What I learnt from haunted places about love
The places that are eerie by the night have a rare beauty about them in the day, a quiet confidence as they foreground their brokenness for all to see.
The day R and I spotted Pilerne Lake, I may have taken fewer breaths. It was so vast, so quiet, and so hauntingly beautiful, a phrase certainly coined in honor of a place like this. It was green as far as the eye could see. The sun was eager to set, and a dull sky enveloped it from all sides. A large board at the entrance of the lake labeled it a birding site, but no birdcall fell on our ears. The next few times we went, I would spot a total of five egrets, a few cows, a flycatcher, a dragonfly, and broken beer bottles. We visited it often in the evenings when the town was winding down, the shops were shutting, and the egg-bun seller on the bicycle was going home with a few buns unsold. At this time, Pilerne Lake looked like a ghost. As if covering it was not green marsh but a thick shadow of its past, penetrating which would require a reversal of time.
The only other people we ever spotted there were another young couple.
Years ago, I visited Agrasen's Baoli, an old, famously haunted stepwell in Delhi. It was filled with lovers, most of them young, college-going kids. It isn’t a coincidence that lovers make a home in the ghostliest places in town.Â
For one, where else can people find more privacy than a place no one else dares visit? And two, what has more audacity than love?
But there’s more. I think lovers have a deep relationship with the past, of the things that haunt the people we love, and over time, we come to see them very clearly. We come to see them with eyes that are kinder, with care instead of fear.
Lovers also share a kinship with crevices, shards, and mysteries we are not desperate to solve; a kinship with the decay of time; a kinship with desolation itself, because how else did we learn to love if not with the risk of being left alone.
The path of every love crosses a haunted place or two, where we learn that completeness is not a condition for love.Â
The sun was always going down at Pilerne Lake, and this is how I had come to love it.