19th June – 1999 to 2011

19th June is just round the corner. 19th June has a special place in my heart – not only this year, but it has always been special since the time we met for the second time on 19th June, 1999. It was 4th March, 1999, when I had been to my Golu’s office at Saki Naka, and had known that an individual (namely Jason Cardozo) existed. Period! After that I went my way and didn’t bother to be in touch with him though he so much wanted to be in touch with me. I wasn’t acting hard-to-get but somehow he hadn’t left a lasting impression in my heart and honestly, hadn’t appealed to me much. I had happily forgotten all about him soon after stepping out of his office.

But destiny has its own plans and no one can really escape it. In April, that same year, I joined a portal as a movie and music reviewer. I had to develop contacts with all the music companies for them to keep me posted about their new releases. That’s how I happened to call him at Plus Music and after two days of coordination, agreed to meet him to get some CDs for review. He had said something like having some work in town that day.

So this smart Alec (that’s what I thought at that time) had the cheek to ask me for a movie (Antz) and so wanted to meet me at Churchgate station. But I gave him a ditch saying that I wasn’t “appropriately dressed” for a movie and instead could he meet me at Dadar station, platform no.3, under the indicator, at 5 o’clock in the evening. Since I was literally and figuratively a ‘poor thing’ at that time, I had thought that I will take the CDs from him and then it would be “tata, bye bye” from there. But this guy, I must say, was well prepared. Now he tells me that he didn’t want this second meeting to go waste and had all the plans of ‘patao’ me that day itself. Thus, he detained me at Dadar station and cajoled me to come out with him for some Saturday ‘outing’. Don’t know how, but, I agreed and we took a cab to Bandra’s Seaside Café. There he kept trying his level best to impress me with his smooth talks and here I kept getting impressed by his talks and not his looks.

After this outing, he volunteered to drop me home till Vasai. It is all very well to say that destiny was definitely playing an important role here. From Bandra we decided to go to Churchgate and then we took a Virar train from there. While we were in the Virar train he subtlety said that “I want to marry a girl like you”. I was a bit shocked and didn’t know what to say. Instead of the clichéd “I love you” this guy had already proposed marriage. I was dumbfounded and he took this silence for a “yes”. I just didn’t know how to react. But looking back, I am glad I was silent at that time. My “no” could have brought some rascal in my life who would have been too happy to devastate my already devastated life and, who knows, my life wouldn’t be as beautiful as it is today. I am so glad we indeed don’t have any control over our destiny.

Well, to cut the long story short, as they say in romantic novels, destiny had its own plans. My Golu was already madly in love with me but it took me some time to fall in love with him. Within six months (28th December, 1999), we got married and here I am today, writing this piece.

PS: It was raining romantically (for him) and we were sitting under my pink umbrella, eating ‘bhutta’ at Bandstand.