Photographs: Courtesy Heera Nawaz
We had invited you, our dear readers, to share with us love stories of your parents.
Tell us how they met.
How they fell in love.
How they dealt with the ups and downs of life.
Share with us their stories and also their photographs and we will carry the best ones right here on Rediff.com.
Heera Nawaz from Bangalore writes about her parents:
My father, the late Mohammed Khader Nawaz Khan was an orthodox Muslim (recall Shah Rukh Khan's movie, My name is Khan).
My now late mother, on the other hand, was an equally orthodox, no, not Muslim, but Hindu.
She got the most sparkling name from her parents, and that name was Leela.
How did these two diametrically opposite individuals meet? And how was it possible that a Muslim young man could fall so madly in love with a Hindu woman when we are aware that it was 1956, it being the time of post-partition and refugee woes.
But, fate and destiny played a role.
These two individuals, my parents, were classmates in LLM in Chennai (then known as Madras).
My father was a handsome man, and my mother a strong and shrewd woman.
When they fell in love, it was surely a case of "love is blind" since not only were they of different religions and castes, but they did not go in for criteria which people usually look for in a marriage of choice.
They were not attracted by good looks, social standing or financial considerations, but were attracted to each other with a sizzling chemistry, due to goodness in character and morality.
This really is rare, as it is today, too!
However, when they decide to get married, all hell broke loose!
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Parents' love story: She was a Hindu, he a Muslim
Photographs: Courtesy Heera Nawaz
Both my father's and mother's parents were against the match, so they decided to elope! A rare phenomenon in those days!!
One afternoon, two of my father's friends came to my mother's hostel with two plane tickets, one for my dad and one for my mom!
The rest, as they say, is history, for they got married through the Special Marriage Act, and proved that they were indeed ‘special' for having lived with each other happily, through the ups and downs, the mountains and valleys for over 40 years until my dad breathed his last on December 31, 1998.
This really proves to the world that if you love someone truly and unconditionally, you can make a success of your marriage and life.
When my mother was to make the momentous decision of her life, her classmates chided her, told her not to trust people of other religions. Yet my mother stood firm and went ahead, guided by gut feeling and true, deep love.
Indeed, the following words of a popular song rang in her mind, "Will you still need me? Will you still feed me when I'm 64?" And, indeed, my father did need her and feed her when she turned 64!
Luckily for my mother, my father was a gentleman and a gem of a person.
He lived up to his promises of standing by her, in sickness and in health, through good times and bad, through peaks and troughs, until his death did them apart.
Though the Bard of Avon, Shakespeare, said, “The path of true love never did run smooth”, in the case of my parents who were true lovers, the satisfaction and happiness they got in spite of the obstacles made them think that their love was totally worth it!
Happy Valentine's Day!
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