Fitoor!

I was sixteen, and in school we were being taken through Great Expectations and Wuthering Heights side by side. For obvious reasons, many of us girls had sided with the frost and fire of the latter. Pip to me had remained the little orphan boy, the lost lover, the ungrateful child... someone who was intriguing, undeniably, but not enough to lose your sleep over.

It was not just that, perhaps, too. Somehow, at some phase in our formative years, you are taught to fear passion in a way so disguised that today you cannot even look back and point your finger. If you have been endlessly in love, something – I don’t know what – teaches you to not be so. They teach you vulnerability is bad, they teach you that putting your entire life, entire happiness on the hinge of one man’s whim is unwise; dangerous, even. 



And you learn! So did I. 



When I read Great Expectations, as I look back now, I suppose I too had learned more from Miss Havisham’s sufferings than from Pip’s incredible, innocent longing. I had since then, many times over, quoted how Miss Havisham spoke of love:

“I'll tell you," said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, "what real love it. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter - as I did!”