Fate

We are currently addicted to “How I Met Your Mother”! Fortunately we started watching it after Season 3 ended which meant we could spend weekends with buckets of hot chocolate/tea, running “How I met Your Mother”-marathons. This is the ultimate way to spend a relaxing weekend.

“How I Met Your Mother” is about how a series of events in the main character’s life brought him to the point where he meets his future wife. It got me thinking about my own life, if and how fate had played a role in it. Being Indian, I think the idea of fate is something you grow up with. Often, Indian parents attribute bad events, especially, to fate/destinty/’that’s the way it was meant to be’ type reasons. I am a bit of a skeptic, I would like to think that had I not taken a certain path or made certain decisions, my life, while different would probably have turned out fine. But that was before I met TD. Since then, I cannot begin to imagine what my life would have been like had I not met him, which made me think about what part fate might have played in my life.


So here’s my version starting in 1997, when I met my First Real Boyfriend, the one before him does not count as it was a long distance internet relationship ( we met once in the year long relationship - I was young and naive!). FRB was a very intelligent, short, dark chocolate guy with light green eyes. It was the green eyes that had me hooked. We didn’t have much in common, he wanted a girlfriend and I wanted a boyfriend, a distraction to get away from all the shit that was hitting the fan in my life. My family was going through a rough patch and he was my escape from reality. It seemed like a fair partnership.

During our short relationship, I got to meet his friends as is usually the case and it turned out that RFB’s best friend (henceforth known as Best Friend), was in fact someone I knew (not very well) from my high school irc days. BestFriend lived in another city so our normal mode of communication was via online chat which actually was another reason for our friendship to grow as his girfriend was in the same town as me and was best friends with RFB’s ex girlfriend. This intertwined network of friends actually strengthened our friendship and it became my saving grace when a few months later I found out that FRB had been unfaithful to me. I was devastated. It wasn’t that I had invested too much emotionally in the relationship as I was under no illusion that he was the one but the timing was spectacularly bad. My parents were going through a very painful and public process of separation.

RFB’s unfaithfulness came at a time when I had lost all faith in life and was clinging on to this illussion of hapiness. On its own, RFB’s unfaithfulness was a minor pothole but with all this happening in the background, it became a sinkhole. I can’t begin to describe the level of desperation and depression I had sunk to. My life felt like a dry, empty, never-ending landscape. I slept, woke up and breathed through a acidic knot at the pit of my stomach. It was all too much and the only thing that kept me from completely loosing my grip was BestFriend. He will never realize just how big a part he played in maintaining my sanity. He restored a lot of my faith in happiness and I owed him my life in many ways.

Little did I know that a few months later, I would be in a position to repay my debt when BestFriend and his girlfriend broke up. He was devastated, even more so because he was sure she was his one. It was a dark period for him and it was my turn to comfort and take the punches of his ranting and raving. We depended on each other and supported each other through this dark period in both our lives - our friendship grew and became much stronger and we became best friends. There were times when one of us felt like taking our friendship to the next level but the other always held back because deep down we both knew this need rose more out of loneliness than real feelings of attraction. I am glad we got through all those vulnerable patches because next to my relationship with TD, this friendship had the most impact in my life.

As with any type of heartbreak and mental anguish, time is the salve. As the weeks turned to months, we got past much of the heartache, I still had a lot of family related issues to deal with but I had survived the worst of the situation. It could only go up from then. As I mentioned earlier, BestFriend and I communicated via online chat mostly and in 2001, he figuratively bumped into one of his friends online and introduced us. SweetGuy and I hit of immediately. The three of us spent our days at work with the chat window running in the background. These chats helped us survive our respective work environments. As with any friendship, we had personal insider jokes and we formed a click and to hell with anyone else who did not get it. I remember once, SweetGuy introduced us to one of his buddies online, within ten seconds of chatting to us, he had enough of our insider jokes, proclaimed me a clicky chick and promptly left, disgusted. We proclaimed him obnoxious, giggled and carried on - partners in crime!

Sweetguy and I became very close as we got to know each other. I was going through a self-reflecting, soul-searching journey, which was so important in making me whole and I never realised how important this journey would be until I met my soulmate, my best friend. He was going through a similar process which is what cemented out friendship. We had deep discussions about religion and life in general. We fed off each other’s need to figure out who we were, how we viewed ourselves and where we fitted in this great big world of shitty experiences.

It was a pretty intense friendship and looking back, I can see why the friendship became more serious for him. In hindsight, I think I knew that we would be nothing but great friends, but back then it was difficult to trust my instinct. So when SweetGuy professed his feelings for me, I was confused, one part of my mind kept telling me that he was a great, kind and lovely person but those very reasons worked against him as well. I always felt that when I met the right person, I would be using far more expressive words to describe him. Words like “fantastic!”, “amazing”, “hot!” came to mind. But then again, I wondered if there was such a thing as the right one? In the end, I decided that I wanted him as a friend and I didn’t want to jeopardise our friendship with a relationship that might not have a happy ending. He didn’t take the news very well and our friendship came to an end.

I didn’t have time or energy to dwell on SweetGuy’s decision as my family was finally reaching some semblance of stability. My parents had been separated for almost six years by then and for the first time my mom, sister and I felt like a family unit again. We had decided to go India for the end-of-year holidays so planning the trip kept me busy. I guess I was selfish as well, spending this time with my mom and sister, getting back in touch with the idea of what it was like to be a family. SweetGuy and I had minimal contact during this period which was inevitable because we were both friends with BestFriend. A couple of months before I was leaving for India, SweetGuy contacted me and we tentaively patched up our friendship. I am not sure we ever truly mended the relationship, I think we slipped into being acquitances, there was too much water under the bridge but at least it was some sort of closure for our friendship. Looking back, this closure also covered a period in my life, which I am glad for, because the events over the course of my trip to India would literally set my life on a new course.

This trip and the events during this trip deserves a post of its own, but for the purposes of this post, I will give a very abridged version which reflects the speed with which my life turned upside down. Both my parents always wanted to own a house back in India, they were born and brought up there and that’s where they wanted to retire. Despite being separated, my mom still had the same dream and it was during this trip that my mom eventually found a house that she fell in love with. What she did next would be a huge turning point in all our lives. She called up my father and told him about the house and proceeded to ask him to come to India, see the house and rejoin our family. I was left speechless. I was more shocked when my father agreed to come. I rebelled against the idea, I had no wish to see him as part of this family, a family he abandoned and left to fend for iteslf. I was very angry at my mother for bringing him back just when this family was slowly pulling back together again. My defiant cries fell on stubborn deaf ears. My father landed in India a week later and they bought the house two weeks later. And as quick as that, he was back in our lives.

And so my holiday ended and the year 2004 began with many upsets and more changes to our family structure but despite all these changes, as I got on the plane to return back home, I realised that I had a deep sense of faith in this coming year. No matter what this year would throw at me, I was going to persevere and be just fine, this was going to be MY year. Little did I know that 2004 would indeed be the beginning of the rest of my life.

To be continued …