We have the same in Sanskrit and I am told that just like the Persian couplet it is recited by the bridegroom and the bride in certain parts of India :
yadet hrdayam mama tadastu hrdayam tava
Yadet hrdayam taba tadastu hrdayammama.
Let this heart of mine become thy heart
Let this heart of thine become my heart.
If two hearts melt into one, it is but natural that in course of years, as Daudet points out, they should resemble one another bodily also, indeed there is a couplet in mixed Bengali which says :
Sunori sunori tehar nam
Sundari Radhe hoilo Shyam.
Ordinarily it is translated as Recalling his (Krisnas) name over and over again the beautiful Radha became dark (Shyam, dark, Krisna) but other pundits maintain that she actually looked like Krisna. But as they were not married to one another and did not live for any length of time together actual friendship did not grow up between them. Had Lord Shrikrisna returned to Vrindavan again it might have been different. Some say he did visit again when Shriradha was a full hundred years old! Well. I presume that was rather late in the day for either love or friendship.
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A personal experience
It cant hurt now was Mr Sherlock Holmess comment when for the tenth time in as many years I (Watson) asked his leave to reveal a delicate inci dent. In my case it is not ten hut close upon forty! When I was student in Bonn from 1930 to 1932 I fell deeply in love– not a calf-love- with a medical student who belonged to Stuttgart area. As I spoke precious little German when I met her for the first time and she spoke it perfectly well as also showed keen interest in India and Indian things (actually Tagore visited the Marburg University in summer 1930 and Mariana bought everything available by him and on him) we were drawn very close together. Well, in Germany Studentenliebe (love or/& friendship among university students) is equated with Semesterliebe (love of/& friendship only for a Semester which is a university term of six months)… German students are passionately fond of shifting from one university to another at the end of a Semester till they settle down for good at some particular university to prepare their thesis but neither I nor Mariana dreamed of seperation. I got my doctorate in the beginning of 1932 and left Mariana and Bonn in tears. Shortly afterwards Mariana wrote to me to say that she just could not stand the sight of Bonn, the Rhine and above all the Venusberg where we used to go out for long walks and on Saturday nights often used to greet the rising sun. Bonn was a small university town forty years ago and practically everyone who had anything to do with the university students knew that our love was feste (unshakeable) solide (solid, pucca) and when I left for India and Mariana for Munich it was palpable to our colleag, at Mensa (students restaurant), the old woman at the newspaper kiosk, waiters, the few policemen on beat that Bonn could boast of and finally even my good old professor Carl Clemen who had international fame in Comparative Religion and knew that we were inseparable would raise his hat and bow profusely whenever he met her in the street that ours was not he notoriously proverbial Semesterliebe but of full five Semesters when circumstances separated us.
Five years is a pretty long time and when you are separated by thousands of miles. Our correspondence became irregular, for we had nothing else to tell each other except the cruel pangs of separation. Such depressing letters are not conducive to increase the tempo in correspondence, besides, I knew, that she, being the only child of an aristocratic family, was expected by her parents to marry and continue the name of the family, at least from the maternal side, Marianas sense of noblesse oblige was one of the strongest traits of her character and although I am perfectly certain that her parents, to whom I was presented as a de rigueur, whenever they visited Bonn, never brought to bear any pressure on her to marry, much less a marriage de convennce which though not quite la mode was quite commeil faut among she Swabian elite (I am deliberately using these French expressions to show the profound French influence on the German aristocracy).
