Muhabbat ki ek aur Daastaan!

Soul Curry-timeslife. TOIM/2010/04/18

And they lived happily...

NOW their story can be told...

Gautam has returned home, cheerful and happily married. He has lost some hair though, and put on a few kilos. But that cannot be helped, after six months of sustained radiation and chemotherapy sessions.

We were always worried about Gautam, not so much for his health as for his being perennially “accidentprone”. That was the expression my wife had reserved for him for the way he used to fall in and out of love. Women, no doubt, found him handsome and flipped for him at first sight. But having known him for over 20 years, I knew that for all his charming ways and dashing looks, he was actually an old-fashioned bloke and painfully self-righteous — a trait many of his girlfriends found rather off-putting.

So when Sandhya walked out of an Internet portal and into his life, we were pleasantly surprised. They had a small engagement ceremony in Delhi. The marriage would be fixed once Sandhya got her job transfer and could join Gautam in Mumbai. At last, things were beginning to fall into place for my friend.

And then tragedy struck. Gautam was rushing for a client meet in town and had abandoned his car for the local train. While taking the stairs for the railway over-bridge, he felt a sudden stab of pain in his chest. He made a mental note to give up smoking. Late afternoon, the pain resumed and he called me. I gave him the number of my cardiologist. As expected, he was advised rest. By the third day, when the pain did not subside, he went to Bombay Hospital for a second opinion. It turned out that nothing was wrong with his heart, but he had developed acute lung congestion. Tests followed. They drained almost 750ml of fluid out his lungs. Before long, the biopsy report came in. It was a cancerous growth.

Gautam was shifted to Tata Memorial and from then on, life has been an endless whirl of multi-coloured capsules, injections and drips, of faceless doctors and nurses. Somehow, I was confident that Gautam had the mental strength to pull through. His sister and widowed mother were by his bedside.

One nagging question however, continued to bother us: How was Sandhya taking all this in Delhi? She would fly down every time Gautam was to go through a chemo-cycle. But what about their wedding?

And then, one evening Gautam called, asking for my opinion. He was already five months into treatment and beginning to show signs of recovery. I told him not to rush into marriage. I suggested, “This is not about you alone, you need to think of Sandhya’s future also. What does she have to say?”

“She says that I should go deposit my sperms in a sperm bank, just in case…”

I was stumped for words. In all my life, this was the bravest line I have heard coming from a woman. Here, like a coward, I was lamely beating about the bush on the rights and wrongs of their marrying. And there, marriage was not only a foregone conclusion, they were already planning a family.

It was not as though they were so blinded by love that they did not know what they were getting into. In fact, they hardly knew each other beyond a few phone calls and the e-mails they had exchanged before their engagement. They did not go through the rituals of conventional courtship.

They are from different backgrounds. One is from Delhi and the other is from Mumbai. One is an HR professional, the other is a filmmaker. One is a Malayalee, the other a Punjabi. And yet, they have found the courage to challenge fate and celebrate life together.