Arranged love? What a contradiction!' was my favourite cliche. I repeated it whenever I got the chance to discourage my friends from getting 'stuck' in arranged marriages. In those days, I was just out of college, a rabid feminist, propagator of free art and certainly least interested in getting married. V Day for me was a sort of sentimental nonsense out of which capitalists made money.
So when my mother came to me with the picture 'yet another guy' for a marriage proposal, I was sure it would be a part of laughing session over the phone with my cousins (that was our daily dose of comedy ever since this whole marriage and arranged love drama has started). I looked and instead of the picture saw a date - 31st October, 1984. Isn't that the day Indira Gandhi was assassinated? Hell of a day to be born and then he is Scorpio too! That was the beginning of this real love story of arranged love.
When we first agreed to speak, I was the girl so had to quietly wait my turn, while he made the first move (female strategy coached by aunts). I received a formal email from him that made me laugh for ten minutes. “Please let me know when we can converse on a time suitable in your schedule. Confirm and revert." What was it a corporate meeting to be scheduled? Definitely not my type I thought and shot off a sarcastic mail to him. “I don't understand such formal language. Occupational hazard of being a creative person." That was the last time I had any doubts about this story of arranged love.
When he replied, I realised he had got the joke and taken it well. From then on we never looked back. The first time we spoke on the phone, we spoke the entire night and for the next eight months we were perpetually on the phone talking to each other. I remember my dad once remarked irritated, “there are two people whose numbers are always busy, one is my driver and the other my daughter."
I don't know what attracted us to each other when we met for the first time in Bangalore and then again in Mumbai and the routine was repeated. It was a connection that we still cannot explain (because actually we don't get along at all). This arranged love shouldn't have worked because we both have diametrically opposite views about almost anything, but we were somehow cosmically thrown together by the universe. But I don't regret a single moment of this relationship; not the fights, not the tears not even the heart burns
Almost everybody said (including his family and mine) that we would make a mismatched couple but we proved them all wrong on our wedding day. We think we make a very handsome couple; different but great together. God knows how many times we broke up (in this real love story for V Day, I won't lie) even before we tied the knot in this arranged love story. But we managed to get to the wedding aisle together and we are still together after 8 months of an seemingly arranged marriage.
You can find love in unexpected places because love doesn't need time, it needs a moment.
Mrs. A. Chatterjee
