Smitten

Love’s Perfect Circle
“Okay, bye, see you when Prashant gets married” was the refrain with which many guests bid my parents farewell as they left after my younger brother’s wedding in our hometown of Hubli, Karnataka. It must have been taboo to talk of me getting married. My parents and brother worried deeply about it, but relatives deliberately overlooked me, naming my younger cousin Prashant as next in line.

I was written off the marriage market.

I returned to Mumbai, where I worked. The family had stopped asking the annoying ‘When-are-you-getting-hitched?’ genre of questions. That was something I’d longed for when things had been normal, but my wish had been granted at a huge cost. Cancer in its third stage isn’t so forgiving but it somehow let me off with only a few scars and, after all the chemo, a freshly sprouting curly mop instead of my original long, straight hair.
Yet, such indifference breeds a reckless abandonment. I started living life in fast forward. I travelled, took a lot of photographs, joined travel websites, travelled even more. I started a small company making ad films. I did everything I wanted to do and no one could ever stop me.

The buzz was exhilarating but one tiny detail slipped out of my radar. There was someone regularly visiting my Orkut social networking profile, someone I’d once had an online argument with on the site’s medical community page. I’d almost forgotten about him.

Posted at a remote Air Force station in eastern India, my travel photographs fascinated this young man. Wherever I went, be it the iron-ore mines of Kiruna in Sweden or the Nohkalikai Falls in Meghalaya, he virtually travelled with me, through my photos and blog.

Wing Commander Parthasarathi Ghana finally contacted me in April 2008 through the blog. We got chatting online and then over the phone. A doctor, he was a specialist in internal medicine—and single.

I should have jumped with joy, but I had stopped living in any romantic bubble years ago. Marriage was for them! But it’s amazing—the perfect circles life can draw. Partha was with the same Army Medical Corps my father had retired from! Anyhow, this young Oriya doctor fascinated me with his anecdotes and his rock-steady philosophy of life. And contrary to expectations, my cancer story only brought the good doctor even closer. We fell in love although we’d, as they say, never met offline.

“Why not come down to Mumbai?” I asked.

“No, I can’t get leave now,” he said. 

So I flew down to Coimbatore, where he was then posted, and met him.

“Will you marry me?” he said.

“Yes.”

That October, six months after 
Partha and I started our online meetings, my mother became severely ill. “Why not meet Mama?” I requested Partha. Having just lost his father, he understood the situation well and made a quick day trip to Hubli. Mother asked all of us to step out of the room and spoke to him alone. She passed away a month later. None of us know anything about that conversation till today, and I’ve never asked Partha. I like to imagine that God heard Mama’s favourite hymn, Krishna nee begane baaro [Oh, Krishna, please come quickly], and sent Parthasarathi in person to let her go peacefully. 
Remember, as Arjuna’s legendary charioteer, Krishna too was known as Parthasarathi.

In February 2009, as relatives bid my father farewell, newlyweds Partha and I looked on with folded hands. “Okay, bye, see you now at