So much of love is lost in translations. it spills out by the time it travels from one human to another. for the man at the subway has no clue that the reason i play john legend every time he sits beside me is because i heard him humming ‘all of me’ last week. the same way my father doesn’t realize that my mother cooking his favorite Kheer is a way of apologizing for their fight last night.
love faces language barriers at our doorstep. love, sometimes, is an Urdu Ghazal dying to be understood by an Englishman. love wears a trench coat of languages so foreign to you that when you look at it from the peephole, you don’t let it in, for you think love is just another stranger who lost its way to you.
so much of love is lost in translations; like how the word ‘love’ doesn’t amount to even half of the word ‘mohabbat’. and ‘mohabbat’ doesn’t even come close to the moments spent with your mother, her fingers untangling your hair while you lay on her lap; or the times your lover took you stargazing but just couldn’t keep his eyes off you.
love takes courage and people like me don’t have it. so the next time i fall in love with someone, i hope that when they see me play their favorite songs, they’d hear a thousand i love you’s instead.
