Why Love
Is Blind.

A friend stays with a man who has broken every promise he ever made, and somebody says it over tea. What to do, love is blind.

A mother keeps clearing the debts of a son who has never held a job for a full year, and the neighbours shrug. Love is blind.

You have used it yourself, probably this month, probably about someone you are worried about. Three easy words that close a conversation nobody wants to keep having.

Most people assume the phrase is English and literary. It is much older than that, and it is not a proverb at all. It is the description of a wound, and there is a name attached to it.

There was an emperor named Bali. You already know him. Every year Kerala waits for him to come home and calls the waiting Onam.

Bali was an asura, and that word is badly served by the word demon. Read it as builder. The asuras were the engineers of the old world, the ones who wanted palaces and gardens and comfort and glory. Bali wanted all of it and got all of it. He was generous, he was brave, he kept his word, and his rituals made him so strong that he pushed the gods out of heaven and sat on the throne himself.

Standing beside him, as he had stood for years, was his family priest. Shukracharya.

You should know who this priest was, because it changes everything that follows. He was the son of the sage Bhrigu and possibly the most learned being alive at the time. He could have served the gods and lived comfortably forever. He went to the losing side instead, because the gods already had a teacher and an army and three great lords watching over them, and the asuras had nobody at all.

Then he did something stranger. He performed penance so severe that Mahadev appeared and offered him anything he wanted. Anything. And Shukra, the lord of beauty and pleasure and wealth, did not ask for a beautiful wife or a palace. He asked for the power to bring the dead back to life, because his students kept dying in battle and he could not bear it.

Hold that in your hand for the rest of this story. The man who is about to lose an eye was not a fool and was not naive. He had already given up everything easy so that people who could not protect themselves would have somebody in their corner.

While the great sacrifice was going on, a small brahmin boy walked up to the gate. Short, young, nothing in his hands but a water pot and a wooden umbrella.

The court smiled. A child had come to beg from an emperor. Bali, who had never turned anyone away in his life, was delighted. Ask, little one. Land, gold, cows, villages. Ask.

The boy said he wanted three paces of land. As much as he could cover in three steps.

Everybody laughed. Shukracharya did not.

A priest of his rank does not see with his eyes alone, and what he saw standing at the gate was not a child. It was Vishnu, wearing the shape of one. The three steps were not three steps of land. They were the earth, the sky, and everything Bali had ever built.

He pulled his king aside. Do not grant this. I am telling you plainly. That is not a boy. Refuse him.

And Bali, who loved his teacher and believed him, said the thing that ruined him. I have already given my word. He was not fooled. He was told the truth and he understood it, and he would rather lose the world than break a promise made to someone standing at his door with empty hands.

One small piece of ritual knowledge, or the rest of this will not land.

A gift is not finished when you say it. It is finished when the water falls. The giver pours from the kamandalu over the receiver's hand, and only when that water touches down is the promise sealed, in this world and in the other one.

So Bali lifted the pot.

And Shukracharya did something no dignified teacher should ever do. He shrank himself to the size of an insect, crawled into the spout of the water pot, and jammed himself there so that nothing could come out.

Stay with that picture for a moment. The greatest scholar of his age, the man who could raise the dead, curled up inside a spout like a stone in a drain, hiding, holding his breath, buying his student one more minute.

That is what love looks like when it is cornered. Not roses and not poetry. A person making himself small and ugly and hidden because he cannot bear to stand back and watch.

The pot would not pour. Bali shook it. Nothing came.

And the little boy, who was not a little boy, looked at the pot and understood at once. He picked up a blade of kusha grass from the sacrificial floor, sharp as a needle, and pushed it into the spout to clear the blockage.

It went straight into Shukracharya's eye.

He came tumbling out of the pot with blood on his face and half his sight gone forever. The water fell. The promise sealed. The boy grew until his head passed the sky, covered the earth in one step and heaven in the second, and asked where he should put the third. Bali bowed his head and offered it. And from that day, in every carving and every old painting, the teacher of the asuras is shown with one eye. Ekanetra. The one-eyed one.

Now read the story again, because this is where almost everyone gets it backwards.

Shukracharya saw perfectly. He was the only person in that entire hall who saw. Every minister, every guard, every scholar and the emperor himself looked at a harmless child, and he identified Vishnu in disguise. His sight was flawless.

He did not lose his eye because he could not see. He lost his eye because he loved.

The blindness was not the cause. The blindness was the bill.

That is a much harder thing to swallow than the greeting card version. Love does not fog your eyes. Love makes you willing to lose them. It makes you climb into the spout knowing it is undignified, knowing it will probably fail, knowing there is something sharp on its way, and do it anyway, because the alternative is standing back with clean hands.

Every one of us knows somebody doing this right now.

The mother who has cleared her son's debts four times and will clear them a fifth. She is not confused. She knows exactly what he is. She simply cannot bring herself to let him fall.

The wife who has heard the same promise for eleven years. She is not naive. Ask her privately and she will describe her husband more accurately than his own brother could.

They are all in the spout. All of them saw the boy at the gate. All of them said something once and were not listened to. And all of them are still holding on, because that is what love does when it is cornered.

Love is blind gets used to wave away things that should never be waved away. Somebody being frightened in their own home is not a love story, and no amount of mythology makes it one. If a person is being harmed, those three words are not wisdom. They are a wall built across a conversation that needs to happen.

Notice that Shukracharya warned his king. He did not sit in respectful silence and call it devotion. He spoke, clearly, to the most powerful man in the world, knowing it would not be welcome.

The story asks for the eye and the love together. It never asks you to hand over the eye and call the loss romantic.