eyes.
Yes, yes. You saw someone. Your heart started racing. You’re restless. And now apparently God needs to be consulted.
Rabba, mainu ki ho gaya?
Biology.
Biology ho gaya hai tumhe.
You are a male. She is a female. You find each other attractive. One of the most basic and ancient biological reactions is taking place. Why are you disturbing God over this? Stupid humans.
Then:
“Ho tere agge pichchhe ghume sohneya, jaddo tere hatth chumme sohneya, meetha meetha jee ho gaya…”
And again I’m sitting there thinking: yes, congratulations, you have discovered attraction and are currently confusing it with some sort of divine intervention.
If only you people had studied biology properly.
And THEN.
Then the song does this:
“Main dil tere kadmaan ’ch rakhaan dholna, main tere agge akhiyaan na chakkaan dholna, je tere te Rabb vichon takna pave, te phir main tenu hi takkaan dholna.”
And suddenly all my aversion to romance evaporates.
It almost feels like listening to something devotional. There is joy in it, but also peace, surrender, reverence — I will place my heart at your feet. I will not raise my eyes before you. And if I have to choose between looking at you and looking at God, then I will keep looking at you.
Oh.
That I understand.
That makes my heart feel so full that the overflowing emotion could almost leak out through my eyes, not because it is tragic, not because it hurts, but from the sheer joy of the thought.
What a description of love.
I like romance like that.
And this made me realise something: I’m not averse to the biological part of romance at all. I’m all for biology. Sexual attraction is great. Wanting somebody because their face, body, voice, smell, hands, whatever, does something ridiculous to your nervous system? Wonderful. Enjoy.
What irritates me is the dishonesty around it.
We want sex, but apparently we cannot simply say we want sex because what respectable human being could possibly experience sexual desire? So we dress ordinary attraction in these enormous declarations of destiny and divinity.
No.
Sometimes you just want to have sex with someone.
That’s fine.
Call it what it is.
Because when you call that love, what word am I supposed to use for this?
For devotion. For companionship. For tenderness. For the kind of intimacy in which another human being doesn’t merely excite you but becomes woven into the way you experience existence itself.
And perhaps that is also why I don’t think I could ever be satisfied with just sex — even if it were mind-blowing sex.
I want the wholesomeness around it. The relationship. The affection. The belonging. The ridiculous little rituals. The feeling that this person is not merely somebody my body responds to, but somebody my life has made room for.
Without that, biology alone feels strangely unsatisfying.
I would rather have no romance at all than have a version of it that leaves me hungry afterwards.
Anyway.
The song continues:
“Tu jadon teri zulfan nu kholeya, mere kolon gaya nahi je boleya…”
She opened her hair. He was rendered speechless by her beauty.
Blah.
Classic.
Then:
“Meri tu kami ho gaya, dil jaaniye, ae mainu ki ho gaya…”
And again, sir.
Please.
You saw a beautiful woman and your hormones are behaving accordingly. You have not necessarily discovered the missing fragment of your soul.
At this point I genuinely want to jump into the song and scream:
YOU WANT TO HAVE SEX WITH HER, YOU BITCH. IT’S NOT THAT DEEP.
And then comes:
“Ye mahal minaare, suraj taare, humse pare le jaiye, main teri tu mera aur nahi kuch chahiye…”
Again, I get the sentiment. I do. You look at the person you love and, in that moment, they can feel worth burning the entire world for.
But I would still know that the world is rather important for our continued survival.
You don’t suddenly become a spirit because you fall in love. Rent still exists. Food still exists. Families, work, responsibilities, illnesses, irritating neighbours, electricity bills — all of it continues to exist.
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Love doesn’t remove reality.
If anything, I think the love I want has to survive inside reality.
So take away the palaces, towers, sun, stars, everything except you?
Very poetic.
Also very impractical.
Ehh.
Generic.
And then, AGAIN, the Punjabi verse comes along and grabs me by the heart:
“O mainu aisa nasha chadha de dholna, jo sidha mainu Rabb naal mila de dholna…”
Sigh.
See.
This.
This I like.
“Intoxicate me in such a way that it takes me straight to God.”
That is such a beautiful way to imagine love.
And perhaps it hits me harder because I am borderline Nastik. I don’t particularly believe there is some supernatural entity sitting somewhere called God.
You live.
You work. You learn. You fail. You love. You make mistakes and hopefully have enough sense to learn from them. You try not to live according to fears handed to you by society. You pay attention. You make choices according to what feels true and right, while remaining willing to discover that you were wrong. You keep growing, keep becoming better — not “better” in the arrogant sense of becoming superior to everyone around you, but more conscious, more complete, more capable of experiencing life fully.
And perhaps, somewhere along that journey, you reach a state of being that feels like the highest form of consciousness available to you.
Not power.
Not superiority.
Bliss. Pure joy.
That, to me, is probably the closest thing to God.
Which is why this line affects me so much.
He isn’t merely saying, you make me feel good. He is asking this person to intoxicate him so completely that it takes him all the way to God.
And when I hear it through my own understanding of God and love, what I hear is something even more beautiful:
I believe that the life I live alongside you can take me towards the highest version of myself.
Not because you will fix me. Not because you are responsible for my growth. Not because I will sit around waiting for you to “help me become better.”
You might not actively help at all.
You might simply exist beside me.
I will still have to live my own life. Work, learn, fail, change, make difficult choices, confront myself, become better. And you will have your own life and your own becoming.
But somewhere in all of that, there is this extraordinary possibility that we could walk alongside each other while both moving towards whatever the highest form of ourselves is.
And perhaps you feel the same about me.
That is what makes the thought so overwhelmingly beautiful to me.
Not you are my God.
Not even you will take me to God.
But something closer to:
Being with you makes me believe I can travel all the way there. And perhaps, beside me, you can too.
To have that much faith in the person you love, not blind faith in their perfection, but faith in what life alongside them could allow both of you to become.
Oh.
That is the kind of spiritualism in love I understand.
And then:
“O jag diyan nazran buriyan, o sir utton mirchan kara de dholna.”
The world has an evil eye, so come, let me ward it off you.
And I love this too, for an entirely different reason.
It is such an ordinary, domestic expression of affection.
The superstition itself doesn’t even matter. We’ve all seen versions of it in Indian households — mirchi, nazar utaarna, the little black kajal dot on someone’s face because they look too beautiful or too happy, and God forbid the universe notices.
It is irrational.
But affection is often irrational in these tiny, harmless ways.
You are precious to me; therefore, I must protect you — even from things I don’t entirely know exist.
There is something unbearably tender about that.
The next part goes into the usual lovers-being-so-obsessed-that-they-see-each-other-everywhere. Sweet, certainly, but blahh. You can listen to the song yourself.
What stayed with me were these two Punjabi passages.
And I think I finally understand why.
I don’t dislike romance.
I dislike romance that takes attraction, puts a sherwani on it, sprinkles some divine vocabulary over it and asks me to believe it has suddenly become profound.
Attraction is attraction. Lust is lust. Both are perfectly good things. They don’t need to pretend to be sacred to deserve a place in human relationships.
But love?
If you are going to call something love, then give me something more.
Give me desire, yes — but also tenderness.
Give me sex, but give me the person afterwards.
Give me attraction, but also companionship.
Give me someone whose hair can make me momentarily stupid, certainly, but also someone whose presence makes me want to become more, become better.
Give me somebody I can desire without pretending desire is destiny, and somebody I can love without pretending reality has ceased to exist.
Let the world remain exactly where it is. Keep the mahal, minaare, suraj and taare. We might need them.
Just give me a love that exists among all of it.
A love grounded enough to know that we are two ordinary biological creatures who want each other, and profound enough that, somewhere in the middle of all that ordinary humanity, we can live, stumble, learn, fail, grow and keep becoming, side by side, until perhaps each of us reaches the highest state of consciousness we are capable of.
Yeah.
I think I could believe in romance like that.
