To recap, my last column was on Valentine's Day. I wrote about how love is a sort of madness and how it hits you when you least expect it. I also told you that doctors view love as nothing but a set of chemicals your brain releases. I had zoomed in to my college days and to one particular moment when this girl's eyes and mine meet across the noisy and busy college canteen. End of recap.
She was a student of English literature and I was one of the very few journalism students in this vast university campus.
I had grown up on American pulp literature, everything from Harold Robbins to James Hadley Chase, so when I finally picked up my courage and phoned her at home, I blurted the first thing that came to my mind and asked whether she would like to go out to dinner with me. It didn't matter that this was India and we were in this tiny, claustrophobic and dull town, where nothing ever happens, and where you definitely do not take out a girl, a Muslim one at that, to dinner, or the fact that I was broke.
I came out of that encounter a little red-faced, but I had touched first base. But while I, the man-child, was going through some of the most erratic emotions in my life, I came to know much later, that she had already made up her mind.
'Plot point'
But life is usually not that simple. If it was, then you would never find lonely souls, waiting, craving, longing for companionship in singles bars from Toronto to Dubai, looking eagerly at the entrance every time someone walks in.
This is the scene what scriptwriters call the "plot point", the flash of insight or realisation which finally hits the main protagonist of the story. It is here the character makes a life-changing decision, for good or for bad.
A year had passed and we had only talked briefly on the phone. Then one day as I was looking out of the window of our home, I saw her car brake to a halt on the side street and a woman, presumably her mother got out. Then she got out and pointed to our home.
I quickly hid behind the curtains and my heart started pounding wildly. Then I realised my mother was behind me also watching the drama unfold outside. "Who is that girl?" she asked. Completely trapped, I blurted out, "Arif's cousin".
My one burning ambition was to get out this suffocating town and to the US where all my friends had gone before. I could not afford to be tied down. But nature usually hates a vacuum and one fine day, a guy just like me, came into her life and swept her off her feet.
It is another story that I neither got the girl nor went to America, but I did leave home finally and went the other way. It was because of my work in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that I met my wife.
Life takes a turn when you least expect it, and how two people who have absolutely nothing in common can come together is beyond me. I am wacky and take risks. She is the rock we all hold on to, my kids and I, when the sea is choppy.
You can't really do anything but get swept away, when all the stars in the firament and the heavenly bodies above conspire to bring two souls together.
