A Little Rain, A Little Moonlight, and the Things We Fall in Love With
ये नैना, ये काजल, ये ज़ुल्फ़ें, ये आँचल
खूबसूरत सी हो तुम ग़ज़ल।
कभी दिल हो कभी धड़कन
कभी शोला, कभी शबनम
तुम ही हो तुम मेरी हमदम।
I was listening to this old Hindi classic by Kishore Da a little while ago. And while listening to him singing about naina, kajal, zulfein and aanchal — the eyes, the kohl, the tresses and the loose end of a saree — somewhere between those familiar words, a thought occurred to me.
Why is it that when we begin to like someone, we start noticing the smallest things about them?
Not necessarily the things that would attract everyone’s attention. We begin to notice the way they arrange their hair, the way they adjust their glasses, the little pause before they answer a question, the particular way they laugh, or how their expression changes when they are listening to something they genuinely enjoy. We begin to notice things that, until recently, would probably have passed us by.
Love is perhaps too strong a word to introduce at this stage. I am talking about something much more ordinary: the beginning of an attachment, the early stages of liking somebody.
And isn’t there something rather ironic about this?
We usually think of love as a more complex emotion than liking. We imagine that as affection deepens, our understanding of a person becomes broader, more profound, and perhaps even more philosophical. But what actually happens to our attention? It moves in the opposite direction. We begin with the larger picture and gradually move towards the smaller details.
We notice the person, and then their eyes. We notice their appearance, and then the way a strand of hair falls across their forehead. We begin by liking someone’s presence and eventually find ourselves remembering the precise expression they made while saying something entirely ordinary.
Perhaps affection does not always make us discover more extraordinary things about someone. Perhaps it makes ordinary things extraordinarily noticeable.
And this doesn’t happen only with people.
First, We Like the Book. Then, We Fall in Love With It.
Think about a book you genuinely love.
The first time you read it, you are usually occupied with the larger things: the plot, the characters, the central conflict, the philosophical arguments, the questions the author is trying to raise. You want to know what happens next. You want to understand what the book is trying to tell you.
You begin to like the book. You find its ideas interesting, its characters compelling, and its writing beautiful. And then, slowly, something changes. You return to it. You read a paragraph again. Perhaps a chapter. Sometimes you open the book without any particular reason, just to revisit a passage you remember.
And somewhere along the way, liking the book turns into something closer to loving it.
Interestingly, the same process that happens when we become attached to a person begins to repeat itself here.
As our affection for the book deepens, our attention changes. We are no longer reading merely to discover what happens. We already know what happens. Instead, we start noticing how it happens. We become interested in the smaller details, the silences between conversations, the expressions of a character, a seemingly insignificant sentence, or an observation that we might have overlooked during the first reading.
We begin reading between the lines.
I remember experiencing something similar while reading Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
The first time I read it, I was occupied with the grand architecture of the novel: Anna’s marriage, Vronsky, the hypocrisies of respectable society, the restrictions imposed on women, Levin’s search for meaning, and the larger questions of love, morality and happiness. It is difficult not to be overwhelmed by the scale of the book. Tolstoy gives you an entire society to examine.
But when I think about the novel now, one of the scenes that stays with me is remarkably small.
There is a moment between Levin and Kitty in which they communicate by writing the initial letters of words on a card table. Levin writes a question. Kitty understands it. She responds in the same abbreviated language. They slowly decipher each other’s thoughts, sentence by sentence, without needing to say everything aloud.
The scene is beautiful not because of some grand declaration of love, but because of the familiarity between two people who have begun to understand one another so well that even fragments of words are enough.
On a first reading, one might simply recognise it as an important moment in their relationship. On returning to it, one begins to appreciate something else: the trust, the hesitation, the glances, the little movements of the hand, and the remarkable intimacy of being understood without having to explain oneself completely.
The scene is almost an argument for the beauty of small things.
And perhaps this is what happens when we grow attached to a book. We move from wanting to understand its meaning to wanting to spend time in its company. We stop looking only for what the author has written and start noticing how it has been written.
The details were always there. Our attention had simply not been ready for them.
Perhaps this is also why we sometimes reread books we have already read. We are not necessarily looking for a new story. We are looking for a new experience of the same story, because we ourselves are no longer quite the same readers.
The Rain Hasn’t Changed. Something Has Changed in Us.
Another old Bollywood song came to mind:
बड़े अच्छे लगते हैं, ये धरती, ये नदिया, ये रैना… और तुम।
The song doesn’t merely describe the person being addressed. It places that person alongside the earth, the river and the night.
And this brings me to something even more fascinating.
When we fall in love, or perhaps even when we begin to feel strongly attached to someone, the world around us seems to become more beautiful.
We have witnessed rain throughout our lives. We have seen the moon rise countless times. We have watched sunsets, walked beside rivers and experienced pleasant evenings long before we knew what it meant to miss someone.
Yet, at some point, these familiar things begin to feel different.
A rainy evening becomes something worth remembering. A beautiful moon makes us think of somebody. A particular flower, perhaps a tulip, suddenly reminds us of someone. A song seems to describe an experience we have never quite managed to put into words.
Why?
Why does a familiar rain suddenly feel romantic? Why does a flower become more beautiful when we associate it with someone? Why does a moonlit night make us want to share the moment with another person?
I might be wrong, and I certainly don’t claim to know everything. In fact, the more I read and observe, the more conscious I become of how little I know. But this is how I have come to understand it.
I think our experience of the world is never entirely independent of our inner lives. We don’t simply observe things, we attach meanings to them. Our memories, emotions, expectations and experiences participate in the way we see almost everything.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons human beings are so fond of finding meaning in ordinary things. We don’t always experience an object merely for what it is. Sometimes we experience it for what it reminds us of, for the memory it carries, or for the feeling it helps us recognise.
A flower is a flower. But a tulip given to us by someone we love is no longer merely a tulip. It carries a particular afternoon, a particular conversation, and a particular person. A rainy evening can be just another rainy evening, but it can also become the evening we remember for years because someone was beside us.
The object remains the same, its emotional significance changes.
And perhaps there is something more to it. When we love someone, we begin to wish that they could experience the things we find beautiful. We don’t just want to see a beautiful sunset, we want them to see it with us. We don’t just want to listen to a song, we want them to listen to it, too. And it works the other way around as well. We find ourselves wanting to listen to the songs they love, visit the places they cherish, read the books that have stayed with them, and witness the things that make their eyes light up. We become curious about what the world looks like through their eyes. In a way, we don’t just want to share our world with them, we want to enter theirs, too. And perhaps that is what makes sharing such an intimate part of affection: two people gradually begin to make room for each other’s worlds.
Maybe love expands the boundaries of our attention. We start seeing beauty in things we had previously taken for granted, partly because we have acquired the desire to share that beauty with someone else.
And the reverse happens, too. Sometimes we witness a beautiful landscape, a quiet night or a sudden spell of rain, and our first instinct is to think of someone. We want to share the moment with them. Their absence becomes particularly noticeable precisely when everything around us seems so beautiful.
Consider another classic Bollywood song:
ये रातें, ये मौसम, नदी का किनारा, ये चंचल हवा…
Why do nights, weather, rivers and gentle winds so frequently find themselves in songs about two people? Why does a beautiful evening seem to demand the presence of someone we love?
Perhaps because our emotions don’t always remain confined to the person who inspires them. They spill into the surroundings. A person becomes associated with a place, a season, a flower, a smell, a song, or even a particular quality of light.
Eventually, the world becomes full of reminders.
We may have been looking at the moon for years, but now it reminds us of someone. We may have passed a flower shop a hundred times, but now a particular flower makes us pause.
The moon hasn’t changed. The flower hasn’t changed. The rain hasn’t become any different.
Something in us has changed.
When the Moon Becomes a Witness
This association between love and nature is certainly older than the Bollywood songs I have mentioned.
In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, written most likely around 1595-96, Juliet cautions Romeo against swearing by the moon:
O, swear not by the moon, th’ inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.
It is a fascinating moment. Romeo reaches for the moon as a witness to his love, but Juliet rejects it precisely because the moon changes. She fears that a promise made under something so changeable might itself prove unreliable.
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Notice what Shakespeare is doing here. The moon is not simply a beautiful object in the night sky. Its changing phases become a way of speaking about the uncertainty of human devotion.
Nature becomes a language through which human beings try to understand their emotions.
And then there is Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Catherine Earnshaw says of Heathcliff:
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
It is one of the most famous declarations of attachment in English literature. But what makes Brontë’s writing particularly interesting is how deeply the landscape of the Yorkshire moors is woven into the emotional world of the characters.
The winds, the heath, the cold, the storms and the isolation are not merely background scenery. They seem to participate in the emotional atmosphere of the novel. The landscape reflects the wildness and turbulence of the human relationships within it.
Of course, the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff is far from a simple or healthy ideal of love. But that is precisely what makes the novel interesting: the intensity of human attachment and the untamed landscape seem to speak the same language.
Perhaps we have always found it easier to describe certain emotions by borrowing the vocabulary of nature.
We speak of a storm inside us, a spring in someone’s presence, a winter of loneliness, a moonlit night of longing. We describe love as warmth, grief as darkness, and hope as sunlight. We compare people to flowers, their presence to spring, their absence to autumn.
These are not merely decorative metaphors. They are attempts to translate something difficult to explain into something we can see, touch, hear or remember.
And I think this deserves a little more attention.
Human emotions are abstract, often contradictory and sometimes frustratingly difficult to articulate. We may know that we miss someone without knowing how to explain the precise nature of that longing. We may feel deeply attached to someone without being able to put that attachment into a sentence.
But we know what rain feels like. We know what a cold winter evening looks like. We know the sight of a flower opening, the warmth of sunlight on our skin, and the strange quietness of a moonlit night.
So we borrow these experiences.
We take something internal and give it an external form. We turn longing into rain, devotion into sunlight, separation into winter and hope into spring. We give our feelings a landscape because sometimes a landscape can express what language, on its own, struggles to capture.
Perhaps that is one of the most remarkable things art does. It doesn’t necessarily explain an emotion to us, it gives us something through which we can recognise it.
And once we have learnt that language, we begin to use it in our own lives. We no longer need a poet to tell us that a particular evening is beautiful. We have learnt to see it that way.
A Summer Hidden Somewhere Inside Us
Albert Camus offers another interesting way of looking at this relationship between the external world and our inner lives.
In his essay Return to Tipasa, reflecting on his return to the ancient ruins of Tipasa in Algeria, Camus writes:
In the midst of winter, I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.
It is a beautiful line, often quoted as a statement about resilience. Camus is describing the discovery of an inner vitality that remains possible even after periods of darkness, suffering and disillusionment.
What interests me is the way he arrives at this realisation. He returns to a physical landscape — the ruins, the Mediterranean light, the sea and the natural beauty of Tipasa — and finds something within himself.
The external world becomes a way of recognising an internal condition.
Perhaps that is also what happens when we associate rain with someone we love. We are not necessarily responding to the weather alone. We are responding to what that weather has come to represent within us.
There is another passage by Camus that I find particularly fascinating, this time from The Fall. While describing the people of Amsterdam, he writes about them being surrounded by canals, fog, cold lands and the sea, before adding:
I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.
Camus is speaking about the Dutch people and their capacity to inhabit two places at once: the physical world around them and the world of their thoughts and dreams.
I don’t want to force his words into a discussion about romantic love. That is not what the passage is directly about. But I find the observation remarkably useful here.
A person can be physically present in one place while emotionally inhabiting another.
We sit in a room, but our thoughts are elsewhere. We walk through a familiar street, but remember someone who once walked beside us. We look at the rain falling outside and, without any deliberate effort, find ourselves thinking of a person who is not even there.
Perhaps this is what it means to be double in a rather ordinary human sense: to occupy the present while carrying another world inside us.
And love, or even the memory of it, can make that second world particularly vivid.
Who Taught Us to Fall in Love With the Moon?
There is one more question I find myself returning to.
Do we associate nature with love because these things naturally belong together? Or have centuries of poetry, music, painting and literature taught us to experience them together?
I suspect the answer is somewhere between the two.
Human beings have always experienced longing, affection, separation and desire. But the ways in which we express and understand those emotions are also shaped by the cultural worlds we inherit.
Think about how often a song places two people beside a river, beneath a moon, during a spell of rain or on a quiet evening. Think about the number of poems that use flowers, seasons, winds and changing skies to describe the movement of the human heart.
We grow up listening to these songs, reading these poems and watching these scenes. Gradually, we acquire an emotional vocabulary.
A moonlit night becomes romantic partly because we have encountered it so many times through the language of romance. Rain becomes an occasion for longing because art has repeatedly taught us to associate it with memory, companionship and separation. A flower becomes a token of affection not merely because it is beautiful, but because generations of people have used flowers to express feelings that words sometimes cannot.
We inherit these associations, and then we add our own memories to them.
This is where I would like to take this thought a little further.
In European intellectual and artistic history, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a movement that came to be known as Romanticism. It was much larger than romantic love. It challenged the dominance of reason and order in the Enlightenment and placed greater emphasis on imagination, emotion, individual experience and the power of nature.
The natural world was no longer simply something to describe or classify. It could be something to feel, something that reflected the inner life of an individual.
I find this transition fascinating. At some point, art began to do more than represent the world around us. It increasingly offered people ways of experiencing that world through their emotions.
Perhaps the next question is not merely why we associate rain, moonlight, flowers and rivers with love, but how we came to learn this association in the first place.
How did songs, poems, paintings and stories turn ordinary landscapes into romantic experiences? How did the moon become a witness to promises, rain a companion to longing, flowers the messengers of affection, and a particular evening something worth remembering for the rest of one’s life?
That is a story worth exploring in its own right. And perhaps it takes us towards what we might call a romantic revolution — not simply a revolution in whom we love, but in how we learn to look at the world.
The Moon Came Back. You Didn’t.
I think of one last song.
It is not about the beginning of love, but about its absence. About someone who knows that the person they are waiting for may never return, and yet finds themselves waiting.
ये रात कहती है वो दिन गए तेरे
ये जानता है दिल के तुम नहीं मेरे
खड़ी मैं हूँ फिर भी निगाहें बिछाए
मैं क्या करूँ हाय के तुम याद आए
चाँद फिर निकला, मगर तुम न आए
जला फिर मेरा दिल, करूँ क्या मैं हाय…
The moon has appeared again. The night has returned. The world is continuing its ordinary business.
But someone is missing.
And perhaps that is the other side of everything I have been trying to understand. When we fall in love, the world becomes beautiful because we begin to associate it with someone. When we lose that person, or simply find ourselves separated from them, the same world becomes a collection of reminders.
The moon does not know whom we are waiting for. The rain does not know whose memory it has brought back. The flower has no idea why someone has preserved it between the pages of a book. The night has no particular interest in our longing.
And yet, somehow, we continue to find ourselves in all of them.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about human beings is not that we fall in love with other people, but that, somewhere along the way, we begin to see the entire world through the possibility of sharing it with them.
And perhaps that is why, in the end, we remember not only the person, but the rain that fell, the flower we noticed, the song that played, the evening that passed, and the little things we might otherwise have forgotten.
That’s all.
And until the next song… شب خیر :)
