I Too Had a Love Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

not. I am a thousand miles away from her.
    Was it love at first sight?
    Definitely not. We haven’t even seen each other yet!
    —The questions my friends would ask me, and the answers I gave them. (There were some dirty ones too, which I can ignore.) But everyone’s last question was the same.
    Are you crazy?
    I don’t knnoooowwww …
    Indeed, being in love with a person you haven’t even met is a crazy thing. And deciding to marry that person some day, even crazier. Never in my wildest dreams had I thought my love-life would be like this. To be honest, I had never even thought of any love-life.
    But, now, I had changed a lot and was no longer the person I used to be till some time ago.
    A lot of things had changed, in me and around me. I had started slipping out of conversations with my friends just to give her a call. I slept less and talked more. My phone bills led my monthly spending chart, leaving the house rent miles behind in the race. I started noticing couples: the way they sat together in gardens, hand in hand; the way a girl holds her boyfriend, on a motorbike. I started worrying about the ‘how do I look’ factor. My status on Orkut changed from ‘single’ to ‘committed’. She became the password to my several Internet IDs. Sitting in my office alone, I used to smile, talking to nobody.
    Love was in the air.
    Ours was such a different story. A 21 st century love story, whose foundation was modern-day gadgetry. Thanks to Graham Bell for inventing telephones that helped me talk to her, know her better and, finally, fall in love with her. Thanks to the Internet, the World Wide Web and sites like Shaadi.com that helped me find her. I discovered myself to be a true software engineer in this hi-tech-love phase. And whether this kind of love was good or bad, was no longer a point to ponder—we were already in it.
    Coming back to the reason she was shouting at me.
    It was because I had broken a promise. No, not the boozing one. Something else.
    Her family knew about me since our first call, but the case wasn’t the same at my end. My family did not know about her yet. In fact, they didn’t even know that their son’s profile was on some matrimonial site. Naturally, she was concerned about this situation. That too, after we had finally decided our destiny.
    Her queries about this matter were growing everyday. Gradually, she started feeling uncomfortable because of this very reason. Therefore, a week earlier, I had promised her that I would talk to my family on the coming weekend. But unfortunately, I could not, because of the weekend exam atIMS. (IMS. Another interesting similarity between us was this MBA preparation center. We both were preparing for MBA, and we had joined the same crash-course in the same institute in our respective cities!)
    ‘I could not travel to Burla last weekend because I had to appear for a test at IMS,’ I said, trying to calm her.
    ‘But you promised me Shona …!’My shouting lady turned into an emotional one. She killed me with that name. She loved to call me different names and the best among them all was Shona. And I loved the way she used to say it. With such care and warmth.
    ‘This weekend I will, for sure. I don’t have any task more important than this one,’ I told her.
    And my Shonimoni was happy again. Shonimoni. The name I gave her. Punjabi for cute and sweet; the feminine counterpart to Shona.
    The next weekend arrived and I was panicking. After all, I was going to talk to my parents about my marriage. This was definitely going to be a bolt from the blue, for them.
    I was smart enough to take my younger brother, Tinku, into confidence the night before we left for Burla. He already knew something was going on between me and some girl. My late night calls had made that much clear. But he had never imagined that all this started at a matrimonial site. Being his elder brother, I did not give him any option except to be on my side when I talked to mom and