A trans-continental Love Story

****THIS BLOG IS A WORK OF PURE IMAGINATION. ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ANYONE DEAD OR ALIVE IS PURELY CONINCIDENTAL*****

One of my best friends recently fell in Love with a bloke. Earlier I used to think “falling” in love was like falling on a well-made feather bed after a tired day at work or falling in a tub full of warm water with rose petals and scented candles to go with. Or like falling suddenly into an unattended manhole (which is pretty likely in India) just to realize that you are not in the municipal waste- water but in an entirely new world full of fluffy clouds, fairies and cupids.

But she fell in love in the cyberspace with a guy who was half a day behind her in life!!
It’s so easy these days. Earlier if you had to get yourself a respectable match in India, your parents started out when you were 18 (yeah and if you had any manufacturing defects it started much before that). There was a time in our (glorious) history where parents were so insecure about getting their girls married that they booked them husbands when they were still in diapers.

Now things have changed. A bit too much I must confess but changed for the better. Now look at my friend, she was swimming in the cyber sea of millions of interesting and boring profiles when the God of the Internet (yes, we have to have a different one now as the God of communication is unable to handle the Internet) in collaboration with Venus made her bump into the Love of her Life. And what a match it was!!

She fell in love with her physician’s son. For years she used to go and see her physician for throbbing headaches. Headaches that left her sleepless and distressed. Some called it migraines some said she was just too dainty to take the pressure of a hard life!!
Her physician lived at a meager five miles away from her house. She was an able doctor who was one of the most sought after eligible mother in laws in town.
And all these years when my friend used to go see her with those rancid headaches, little did she know that this girl who was just a name in her appointments book is going to be the reason for her son’s heartache and euphoria!!

The Son comes into the picture now. He was the typical guy. The kinds that measure the quality of life they lead by the number of push- ups they do every morning. The one that is blissfully unaware of the “other kind”. The kind that wears lipstick and high heels..the kind that enters in a room with a whiff of fragrance… the kind that can cry at every occasion starting from an Onion’s funeral to being caught by a traffic policeman.
He was happy the way he was assuming (like guys always do) that life is just as happy as he feels right now. He did not sit at his desk, with his face cupped in his palms and with stars in his eyes wondering about the woman that might gently cruise into his life and change it forever. Not that he didn’t want to, but like all guys are he was a little short in the creativity department.

He was in the US and she was in India. So when they started e dating it was really hard to keep up. I used get euphoric phone calls at night with my friend doing a hundred words per minute explaining what he said to her over email and like all loyal girls do, I used to try and interpret it for her in “our” language. “Our language” is the collection of evidently useless conclusions girls reach about every silly thing their potential soul mate says to them. Useless because later we realize that guys say everything as a reflex action. Communication never comes from the twisted curves of their brain. They almost never mean what we want them to and what we conveniently conclude.

So I used to go off to sleep after giving her the day’s interpretations.
The next day first thing in the morning while I still used to be in the “eye-rubbing-grumpy-phase” my phone would ring with the latest update. This time she would be forlorn, melancholy and insecure about the future. She would curse all the 33 billion Indian Gods and lament in a particularly high-pitched lonely voice about how her life is like this soap opera tragedy. I used to give her some practical tips and ask her to get going, which she did most of the times, but then sometimes she used to show up at my place like she had not slept a single wink in 23 years.

Since her prince charming was about 10 hours behind us, they had this 24-hour love story going on, while ordinary people like me; who switch off their phones at 10 because they have to sleep were left far behind in this trans-continental exchange of emotions! I felt really hopeless some times. This love story brought to my notice that we waste an awful amount of time sleeping everyday while “others” march ahead on all the fronts of life. I actually started working late after I realized this.

He finally confessed, and they decided to meet when he comes to India. So now they are constantly in touch using all the available satellites. Which made me realize that in older days Moon was the only important satellite in Love. The Romeos and Juliets just used the Moon to get smitten and stare at it like idiots. Now, we use so many of them! If some good-for-nothing poet in the olden times would have come up with the sci-fi idea of artificial satellites being used to send love-messages across the globe; he would indeed have been the Galileo in his time. Love messages were meant to be sent through ridiculously white doves while satellite was only a luminescent and essentially useless mass in the sky that was supposed to create tides in the ocean and ripples of Hormone-induced feelings in the hearts of ardent lovers.
But Moon has inspired us nonetheless and now we have moony couples falling in love across the Pacifics and the Atlantics.

I am sure it will work out great for them. And I thank them both for giving me food-for-my-blog! :)