A weekend that changed the course of my life forever

Last year around this time…. It was 18 (or 19) November 2005. On my yahoo messenger I got an offline message from some unknown id. If I was to believe that the ID was not misleading then it could be someone named Deepa save.

It was clear that the person on other side has mistaken me for someone else because that id was not in my friends list and from the message it was clear that it was not for me.

I just wrote back and asked for an introduction. To be precise, this is what I had written from my yahoo archives…

“hi...buddy....it will be great if u could give some introduction of urs....”

Next Sunday I was in office. I had got a reply from that id to my query for intro.
It was a girl named Deepa Save. We had a brief chat. We soon found a common ground in form of a yahoo group where we both were members. She had some trouble in sending an email so I sent it on her behalf.

After that we exchanged our phone numbers and talked top each other.

At that time I did not know what lied ahead…
Very soon the phone call had become a regular thing. Thanks to VSNL, Deepa used to call me regularly. When she was not in office, we used to give missed calls to each others.

We used to talk about a lot of things office…family…friends…likes…dislikes…hobbies and many other things that mattered to us. We used to exchange opinions advises so on and so forth.

One day decided that we should meet sometime. I agreed that whenever I will come to Mumbai next time I shall take out some time for the meeting.

It was when I came home for Holi we managed to meet. We spent an entire evening talking to each other about so many topics.

Phone calls were now a daily matter. We used to speak at least once a day. We used to meet whenever I was in Mumbai and our schedules permitted.

This continued till this Diwali. During Diwali we met three times. One thing we had done was we never lied to our parents. We used to tell parents whenever we met. No hiding. By this time all this sequence could not have gone unnoticed by parents. In Diwali my mother questioned me if had any plans to take this relationship to next level. I had not thought on this point till then. We used to discuss even the marriage proposals we received but I had never thought of this angle of our relation.

I was one day she was telling me about a proposal her family had received from some relatives and how serious they were about it. This made me think.
Am I really willing to let her go? I questioned myself.
The Answer was No.

I started thinking seriously on this line. Shall I or shall I not? What does she think about me? What will be her reaction? But somehow I needed to communicate. And I did not have the courage to ask directly.

One day I got a sms from her,
“Dont love the love unless d love loves u,If love loves u then love d love in such a way tht it wont love anyone else...”

I responded…
“Does the love love me?”

And there was a reply in a short while…
“Yes.”

I called up. We talked for a lot of time. But now the conversation was not the same as in the past.

We decided that we shall have a face to face discussion in this regard before we take up the matter with our parents.

Regular phone calls went on as usual.

We met on 25th Nov… One year…53 weeks to be precise… after our first introduction…

We discussed a lot of things that mattered to us… which we thought could be causes of potential conflicts later.

In the end everything was fine… I asked her if she would marry me. She accepted. We decided that we would keep quiet for a year and only our parents would know it.

A new phase in life had begun. The snap here is a snap of sunset taken on 25th Nov at Girgaon Chowpatty. This was an evening to be remembered forever.

I have written this on 30th Nov 06 but I shall publish it on the day we would get formally engaged.

(Publishing on 28 Mar 07... 2 days after our parents formally announced the alliance...)