The tagline of the Shah Rukh Film says, "There is an extraordinary love story in every ordinary jodi". Well, I can definitely say that it holds true for Sarang and me :). Our story is straight out of a Yashraj Film (including a white salwar kameez... LOL!...but no details there, sorry...). In fact, we often joke that we should sell our story to Yashraj Films in lieu of guest appearances in the film with Shah Rukh in the lead :).
Most of you reading this post might know this, but Sarang and I met some 26 years back, as primary school going students in Hyderabad. We were in the same class. We weren't great friends, but I remembered his name because it was long and unusual(Sarangarajan Muralidharan). Another reason that I remembered him was that his grandfather used to come to school to drop Sarang and his brothers everyday and was very nice to me. He used to give me candies :). Having lost my own grandfathers recently, I took an instant liking to the nice gentleman.
Sarang remembered me for another reason he tells me. When we were in the second class, and were being taught about butterflies, there was this huge craze amongst our classmates to catch butterflies. Apparently, I had caught one and showed off! And Sarang, in order to prove that he could do it too, spent many a day in search of the elusive butterfly. One day, he caught something he thought was a butterfly and showed it to me. And I said, "Chhee, that's not a butterfly. It's an insect, you fool!" He says he remembered my face with my nose all screwed up :).
Cut to 1992. I had moved to Calcutta on account of my father's transfer and Sarang was in Hyderabad. I had earlier moved to another school (St.Ann's) while still in Hyderabad. After 10th class boards, one of my friends from St. Ann's moved to Sarang's school. She told me about everyone in her new class and I wrote back telling her that I remembered so and so. Amongst those names was Sarang's name :). He told her that he remembered me as well and we got writing to each other. After a few letters, I delayed a reply and meanwhile Sarang moved to Chennai. I didn't receive the letter he sent me with his new address. And our letters stopped.
Cut to 2004. Sarang was in Honolulu and I was in Bangalore, recovering from a surgery, an ankle fracture and much much more. I badly needed a friend and most of my friends had turned their back on me. And one day, I found Sarang on batchmates.com . We got talking. I got in touch with a lot of old friends that I had lost touch with and was pleasantly surprised to note that they still remembered me. But it was with Sarang that I could TALK. We talked, and talked and talked. I was surprised when I realized that I was telling him things I hadn't begun accepting myself. We talked about music and films most of the time and yes, we shared Ghalib :).
I moved to Dhaka, Bangladesh with a new job and Sarang kept in touch. Sometimes, he'd stay up all night on weekends to talk to me. It was great fun. Somewhere along the line, we realized that we wanted to be together always, because phone calls were not enough for our discussions .... LOL! :) By the way, there was no formal proposal from Sarang. All he said was, "Let's get married the next time we meet", like he didn't even have the slightest doubt that I'd marry him. And marry we did :).
We married the day after we actually met after 18 years! We had planned to marry a day later, but the venue wasn't available on Sunday, so everything was done within a day and we got married on the 23rd of July. There were a lot of hurdles to overcome, but we did all that and had a small Arya Samaj wedding. Vedic Rites never made more sense to me. It was raining cats and dogs on that day and I got married with my hair still wet. I didn't even have a matching blouse for my new saree... but all that didn't matter on that day. One of our common friends (unfortunately, he's no more today) came down for our wedding, my family and family friends blessed us and there we were.... married. MARRIED. I was really scared of being married. Being an oddity for an Indian girl, I wasn't sure if marriage would restrain my free spirit. Even more doubtful I was, of making someone else happy. I really didn't have that faith in myself at that time. But with Sarang's love and support, I overcame those doubts and became more confident of myself as a person. Its been a good three and a half years since then, and we haven't stopped talking :). We haven't stopped fighting and we haven't stopped giggling. People find it strange that we spend all our free time together, doing things together. But really, there is no other way we would have it. When I am making flowers, Sarang keeps me company watching his Japanese films :). When he wants to see an English film that I can't bear to see (Sorry, no vampires and werewolves for me!), I wait for him outside the cinema hall reading my book. Once we are through, we again get back to discussing films, music, cricket, politics, religion, state of the world ...... basically anything :). We play silly games, we hike, we travel and we entertain. We are happy together.
There are people who are still skeptical about our relationship, but we aren't. That's an extraordinary story for you and a real one too :). Love does happen Yashraj style sometimes.
