A long day at work and an evening of rushed packing prepared us for an early morning flight to Bangkok airport. Bags packed and done with dinner, we crash early only to be up hours later at 2:15am. We’re at the airport well before 4am. The queue is as expected, with Indians, like us making up for most of the travellers onboard this Lion Air flight. Everyone is embarking on their Desi-Diwali vacation to Thailand. There were single men, but surprisingly many families too, with children armed with trolleys, bag packs and suitcases. The boy ahead in queue is pushing his father’s suitcase. He’s 7 or 8 but his parents look like 50 or more. Perhaps, it’s their excess baggage and weight that makes them appear older than they really are.

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I registered myself on Shaadi.com around 2013 - 2014. I must be clear, I was always quite introverted, certainly not the social butterfly to mingle around in search of a life partner. Online matrimony web sites were the only way ahead. My family wasn’t very keen or forward in getting proposals. Towards the end of my search, one of my aunt’s told my mother that we should stop looking out now. I had clear directions to find a Roman Catholic, Mangalorean girl. Attempts of anything outside the norm, such as X1 had ended in a fireball, broken relations with family and worse. I had my own qualms as I have described in previous posts. As a non-believer, I wasn’t ever exposed to the circle of church-going women. As someone who didn’t experience college life, never did I get the chance to mingle. I am a non-believer, I graduated late, through a less-than-ideal correspondence university, and I do not have a master’s degree, no MBA, nil! All of these tossed my hopes out the window.

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A week or two after my last interaction with X2, I realized she had started looking out again. I couldn’t tell what to feel or think. I was where I left off after my relationship with X1 ended, disappointed, depressed and shocked. I kept my calm, following the prevalent advice of society - take some time out for yourself. I focussed back on work, my hobbies and kept as calm as I could. I had no choice. It’s not like women on Shaadi.com were looking for me. I found it terribly disturbing that X2 could move on like that. She pinged me once in between, telling me she was sorry she took me for granted for that long. That came as some relief, knowing that she had realized it, or been told that by someone.

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There’s something very soul-sapping about pushing your boundaries of patience, trying never to judge, only support. This change of heart happens especially when you’re recovering from the guilt of having abandoned a loved one. Now you’re left questioning only your motives, not the one testing your patience. This was the chemistry between X2 and I. She had the gift of ignorance, never having to think of her actions and their consequences. Her thinking was like that - all for gain. For me, it became - hang in there! This is only a phase, I told myself.

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The knowledge I gained about X2’s past was enough to get me riled up. Trust was an issue, but she promised she was a straight-forward person and she would never do that to me. She told me we should focus on our relationship. I took her word and looked to the future. X2 didn’t handle her finances herself, her father did. She was very random in this matter, as with everything else. She had casually mentioned wanting to invest in a low-cost apartment in the distant corners of Mumbai as means to reduce taxes. Her previous attempts of handling finances were with the help of her boyfriend in Bangalore, a north-eastern guy who could only be called weird. Some common friends who I met much later knew him, and they agreed. He’s a complete idiot.

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