By Stuti Sharma, ISC Batch of 2021
Two years ago, sitting on the bench outside the fourth residence hall at my college, I realised that I had fallen in love for the first time. It was a surprisingly clear night in Sonipat, and I watched the sky with him – both of us attempting to make sense of each other, staring at the provocatively crescent moon. We decided it was much easier than maintaining eye contact. The moon had a reddish undertone, maybe because it realised we had been watching it for a while. My mother prepared me for all of the world’s dullness with bedtime stories about mythology passed down from her mother. The only thing she didn’t prepare me for was where to put my hands when blood flushes into my cheeks unexpectedly and she isn’t there to convince me that it’s just because of the weather. I was too young to fall in love. It couldn’t be.
I darted my eyes at anything and everything around me that did not resemble a set of ocean eyes that I would instantly drown in.
The moon was a safe and familiar distraction. I stayed with it. I hoped it would stay with me too.
It reminded me of my mom.
The first time I ever heard of the chukar partridge was in her voice on a primary school night, back when I was still scared of the trees outside my window being monsters. She spoke of the chukar as fondly as she did of her childhood best friend.
I had never bothered to look up the appearance of this bird. It didn’t occur to be relevant to me, in any way, until that night.
The only thing I did know about the chukar was its love for the moon. With feathers that look like a veil covering its frontal part, it chases every inch of land the moon shines its light on.
Also lovingly called the chakori, it has eyes that look like they’re surrounded by red glasses to gaze at the ignorant object of its affection. Its light brown breast and grey back complement very well, the moonlight that it allows itself to shine in. If you watched it move, you’d wonder if it had had a little too much for lunch. It doesn’t move from a patch of moonlight if it finds one. It stays there and dreams unstoppably. The chakori will scream to the moon and curse it for being so distant. She’s angry but she also easily submits to his unnecessary charm.
He has been a constant wherever she goes.
She wants him to watch her the exact same way.
She craves its silver lining in her barren, cold vastness.
The moon has no clue.
Although it’s the national bird of Pakistan, it is also found in many places in India, specifically the western Himalayan belt. She has slithered her way into Radha-Krishna bhajans, Hindu mythology, folktales and a lot of stories that my mother told me. It has had a special relationship with my mother – because of their rendezvous at my mother’s house in Himachal – a favourite abode of the chakori. My mom grew up with this bird.
I have never seen it.
Mumma would tell me a lot of stories about the moon – from singing lalla lalla lori, chaand ki katori when I had trouble sleeping, to narrating how lord Ganesha cursed the moon for mocking his belly. I had read about the man on the moon and about the moon princess who descended to the bamboo cutter one night. Most of the stories she told me, and the ones I read about the moon starred it as its own main character. But I have never heard a story about the chakori without a reference to the moon.
Why?
Why can’t the chakori be separated from the moon, when he could simply never be hers? Why does the chakori actively make this choice, each waking moment?
I come from a lineage of women who find spiritual satisfaction in caring for their male counterparts and loving them in ways only goddesses could love their gods. My father cannot go a day without my mother’s hand on his chest, which he claims is his jadibuti. My grandma still watches out for my grandfather’s nonverbal gestures and silent moods before she makes a decision about what ‘she’ would like for lunch today. My sister falls gut-wrenchingly in love every time someone offers her a hug and asks her about how her day went – the kind that haunts every boy that has dared to be loved by her. They will never be loved the same.
Naturally, I have learned a definition of love as fierce as theirs. I did not know how badly the fierceness would blister me.
That night had three of us – him, me, and the moon. I was shuffling my toes because of how new and rushed and confusing and scary it was. But at least I had the moon. I like having it around as a witness not because of the cliche romantic symbol that it represents, but simply because it’s the only constant in my life. It reminds me of my mom and of belonging. I can hear her voice when I look at it. Sometimes if it tries, it looks almost as beautiful as she is. It’s the only familiar thread I can grasp, to be able to hold onto home. I don’t know how I have come so far – from when the moon had a handsome face and my mother’s hands were always on my head.
If I knew how, I would find a way to undo it.
The moon has followed me like my shadow. At least I would like to believe it has. It was the same when I would peep out of my Maruti Suzuki as a giggling girl of 5 and fantasise about it following me everywhere I went. It is the same now when I walk The Walk with another failed date with another man who liked another Instagram story from a week ago when he was lonely at a party.
This one was different, I thought. He was witty, smart, funny and tried his best to be sensitive to every opinion I had – the perfect green flag. We had been close friends for a while, and he had looked at me, on multiple occasions, like I was Venus. I had learned his favourite songs and would hum them unconsciously on my way to classes, playfully tapping my forehead every time I realised. Every trip to Delhi had transformed into a shopping spree looking for something he would adore as much as I adored him. Maybe he would realise one day, when he looked at a desk full of tiny trinkets that reminded me of him, that I loved him. Maybe they would make him love me too.
He was lovely, but he broke my heart. He came from a world different from mine, and he loved people that didn’t look like me. Which is okay. I convinced myself at the age of nineteen – when you believe you hold all of the world in the palm of your hands and dream of love and success and a gateless heaven – that it was okay. To feel like you cannot be loved by someone who you have come to love the only way you have been taught how – completely.
I understood instantly why you fall, when it’s in love.
I wanted to apologise to him each time I was reminded by the third text message I was about to send, that my love was too much to bear. That I was too much to bear. I was sorry about it each time until I remembered his favourite dish was for snacks and had to let him know.
So when his hand crawled closer to mine right after he confessed he was seeing another girl, I suddenly realised it was starting to get a little cold. Maybe the winter would be able to explain why I froze.
It wasn’t very serious with her though, it wasn’t like that. It was just fun and a passionate side thing. Also, I wasn’t his type. Long conversations with his head on my shoulder when he told me about family vacations that taught him laughter and the art of being alive – were not his type. He was flattered that someone like me would even think of this. He would still like to be my friend, though. I was crazy to think this was something like that, we had only been friends and we would only ever be that. We would never work out, and that I deserved better.
I was looking for a story to hold onto to make sense of the first time I felt completely helpless and didn’t have a home to run back to flustered. The trees hovering over us that night might have been monsters.
I suddenly had a lot that I didn’t know what to do with. I had to now find a way to return him back to himself. I was supposed to return his laughter and the way he stressed the ‘i’ in my name, back to him. I had a poem I had written once mindlessly staring at him when he was working, that I could not send to him now. It’s okay. My notes app was running out of storage anyway. There were traces of his cologne on my dress from last week and I had started wearing his favourite colour a little more. That was okay too. My wardrobe needed a redo.
I had never quite known unrequited love. I had read about it in books and watched it in movies but I had never met it until suddenly one moment I was face to face with it, and knew it like an old friend.
The chukar is a diligent lover. A distant one, definitely. But still diligent. My grandmother’s folk songs sang a lot about the bird’s repetitive calls of ‘chukar chukar’ to the moon – like an abandoned lover waiting to be touched, to be held, to be acknowledged. The calls sound anguished and expectant of something the bird knows well enough not to expect. Naturally active at night under the guise of foraging, it stops and stares in solitude, flirting with the silence of the moon.
I was crazy. He was right. How could I think this was not platonic? What about slow dancing in dim lights and asking me to hydrate myself so I don’t pass out in this unfamiliar heat is possibly platonic? It must be my fault. It always is.
I know I am just twenty. Love is not my lack, and neither is time. But how are you supposed to write about the pain of grieving something you never had and never can, when you feel crazy for grieving the could be?
The chukar only ever stares at her moon silently. She never actually attempts to get to it. She knows her place, and she is graceful enough to make peace with it. She yearns longingly, but from a respectable distance. How foolish of me to try my luck.
She will never stop loving him, I don’t think it’s in her feather to. But she also knows everyone is crazy for the moon. They realise it is uneven and cratered. So deeply imperfect, so narcissistic, disconnected and so far away. Yet, they are for the moon.
She will still sleep only in his light, drink only his water, cry and yearn ferociously, as loud as she can, during the new moon, but she will know it will only ever just be her, all by herself.
She knows there are a million other chakoris.
She also knows there is only one chanda.
So every now and then, I look into the mirror.
I have never seen the chakori before.
Every now and then, I look at him.
My mother never taught me how to fall out of love.
It’s okay.
I will always have the moon.
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