Conversations With My Love is love talk from a raised realm

Grown-ups can more easily confess to having cheated on the love of their lives than confess to having indulged in reading love stories. Grown-ups are complex. They say the same of love, mostly mistaking relationship for love.

In arranged set-ups, we are told, love follows relationship. In the set-ups of love, it is difficult to say what follows what.

Ultimately, we are told, love goes out of the window. Not many people will say they are looking for love for the fear of being judged as immature or not having grown up at all. The ‘mature’ call it companionship now, even as they look for love in that companionship without naming it thus.

Rajiv Kapoor’s book Conversations With My Love makes no bones about calling love love. He says, “Seldom is the idea of love less beautiful than love itself.” We say seldom is a book on love less beautiful than love.

Kapoor’s book revolves around two characters based in the US, one an MNC professional, the other an artist. They meet. They talk. They come to love what they are experiencing in those conversations even as they struggle to decide at which point they should confess to being in love and say, ‘I love you.’

There are ‘splendid dinners, abundant red wine and elegant candles’ over conversations of religion, money, career, families, marriage and children. There are couple trips to New York, to Dallas, to Las Vegas, there are those customary meetings with each other’s parents. The two converse even in their silence. If you are looking for major twists in the tale, they don’t come. The book focuses on conversations between two mature individuals, through letters, texts and one-to-one conversations. The characters talk from a raised realm. Those in love may find easy to connect. Those who have grown out of it may find it difficult to believe.

Kapoor, a US-based banking professional, combines the prosaic conversations with a rich dose of poetry. His characters remain unnamed in terms of nouns. They find their names as ‘I’ and ‘She’ in pronouns. The ‘I’ and ‘She’ manage to reveal enough about themselves through the conversations, so that their going unnamed doesn’t appear odd. Families are mentioned by their relationship – mother, father and brother.

‘I’ talks to ‘She’ and sometimes for clarity on what he thinks about ‘her’, he talks to Krishna, whose votary he is. He is part Hindu, part Sikh. She is a Catholic. They discuss their differences of religions, of hobbies, of money, of food. Nothing appears to be an impediment because they always ‘talk it out’.

There is a certain lightness to reading the conversations which is reminiscent of being in love for the first time when you walk as if you are flying. Only, ‘I’ is not in love for the first time. He has been in love before but has found ‘true love’ now in ‘She’.

Conversations With My Love is a happy book that doesn’t go into the complexities of a relationship. It is a book about love, after all.

You can read it without telling anyone.

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