Skip to main content

That Right Feeling

There was something about Vir's voice that told Sheila that he may be the one. She had not seen him at the time - they worked in different locations of the same company and had met for the first time on a conference call. She tried to remain focused on the agenda and not get distracted each time he spoke. She chided herself for being irrational and ridiculous but it proved hard - Vir seemed to have some subtle subtext just for her as he went over the list of risks to the project. She was glad when the hour was up and Vir was gone. 
They would meet three days later, he would ask her out to lunch. They would end up spending two hours talking about everything under the sun except business. He would ask to meet her again the next day and the day after. Instead of flying out home on Friday, Vir would extend his stay for the weekend. They would spend those two days together. Sheila would feel that supreme sense of comfort she had never felt with any other man in her life. Vir would tell her that "I knew that there was something special about you when you first spoke in that call. I knew I had to finagle a business trip out this way to see if I was right"
A month later they were engaged. They both agreed this was bordering on insanity- their friends urged them to slow down and spend more time before making this serious a commitment.One Sunday, as she drove him to the airport, Vir asked Sheila "Do you want us to wait some more, continue dating ?" and she said "If my past is any indicator of how that will work, we will probably never get married. I have waited this long to feel that right feeling - there is nothing else to wait for". Vir stayed silent. As he kissed her goodbye he said "Sheila, I am more ready for marriage then I have ever been in my life - I don't want us to wait either. Think about when you want us to get married - I am ready when you are"
Vir and Sheila became man and wife a couple of months later, most of their friends were too shocked to be able to congratulate them from the heart - they felt the sense of disconnect and distance from those who had been closest to them in their single years. Vibha was overjoyed and she was in the minority. Most of them stood by to see what damage control they may need to step in to do once the honeymoon period was over and reality set in.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...