Hell hath no fury as lovers separated. As is obvious from the letters they have written each other when war and hardship have kept them apart. Soldiers become Shakespeares and they wax eloquent about their love. Ordinary women, to them, become Helens of Troy, with each of their features inspiring a soliloquy. Freedom fighters, drunk with love, write about how their health and happiness are diminished by the long absence from their paramours.
All this is evident from the letters which history has preserved for a Tinder generation, for whom true love has fizzled to hook-ups and booty calls. Our heroes of yore were never embarrassed by over-the-top romance. Take this letter written by Napoleon Bonaparte to his wife Josephine while he was commanding the French army near Italy: “Since I left you, I have been constantly depressed. My happiness is to be near you. Incessantly I live over in my memory your caresses, your tears, your affectionate solicitude. The charms of the incomparable Joséphine kindle continually a burning and a glowing flame in my heart.” Who would have thought the formidable general could be reduced to a blubbering Casanova by a woman’s caress?
More matter-of-fact and laced with humour are the letters written by German theologian Martin Luther to his wife Katharina when he was travelling during the thick of the Reformation. Affectionately, he would refer to her as his “deeply learned lady” or his “doctoress and self-tormentor at Wittenberg”, when she expressed concern about his health. Despite this teasing, or perhaps because of it, they had a happy marriage. Not that she had it easy. In Douglas Bond’s biographical novel Luther in Love, he records how Luther, who was 41 when he got married to the 26-year-old Katharina, had not made the bed for a year and it had become foul with the smell of his sweat, before Katharina entered his life. When she asked him why he had not changed the sheets, he looked at her bewildered. “One is meant to change them?” he asked. He had no conception of managing a household or handling money, all of which Katharina took over after the marriage.
Once, when she asked him what they were to eat, he quoted Scripture to her: “Man shall not live by bread alone.” Incensed, she retorted, “If we don’t eat, we die of hunger. A corpse cannot read the Bible.”
It is not just Katharina who always had to take second place to her husband’s cause. Indian freedom fighter Subhas Chandra Bose told his Austrian wife Emilie Schenkl that “my first love and only love is my country, so I have nothing left to give you”. They met in Vienna in June 1934 when he employed her as his typist, got married in December 1937 and saw each other for the last time in Berlin in February 1943, two months after the birth of their daughter Anita.
According to Krishna Bose, the wife of Subhas’s nephew Sisir, Subhas wrote 162 letters to Emilie between 1934 and 1942. In them, he could be moody, expressive, forthcoming or curt. He tried to explain complicated legal cases and sent her newspaper clippings. He also tried to discuss spiritual matters, asking her to get a German translation of the Gita. The most important chapter, he told her, was the second one on karma yoga, or “worship through work”.
In the letters, Subhas seems cavalier at times. Once, he tried to teach her how to write political commentaries on international relations. According to Krishna’s book Emilie and Subhas, he wanted her to be the Vienna correspondent of some Indian newspapers and magazines, but she was not inclined to it. Subhas found one of her articles to be unsatisfactory and was impatient with her. “Your article is rejected,” he wrote her. Not exactly the words of a star-crossed lover. But still, Subhas could have his moments. In one flight of fancy, he writes in capital letters after being released from prison in 1937, “NOT A SINGLE DAY PASSES THAT I DO NOT THINK OF YOU. YOU ARE WITH ME ALL THE TIME. I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I SHOULD DO IN FUTURE. I AM NOT ABLE TO DECIDE. I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW LONELY I HAVE BEEN FEELING ALL THESE MONTHS AND HOW SORROWFUL.”
And it is not just freedom fighters, revolutionaries and soldiers who write feelingly to their sweethearts in the thick of conflict. Take the story of Khawar and Iqra, two ordinary lovers from Kashmir. Their story is told poignantly in Loal Kashmir, a book by filmmaker and writer Mehak Jamal, in which she compiles 16 stories of love and longing in the conflict-torn region.
On August 4, 2019, Khawar and Iqra, who had been engaged for four years, were on a call when the line went dead. The next day, Home Minister Amit Shah announced that Article 370 was being scrapped and Kashmir put under a lockdown. Being doctors who worked in different hospitals in Kashmir, Khawar and Iqra found an ingenious way of communicating with each other: For three months, they exchanged letters through the drivers of the ambulances that plied between the two hospitals. From peons to parking attendants, everyone was clued into Iqra and Khawar’s small postal system, writes Jamal.
As these letters testify, love in the time of conflict has a truer, purer quality, perhaps lent by that edge of desperation that lovers feel amid gunshots and landmines. To understand it, I met people who forged their love in the crucible of conflict, from a couple who fell in love in a Maoist camp to an Indian-Chinese duo who had to face the repercussions when relations between the two countries worsened, with racist slurs on WhatsApp and ugly stares on public transport.
Sometimes the letters need not even be effusive or heart-warming. Occasionally, marriages made in heaven are ratified on earth by humour. Like this letter written by a pilot to his commanding officer asking for permission to get married over Zoom during the Covid lockdown, published on the blog of an Army wife.
“I regret to be dropping this bomb on you at such short notice, but as you would agree, I intend to drop a nuclear one on myself…. I hope you shall find it in your heart to forgive this reckless, evidently suicidal and absolutely amateurish blunder of a manoeuvre on my part. I also hope you will be willing to please personally witness the massacre and pay your condolences to the couple.”
The commanding officer’s reply was brief, listing the achievements of the soldier and his affection for him. “But all good things have to finally come to an end,” he concludes. “Welcome to hell.”