All's fair in love

Quaintly maybe, many still use the phrase, I give you my word; in Hindustani, zubaan di hai. I like the latter because it graphically suggests that the promise maker has given an actual part of themselves as surety that they will do as said or forever forfiet the right to say anything.

What equivalent phrases mirror the feeling we have when these promises are not kept? It is as if even language, the punctilious cataloguer of emotions, is inscrutable in response to complex betrayals, challenging us to craft new words.

Often we read about a woman suing a former lover for rape, when the relationship does not culminate in the promised end of marriage. Most recently a flight attendant filed charges against her pilot boyfriend of two years, where she agreed to have sex on the basis of his promise to marry her, a promise he didn't keep.

Legal recourse is so interestingly different from say, an acid attack. Where the latter is a blind act of revenge, the former seems a desperate search for expression or acknowledgement of itself. It's as if the long entanglements of love, replete with half-truths, interpretations and misinterpretations and deep, changing intimacies, can be equalled only by the long entanglements, manipulated truths and bitter intimacies of litigation. If rape were to be understood in the way we understand the rape of a land -- "to destroy and strip of its possession" - we might even begin to perceive, if not agree with, a certain logic here.



The English common law of torts did allow for cases where, in a broken engagement, a woman could sue a man for breach of promise. The basis lay partly in that women relied on marriage for economic stability and so in fact an implied contract had been broken; as also that social assumptions that the woman had been intimate with her fianc ufffde would affect her reputation and future matrimonial prospects. It publicly accepted that she'd been wronged, hence was good. As equality, morality and relationships have changed, such cases too have ceased.

In urban India if we go by what people wear and what we read in the supplements, we are in the throes of sexual liberation. Magazines are full of advice on the best sexual positions and how to cultivate the air of the footloose, fancy-free, lovin' and movin' on single person. The very same magazines are also full of cautious advice on how not to be seen as a "loose" or "easy" girl. It's all about how others see you. Rarely do we find a discussion of how we go about the unpredictable journey that inevitably results when we decide love is not a linear plot ending in marriage, but an open-ended narrative, which we shape by our decisions and actions. The rules that govern this are found not in law, trends or tradition, but in ethics.

Because the primary note of our times is pragmatism, it may seem quaint to invoke ethics. But morality is not about monogamy or promiscuity anymore than love is only about sex or sex only about technique. In love much is unspoken, promises made not with words but a series of expectations and implications. We have to search for ways in which to honour promises both spoken and unspoken -- not see them as an instrument of trade, where sex is exchanged for marriage -- or the false promise of one. We also have to accept that these promises can be broken -- and search for ways to break them with honour and kindness. Love is as capricious as it is magical and reserves the right always, to be unfair. But there's no reason we have to be.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer, teacher and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevi.com