Love conquers all is a trite phrase, and it is doubtful if it is true except in sweeping paperback romances. It is certainly true in Achala Moulik’s Phantom Lovers, consisting of two novellas. And why should it not? After all, if such conquering love does not exist, at least on paper, what ideal should mankind strive towards?
Moulik’s love stories―With Fate Conspire and Wait!―are set in turbulent times, one during the mutiny of 1857, and the other during the Afghan coup of 1978. Separations are inevitable, because true love must always face opposition. In the first story, it is a separation of time. A century elapses after a young British magistrate, Julian, and a zamindar’s daughter, Radha, are torn apart by the mutiny. And now, if souls are truly immortal, can their story be carried on across the frontier of time?
In the second story, the separation is of space. An Afghan academic, Rustom, and an Indian woman, Minoti, fall in love, but Rustom is compelled to return to Afghanistan when events there take a turn for the worse. He promises to return, but fate conspires to keep them apart. But can distance truly be a hindrance to the magnetic pull of love?
Moulik makes liberal use of Indian and western poetry and mysticism, with her young lovers quoting Tagore, Dante, Petrarca, Kalidasa and Banabhatta, with their “tangled tales of passion, death and reincarnation”. It is like she is deliberately sending them down a rabbit hole of these writers’ imaginations. In With Fate Conspire, for example, Tagore’s dance-drama Shapmochan―about a capricious god punishing two celestial lovers and sending them to earth until they are reunited after enduring pain―could have been the template for the story of Julian and Radha, and their descendants.
This lends the book an air of whimsy and otherworldliness. In stark contrast are the dark events against which it is set. They span from the 1857 mutiny to the Cold War and the arms race, to the Kennedy assassination to the Indo-Pak war of 1971 to, of course, the tumult in Afghanistan, when the coup by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew the government led by Prince Daoud in 1978. While violence and war simmer around them, the lovers hold steadfast, their love the only anchor in the quicksand of history.
Moulik’s language is crisp, even as she builds worlds of fantasy and furore with it. Occasionally, the connection between the story and the setting is not seamless, and one feels like one is being given a history lesson. Still, it is captivating to understand the violence that birthed our world as we know it. And the love that shone through, even as everything crumbled around it.
PHANTOM LOVERS
By Achala Moulik
Published by Niyogi Books
Price Rs595; pages 382