Devdas walks the streets of Istanbul

What is it about unfulfilled love that attracts so many writers? Is it the sheer force of passion lovers feel? Is it the chance to examine society through the constraints it imposes on love? Is it the deep examination of human values and feelings it allows? Such portrayals of love have produced some of the best novels, William Styron's "Sophie's Choice", Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera" and Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby". But arguably the greatest work of unfulfilled love is Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's "Devdas". Orhan Pamuk's "The Museum of Innocence" is probably the worthiest modern heir to this category.

Pamuk's protagonist, Kemal Basmasi, like Devdas, is born into a wealthy family. His education in America gives him a modern outlook and in 70's Turkey that means the freedom for women to lose virginity before marriage. At 30, Kemal is engaged to Sibel, a woman of the upper class Istanbul and educated in France. He is preparing for his engagement at the Istanbul Hilton when he runs into an 18 year old cousin, Fusun Keskin. Fusun, like Paro, comes from a poor family and works at a boutique. Kemal seduces Fusun as he prepares for the engagement and even invites her to the party.

But Kemal falls in love with Fusun. A few days before the engagement, lying in bed with Fusun, Kemal says "It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it..". But Fusun breaks off the relationship after the engagement and Kemal is left to nurse a bruised heart. As Kemal later wonders,"No one recognizes the happiest moments of their lives as they are living it, ... they still believe in the certainty of the happier moment to come. Because how could anyone carry on with the belief that things could only get worse?"

For the following decade, Kemal tries to capture the happiness of those moments. He breaks off his engagement with Sibel and leaves his rich Istanbul friends. He becomes, as he puts it "The Anthropologist of his own experience". Whether he succeds in regaining his love is the subject of this brilliant work. But the success is also strangely unimportant. For the means and reasons for actions are far more important than the ends. In the end, Kemal succeeds if only in displaying his love, as an artifact of personal history at the Museum of Innocence.

The novel also makes you wonder about the nature of Kemal (or even Devdas), as a man in a society that is at war with its own ideals. Is he just a hapless soul caught between the clash of ideas, ideals and reality? Is his rejection, patience and humiliation an atonement to his sin and the price of his enduring passion? Will his ultimate self-destruction make him a candidate for the pantheons of eternal love or is he just a spoilt brat. Pamuk's narration compels us to feel sorry for this victim of love. For as Rachel Menkin puts it in Mad Men, "I haven't thought about it till this moment, but it must be hard to be a man."

Like all of Pamuk's novels, Istanbul provides the setting. The city is painted with love and the landscape is replete with the history of each landmark. The Bosporus, the Nisantasi neighborhood, the Beyoglu film district, the poor slums and Europeanised restaurants become characters portrayed with unsympathetic but compassionate colors. Also on display are Istanbul's social strata, its dysfunctional institutions and ideas of the old world that clash with the new ones.

There could be many suitable titles to this novel, "The Pilferer of Trifles" (since Kemal steals everything Fusun touches), "The Collector of Love" (for Kemal's obsession of personal artefacts), "Love on the Bosphorus"(to signify the mingling of eastern and western ideas) and many more. And yet the best is "The Museum of Innocence". For love, the kind felt in the depths of the heart, is innocent and only the innocent and the idealistic can aspire to it. Love untouched by the realities that constrain it and misunderstood by the society that crushes it, is more than anything else, innocent. You need a book, a museum, to display such love, the city and the time it happend in.

If love can be believed in, felt, given meaning and a sense of purpose, why not have a museum for it. And who better than Orhan Pamuk to chronicle such a museum.