Day 41 of 100 Indian Tinder Tales
Inspiration: Frida Kahlo’s Two Fridas.
B from Paradeep shares her tale.
“It took us one conversation to realize that we matched in terms that went beyond the swipe feature. We surprisingly shared the same taste in movies (and from that I believe, we already felt familiar to each other), an equally ridiculous sense of humour and above all, a desperate urge to be capable of being vulnerable to someone again. The most amazing part of meeting a stranger online was that you could choose to be whatever kind of person you want to be in their eyes.
Having no memory of when was the last time I was someone more than a personified version of everyone else’s opinions, I decided that this time, I will be unapologetically myself. For the world, I was the quintessential left-aligned, liberal kind of woman, the one who always keeps her chin up and has a steel heart brimming with feminism and revolution, exactly the kind men are afraid of asking out. But for him, I was just a young submissive woman who still battled the nostalgia of childhood, believed in Jane Austenian theories about love and human relationships and craved to be written about.
In the forthcoming days, a lot of sleep was lost in continuously texting till the dawn and a lot of hopes were built around the tiny instinct that something was about to happen here. On my good days, I made some careless promises. On his bad days, he expressed confusion regarding the pace we were moving forward with, which sometimes pulled me back to square one, but sometimes gave me miraculous ounces of patience to explain that the anxiety was justified but misleading. But the closer we came, the more my apprehensions grew. My habit of looking at the world cynically overpowered my craving for any kind of romance and slowly I was curling inwards, withdrawing for the connection we shared, afraid that accidents can never be determined and any day he might reveal something indigestible for me or turn inside out to become something malevolent that I couldn’t foresee. So one cold night, I retracted under my blanket into a little girl of sixteen who was equally inquisitive of feelings as she was afraid of them, breathing in some courage, and breathing out slowly the last chance I thought I had with love.
My phone rang. His name flashed on the phone and only God knows how I was woken up from deep sleep, almost hopping a little on my bed, to pick it up and whisper in my kindest voice. He said he had alcohol that day for the first time. I said nothing in return. After a few moments of breathing heavily and searching for the right words, what took place was the most elaborate and romantic conversation ever. The lights of my building went out, the din in the city fell quiet, and I am sure the stars grew tired of twinkling. But we both were still awake, telling each other little things that did not matter for anyone else. Marking the start of the best thing, that had happened to both of us. Looking back at that day in the back of my mind, and looking at him right now, sleeping peacefully beside me, burying his face in my arms, I still am having a hard time deciding if I am sleepwalking through life or wake-walking through a dream. I guess that line from the movie we both love a lot, was true. Life indeed is a box of chocolates, and you never know what you are going to get. However, you can definitely believe that whatever you get, will surely be sweet.”
