No, not mine. My cousin Vishal’s. He’s getting married on Wednesday. And thereby hang a couple (or more) of yarns.
Since last year, my cousin has been anxious to get married. Whether this is a wise state to be in at all can be discussed another time. For now, accept it as a given.
Anyway, whlie he was waiting for a flight at London-Heathrow- the flight, being an Air India one, was delayed- he met this girl. He struck up a conversation, and found that he quite liked her. But then, boarding for the flight finally started. And in the haste and worry of boarding, he forgot to ask her for her contact details.
He was thus quite depressed when he took his seat. And then his depression ended.
Romance, bravely ignoring the grim dreariness of an Air India flight, struck. The girl whom he had forgotten to ask for her contact details came and took the seat next to him. This time, at the end of a twelve hour flight (I assume it’s twelve hours, it’s been a while since I flew LHR-DEL. With Air India, it would of course seem like eighteen, but for my cousin it must have passed in less than two), he did take her contact details.
For the next two months (October and November 2002) he ICQ’s and SMS’s and various other TLA’d that girl.
After that, of course, I had my endsem exams, so I was unaware of any further unraveling in this regard. But then, shortly after I came home for the winter holidays, I was told to dress up- we were going for dinner to meet Vishal’s fiancee.
He got engaged to the airport girl? I asked with interest.
Apparently not.
It seems that romance just can’t stand up to Air India, however hard it tries. To refer to the airport girl now would be to commit a faux pas to end all faus pas, my mother warned me. Vishal’s fiancee had been carefully chosen to not do whatever it was the airport girl had done.
To this day, I am unsure what exactly happened between the airport girl and Vishal. All I know is that within a very short space of time, Vishal forgot all about the airport girl, and asked his parents to find him a wife.
So.
He’s getting married to quite another girl this Wednesday.
Such are the ways in which life moves.
Now, if this were a Plum book, it would have involved you going out in the night, scaling castle walls and braving aunts with freezing looks to rescue your cousin from the ivory tower and finding this airport girl and more.