Just like most popular child protagonists are orphans—Harry Potter, Oliver Twist, Tom Sawyer, Pollyanna, Anne of the Green Gables, Judy of Daddy-Long-Legs—the best love stories are those where boy meets girl and one of them dies. Once dismissed as sick-lit where the boy or girl or both boy and girl die, publishers soon caught on to the commercial sexiness of terminal illnesses on the page.
Either the dying are pale and brave or they are nauseatingly cheerful, but they are always, always witty. First they must convince the reader of their utter indifference to rom-coms; they are looking to live, not love. They are not cruising in a chick-lit lane, waiting to be smitten! The infatuation just takes them—and us—by surprise. The banter is first-rate but their real job is to clutch their chest and go ow ow ow sooner or later.
Grand Passion meets fatal infection. Obviously, everything is more magical, more memorable because soon, very soon, someone is going to be no more. The whole trend started with that Romeo dude and Juliet babe. Shakespeare killed off one, said oops, not dead, killed the other, and said, there, did it, now both are gone.
From Love Story by Erich Segal to The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, the besotted parties mouth profoundly meaningful and impossibly beautiful lines to each other just before one of them pops it. Para after para of pretty language rushes readers to the poignant ending—we all know there’s a funeral to plan.
Sometimes we have to make do with near-death, that is, the hero or heroine doesn’t actually pass away. One party almost departs, but just when we are reaching for our hankies, they totter up weakly and say they are fine, after all. In The Big Sick, there’s a girl in a coma and a guy who is Asian; love does not bring them together, sickness does.
Remember Mughal-e-Azam? It was the mother of all heart emojis. That actors Dilip Kumar and Madhubala had a real-life thing going only added to the explosive chemistry on screen. The heroine is all, like, kill me because I can’t stop loving, but then in a twist in the tale, the disapproving dad lets her live, as long as she is kept far away from the hero. Daastan-e-Mughal-e-Azam, written by journalist Rajkumar Keswani and published by Manjul Publishing House on the 60th anniversary of this film’s making, takes us on a tour behind the scenes. A book on a movie about a historical crush that is even today a byword for all that’s lovey-dovey and gave us the amour anthem: ‘Pyar kiya toh darna kya...’
It is mandatory to have one party garrulous while the other is allowed to be all brooding and monosyllabic, in classic introvert-extrovert pairing. In the film Me Before You, the man opts for euthanasia and nothing the love of his life says can make him change his mind. In the novel Wuthering Heights, lover boy is caught talking to his beloved’s ghost, for she is already deceased at the story’s start. The literary couple is conscious of their destiny from the moment they meet. Walking into the sunset like good sports, their eyes meet the author’s just before they tip over. To misquote Tennyson, theirs not to reason why, theirs just to do and die.
The author can be contacted at shinieantony@gmail.com