Some characters of the fairy tales or of ordinary love-stories outlive all others in our memory. Longevity is built into them. In Central Asia today, every town is likely to have a restaurant named Shirin-Farhad, after a stone-cutter who killed himself because he could not live after the woman he loved was reported to have died. The hill called Koh-e-Besutoon, on which he is said to have been working at the time, is also believed to be in that region though now no-one knows where it is exactly. There are many versions of the story. For example, since Shirin was the favourite of a king, Farhad, the stone-cutter, who desired her, too had to be a prince. And not just any prince but one of substance. So he becomes in the story the son of the emperor of China. Now Shirin, on her part, is promoted to a princess of Armenia. As Moliere's Jourdain would say: Voila, tout le monde raisonable. Actual story of Shirin-Farhad is less pretentious. The Sasanid king, Khusrau, took a liking to an Armenian girl, named Shirin, and acquired her (most likely by purchase). Farhad, working on a hill by the palace, lost his heart to her when he saw her walking through the garden to the royal chamber. He requested the king to give her to him. The king said he would if Farhad cut, single-handedly, an aqueduct through the hill to bring water from the other side. Farhad, bewitched by Shirin's beauty, accomplished the impossible in a single night. The king, not wanting to part with Shirin, sent a woman to tell him falsely that Shirin was dead, whereupon Farhad killed himself with the pick-axe he had been wielding upon the rocks. Shirin had not noticed Farhad but was deeply moved when she heard of his suicide for her sake. Nizami Ganjvi has sublimated the story in one of his best poems. For example, he describes her manner of walking: Badeen Taoos kirdari humaii, / Ravaan shud choon tazrui havaii (A phoenix dressed like a peacock, started walking like a Greek partridge gliding in the air.) Reminds one of Verlaine: O la femme a l'amour calin et rechauffant, / Douce, pensive et brune et jamais etonnee, / Et qui parfois vous baise au front, / Comme un enfant. (O' woman with caressing and warm love, sweet, pensive and brownish, and never surprised, and who sometimes kisses you on the forehead, like a child.) Shirin, alone in her room, complained of the night being dark and unending: Dil-e-Shirin dar aan shab-e-kheera manda, / Charaghash choon dil-e-shab teera manda. (Shirin's heart that night was filled with darkness, and her lamp remained unlit like the night's heart.) Farhad has since become a symbol of absolute commitment, both in ordinary parlance and in the vocabulary of Sufism. But, even here, Ghalib and Iqbal have not failed to regard the generally venerated story from their peculiar angles: Ishq-o-mazdoori-e-ishrat gahay Khusrau kia khoob, / Hum ko tasleem niku nami-e-Farhad nahin. And: Zamaam-kaar agar mazdoor kay hathhon mein ho phhir kia? / Tareeq-e-kohkan mein bhi vahi heelay hain parvaizi. They may be great poets. But here the masses ignore their snobbery and look upon Farhad as a simple and, therefore, complete lover, for whom, a life without Shirin is a life without a reason to be. The writer is a former ambassador