"By the River Piedra I sat down and wept"

“All love stories are the same,”

says the last line of the opening chapter. Yet, from the moment you turn the first leaf, the book ensnares you, take you to its custody and stir your inner piece in the least disturbing way. Finally when you come to the last leaf, it leaves you with such an urge to look back at your love, choices and decided destinies and lure you to question them according to your heart’s new found measurements.
Love, as Coelho sees, is the ultimate devotion that makes all the other devotions worthwhile. For him, choices are those that shape your journey and drag you into corners where you unknowingly longed to be. And patience for him was a not a walk in the Sahara dessert on a mid August morning but a sweet preserve of a long ago time that refreshes your heart and mind when the present discourages you to reach your waiting point.
From the surface, it was like any other love story. An encounter of a girl and a boy, childhood best friends, who were in love with each other even before they came to know what love really meant. The story was about their quest of digging into their individualities and realizing the length and breadth of love; a kind of love that can overcome every other physical and imaginary boundary and change someone for the better without making him or her feel lost.
If Coelho were a saint, his specialty would have been the balminess of his words. His optimism is not something dreamy and high above the ground. Be it ‘The Alchemist’ or the ‘Witch of Porbello’, it was the same cozy warmth of human goodness and the beauty of the human mind that sparkle through his dictions like the rising sun over the springtime Pyrenees.
Having read only three books from Paulo Coelho’s lengthy collection, it would be rather stupid to call ‘By the River Piedra I sat down and wept’ my most favourite. When Pilar sat by the River Piedra and wept, I wept too, for a love I sometimes took so much for granted. And finally when she beamed at her lover who was walking towards her, I smiled myself the same smile and convinced myself that the weeping was worth it. Before closing the book, I sent Shabs another ‘thank you’ message for gifting me a piece of my own conscience.