Three Thousand Years Of Longing

Tonight I watched the movie Three Thousand Years of Longing. It was based on a short story, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye by AS Byatt. As it so happens, I have almost always travelled from books to their movie counterparts, shunning the later. But this time it was the other way round. Has my opinion changed though, are movies better than the books? Nein, nein, nein! Like a true Nazi I would die defending the fact that the movie adaptations do nothing but malinger the story. You see, a good story needs not to be just read, seen or heard but to be tasted, touched and enveloped forever in the warmth of our hearts. So do you believe any sort of televised and brutally shortened version would be able to render the nuisances of a tale, that is in it’s entirety a character by itself?

However that is not what am here to talk about. I am in my own way going to malinger the essence of the captivating story I have just read. Yes, after watching the movie I downloaded the book and read the short story, hence preserving my original judgement.

A Djinn is freed from a bottle and asks the woman to ask of him three wishes that were her heart’s desire. Availing the wishes would set him free. But this lady is quite content, you see. A narratologist and drunk on stories, she has nothing but a thirst for the tales unknown, of untraversed kingdoms and palaces she has never read or heard about before. And so the Djinn in an attempt to persuade her, begins recounting his past. How he was in love with the Queen Sheba and how love brutally trapped him time and again thus imprisoning him for three thousand years. Until he landed in Gillian’s hands.

What does a woman, content with her life ask for? What does a woman want? As it turns out, what she desired the most was Love. No points for guessing, you geniuses! Love is what we all desire.

What matters however is what we do with the love we find. Do we make it our slave, to do our hearts bidding? Do we cage it in a golden palace and profess kindness for the act? Do we become a prisoner ourselves in turn? And what about the times when it scars us to the soul and we wish it were forgotten, eternally erased from our memories!

Does love set us free or is it the other way around?

I am by my very nature motivated to find a comforting place where I can curl up and sleep. So I sleep the way I was in my mother’s womb and need to be surrounded by warmth all around. If someone were to tell me that I slept wrong and might damage my spine, I would entertain their blatant breach of my personal space for a minute or so, and then call on their bullshit. My primary source of entertainment in conversations such as these is the wasted breath of the well meaning morons.

So when it comes to sleeping positions, I stick to my nature and find true bliss.

But when it comes to the matters of love, if I were to go according to my design as I always have, I would find myself gathering the broken pieces of my heart time and again.

A lot like the Djinn in our story.

Ain’t no Aladdin ka Chirag imprisoning me but I consciously choose to lock myself up. Towards what end? My own destruction it seems. Like the genie once wished to be trapped forever in the bottle as he was too much in love with his master.

As fate would have it, our Djinn finally finds himself into the hands of his liberator.

Again, he doesn’t want to be free. He has fallen in love, you see.

But this time his self confessed idiocy won’t give. And off she sets him free!

And it is only when he’s liberated does he understand finally what it means to be loved. And that you cannot possibly love someone unless you’ve learned to love yourself first. We all know this, don’t we? Then why is this particular story so special?

Well it is so because it taught me a truly valuable lesson, one that has generated much hope in my faint heart. I learned that the ones who truly love you will never even for a second wish to keep you for themselves. Yes. Sounds antithetical but it’s true. Possession is not love. Love is liberation.

Swami Ji keeps saying this all the time, “Do not look at me, look at Sri Hari because He is constant, I am not.” Or when he says, “If some day it so happens that you wish to leave me, I would be more than delighted to let you go, for I would consider my work done and you would be ready to move on to better things.”

How heartbreaking that our beloved could be such a Nirmohi! Does he not know that we all see Sri Hari in Him. Dare I say that we love Swami more than we love Sri Hari!

Of course He knows. Of course we are idiots.

We wish to be imprisoned forever in a bottle like the Djinn madly in love. Like fools we dread a time when He might let go of our hands, not knowing He would only do so when we’re ready. Like scared little rats, we cry out in desperation “Do not let go of me!” 

Our beloved knows better. And hence, as He provides us an anchor for troubled times, He also rows us past the silent grateful seas to sunlit horizons. Like a mother gently and gradually weaning the baby off her milk, nourishing and making us capable of feeding ourselves at the same time.
Because the greatest wish of Love is liberation from this cycle of longing!

And so from this moment forth, am beginning to draft a new prayer. One that goes along the lines of..

“ Your love is liberation

and hence do as you please.

My gratitude is infinite only second to your grace.

My Beloved, if you so wish, set me free!”

PS: If anyone had this movie on their watch list and think I have spoiled it for them, you’re welcome to issue a death warrant in my name. However, do so only after you’ve watched the movie/read the short story. I await your sentence.