by Ajay Patel
Vijay asked with interest, “So have you taken the time to put your info on these sites?”
“No, I can’t say that I’ve reached that level yet,” admitted Rocky. “Besides, I’m too busy going through my ‘ita’ phase right now.”
“Your ‘ita’ phase?” Vijay asked puzzled.
“You know. The last person I met was Gita. Before that I had met a Mita, Rita, Sangita, and Kavita. You name an ‘ita’ and I’ve probably been set up with her!”
“Wow! You really have met a lot of women, haven’t you?” Vijay exclaimed.
“What can I say? It’s just my luck,” Rocky responded helplessly.
“Well, no offense buddy, but I hope I’m luckier than you,” Vijay said with a goodbye. He hoped that luck would involve New York and Mona.
When Vijay arrived at the airport he was surprised to find the terminal gate crowded with people on the flight bound for New York. He had hoped that the plane would be empty so that he could stretch across three seats and fall asleep. But judging from the length of the line, it looked to be a packed flight.
“What in the world is going on?” a voice from behind him sounded tired and annoyed.
Vijay turned around. His garment bag took a second longer to gain the momentum necessary to make the same turn and took a second longer to stop. As a result, the strap from which the bag was hanging slipped off his shoulder and the whole bag fell to the floor almost making Vijay trip over it. Vijay stood face to face with Valerie, a blond, blue-eyed attorney who worked with him at the firm. She was dressed in baggy sweats carrying a garment bag over one shoulder, holding a leather litigation bag with both her hands, and wearing a frown realizing, no doubt like Vijay had, that sleeping on the flight would practically be impossible.
“From what I can tell, the flight before this was cancelled and so all those people got bumped onto our flight,” he explained to her with a sigh.
After waiting in line for twenty minutes, they received their boarding passes and walked through the gate entrance and boarded the plane. After stowing their bags in the overhead compartment they sat down in their seats. Both of them were giddy now from being so tired.
“I’m so exhausted but I can’t sleep like this.” Valerie squirmed uncomfortably in her seat after the plane took off. She fiddled with the recline button but obtained very little comfort from what it had to offer. Vijay put his tray down and rested his head on it. That wasn’t working either.
“Are you staying around in the city through the weekend?” Vijay asked to make conversation, resigned to the fact that he would be awake for a while.
“Yes. I met this one guy who’s an investment banker on my last flight to New York. I called him up and offered to let him take me out on the town,” she said, sounding as though she was being magnanimous by giving the guy the opportunity. That was typical of Valerie.
“Do you even like him?” asked Vijay critically.
“Geographically undesirable,” she wrote him off without a second’s thought. “But that doesn’t mean he can’t treat me to a nice time this weekend, does it?” she asked coquettishly.
“It’s women like you that drive nice guys like me crazy!” Vijay complained. Valerie was attractive and enjoyed having men follow her around like lovesick teenagers. She and Vijay had a history of animated discussions about her living by the “Rules,” which entailed her playing games and treating men badly which in some deranged way made her more desirable to these same men. Vijay, of course, took the side of and pleaded for the men in Valerie’s life who were foolish enough to lose all of their self-respect despite how she treated them.
“What about you?” she ignored his diatribe and continued the conversation after the stewardess brought their drinks. “Are you sticking around in the city for another one of your arranged marriage blind dates?” she asked teasingly, having heard his stories of the numerous women he had been meeting through the matrimonial process.
“I am,” Vijay admitted.
“You and your marriage rush,” she said with disapproval, looking as if she almost wanted to shake some sense into him. Valerie was the quintessential single woman and the arranged marriage process was very much a foreign concept to her. “I keep telling you, once you’re married, you miss out on all the benefits of being single, and I’m not just talking about going out to parties and dating lots of different women. If we get a great job opportunity tomorrow morning that’s in Europe, we wouldn’t have to think twice about it. We could just go because we’re single! You’ve got tons of years to experience the married life ahead of you, why do you want to sacrifice your few remaining single years for that?”
“I understand what you’re saying,” Vijay responded, “but did you ever stop to think that by extending your single experience you might be sacrificing your married experience?” Seeing that Valerie didn’t believe what Vijay was saying could possibly be true, he said “Here, I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about.” He took out a pen and some paper from his computer bag. “I’m just gonna ask you some questions and let’s see if we can figure some things out.”
“Go ahead,” she challenged him.
“Okay, to start off, when you’re married do you think you’ll want a family?” he asked her.
She laughed at how quickly Vijay had gotten to serious life topics, answering, “Definitely.”
“When’s the latest you think you would want to have a kid?”
“I don’t want to be so old that I’m on Social Security when my kids go to college and I don’t want a high risk pregnancy. So let’s say…thirty five,” Valerie thought out loud.
“How many kids do you think you want to have?”
“Two.”
“How much older will the older kid be than the younger kid?”
“I don’t know, maybe two years apart to give me some breathing room. What’s the point of all this?” she asked, mildly annoyed now. The lack of sleep was taking its toll on her.
“Don’t worry,” Vijay said while writing down her responses on the paper in front of him. “You’ll see. How long do you think you and your husband will be just a married couple before you have kids?”
“From what I hear, you don’t get to go out as much once you have kids. So I’ll want to have some time to enjoy life with my husband before we go down that road. You know, so that we can travel and throw dinner parties and do all that kind of stuff.”
“Of course. So you think you’d be married for two years before you had your first kid?” he asked leadingly, to quicken the likelihood of getting an answer out of her.
“Yes, I think that’s right if I was planning things,” she laughed at the thought of plotting out her life so far in advance.
Vijay made more notes on the paper. “Okay. So how long do you think you’ll be engaged to your husband before you get married?”
“I would need lots of time to prepare for the wedding. But let’s be reasonable. I think I would like a one year engagement.”
“And how long do you think you’ll know the guy before he works up the nerve to ask you to marry him?”
She closed her eyes and answered, “Unlike you, I’m not going to rush into a big decision like that. But let’s be ultra aggressive and say six months just for the fun of it. We’ll call it love at first sight!” she made fun of him and his feelings about that concept.
Vijay ignored her jab and continued, “Is there any guy you’re seeing that you think could be the guy that you end up spending the rest of your life with?”
“No, not right now,” she said with a sigh.
“So what are you saying? Do you think it’s possible that in the next year you’ll meet the guy that someday will end up marrying you?”
“If I had to guess right now, I don’t see that happening. But maybe. Okay, again let’s be aggressive and say this year I meet the guy who I end up marrying. Oh! This is so exciting!” Valerie pretended to be excited. “I’m meeting my husband soon!”
Vi
jay continued to ignore her theatrics. He did some calculations based on the answers Valerie provided. He then looked at her and confirmed, “So you agree that all of this is reasonable, if not conservative? I mean, in order to have the full married life with kids experience, this is how everything should play out, right?”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“Well, according to what you’ve told me, you should meet, or rather bump into, the guy that you will be marrying when you’re twenty eight years old. That is, of course, if you don’t want to miss out on anything as a married person.”
“But, Vijay, I’m already thirty years old,” she didn’t quite understand Vijay’s point.
“I know,” Vijay said gently. “I’m just saying that if you wanted your life to go along the plan you had just described to me, you would have already been married for a year by now.”
Valerie stopped short and pressed against her seat deep in thought as the point finally hit home.
“What I was saying before was that I agree you may have gotten to do some more things as a single person by not getting married so early. But well, here is where maybe you may have given up on some things in your future married life because of that.”
“I guess I never bothered to think about it like that,” she said quietly, slightly disturbed at having missed what ramifications might arise based on her present outlook on life.
“Now do you understand why I don’t feel like I’m giving up on all this fun being single for nothing? I’m just trading it in for a new kind of married fun,” Vijay said in a sleepy tone, resting his head back on the tray, sleep overcoming him. As he drifted off, his head on one side, he could see Valerie deep in thought, mentally working the numbers in her mind over and over again, nowhere near as close to going to sleep as he was.
After Vijay and Valerie’s flight landed, they went to the hotel to change and then left to go straight to the office to work until two in the morning. Vijay felt like a zombie, having not closed his eyes for over thirty hours straight. After returning back to the hotel for a few hours of sleep, they went back to the office at five in the morning on Friday. Although very tired, the prospect of finishing early seemed definite now and gave them renewed energy. By lunchtime the deal had closed and their work was done.
Back at the hotel, Vijay fell asleep immediately upon entering his room, the time change and lack of rest having had a powerful combined effect on him. Before he knew it, he woke up with a start having slept the entire afternoon.
After lying in bed for a while, he went into the bathroom to prepare for his date with Mona that evening. As he stood in front of the mirror getting ready he realized he didn’t feel nervous at all. It was very different than when he was meeting any of the women that his parents had set him up with. Maybe it was because this was just a casual date, like dates were meant to be in a normal world. There were no immediate implications of marriage tied to this meeting and there was no reporting back to parents that would be necessary. Vijay pulled out a printed e-mail from Mona with her address from his briefcase and put it in his pocket. He went downstairs after showering and hailed a cab, giving the driver the address to Mona’s apartment.
After a twenty-minute ride through traffic, the cab driver dropped Vijay off in Greenwich Village in front of Mona’s apartment building. The building was very impressive and all Vijay could think of when he saw it was that this was a place that even Valerie could live in luxury with men at her beck and call. He went through the front doors held open by a uniformed doorman to meet a security guard sitting behind a counter. The lobby was expensively furnished with leather designer chairs and a large array of orchids placed on a center table.
“Hi, I’m here to visit Mona Patel in 302,” Vijay said. He looked at his watch. It read 6:37. They had made plans to meet her at her place at 6:30. A few seconds passed as the security guard called up to Mona’s apartment.
The security guard put the phone down and looked up at Vijay. “I’m sorry sir, but nobody’s answering.”
“I do have the right place don’t I?” asked Vijay. “Is there a Mona Patel that lives there?”
“You’ve got the right place,” the security guard confirmed. “But I haven’t seen her since this afternoon when she left with some gentleman. Is she expecting you?”
“I thought so,” Vijay said with a sigh. He then sat in the lobby waiting for her as there was nothing close by to walk to outside. To his dismay, there weren’t even any magazines for him to occupy his time, no doubt a measure maintained by the building office to keep stragglers from staying too long. After an hour had passed by, he angrily thought to himself, where could she be? He had come all this way from California and was stuck sitting in a lobby waiting for her while the security guard and doorman no doubt were laughing at him! There appeared to be no explanation other than the one Valerie told to him once about when she met guys. “According to the Rules, the girl, even if she’s ready, has got to keep the guy waiting and expecting, especially when they meet for the first time.” He began to wonder if Mona was reading from the same book of Rules that Valerie did.
He looked at his watch for what must have been the hundredth time. It was now approaching 8:00. Mona was over an hour and a half late from when she had said she would be in. Now fully angry at himself for waiting that long and also at the idea of having been stood up without warning, he decided to cut his losses and leave.
He proceeded to walk around the Village full of anger and self-pity. After eating a slice of cheese pizza for dinner on a park bench, he decided that the night had effectively been wasted and returned to the hotel in a bad mood. Getting out of his cab at the front entrance, he saw Valerie next to a Porsche saying good-bye to the driver. She just waved good-bye. There was no kiss, no hug, not even a handshake. Without saying a word Vijay followed Valerie through the doors of the hotel.
“Hey Val,” Vijay said as he caught up to her inside the lobby.
Valerie turned around in surprise. “You scared me! What are you doing here? It’s not even ten yet!”
“Yeah, I can say the same to you too. I thought you were going to paint the town red tonight? What happened?”
“Let’s just say it was one of those nights,” she said with a sigh.
Vijay, sensing things didn’t go well on her date either, asked, “Since we’ve both come back too early to be good, do you want to go to the hotel bar and at least have a drink to commiserate?”
She agreed, and they walked into the hotel bar and ordered two Manhattans for no other reason than besides it felt like the right drink to order in Manhattan.
“So, tell me about your date,” Vijay asked after the bartender had served them.
“Brad’s really nice and all, but well, he just doesn’t…,” she was searching for the right words to finish the sentence.
“Start your motor? rev your engine? turn your crank?” Vijay offered, trying to help her finish her sentence with a smile.
“Yeah, yeah, thanks for your help! But you’re right,” she admitted with a shrug of her shoulders and a big sip of her drink. “He wasn’t someone I felt excited about being with, and I knew that. But I thought what harm would it do to let him take me out tonight?” she asked rhetorically.
“So, what happened?” Vijay asked curious.
“We went to this great restaurant for dinner and while we were waiting at the bar for our table to get ready, I stood next to this really amazing new guy. I just had this feeling of intense attraction towards him, and I don’t get that feeling often! We looked at each other a couple of times and I just knew he wanted to talk to me. Vijay, he could have been the one. You know, the guy that I bump into and get married to within a year!” she referred back to their conversation on the airplane.
“So, did you get his name or anything?”
“That’s the problem! I couldn’t because I was there with Brad!” she let out, patiently explaining the obvious situation to him. “It was then that I realized the perfect person co
uld walk by me and I wouldn’t even be able to do anything because I was with the wrong guy just having fun. After that realization, I didn’t feel like going out after dinner anymore,” she said with a sigh, “so I just cut my losses.”
Vijay shrugged, sorry to have heard her night didn’t go as planned but also happy that perhaps in the long run, the lesson learned tonight might be a good one for Valerie.
But wait a minute!” she broke out of her despondency, “That explains why I’m back here, what about you?” she took another sip of her drink.
“She never showed,” he offered as a short explanation.
“What?” Valerie said surprised. “You sure she wasn’t just being late like I usually am? Building up anticipation? You know, like the Rules require?”
“Well, if she was reading your book of Rules, she has the hard cover edition, because I waited over an hour and a half and she still didn’t show!”
“An hour and a half?” Valerie repeated in awe, almost as if it was a compliment to Mona to get a man to wait that long for her. “She didn’t explain why she wasn’t there?”
“No. There was no note or anything. I could have done something else and not wasted my time,” Vijay said bitterly.
“Did you check with the hotel? She might have left a message telling you she had cancelled.”
As soon as Valerie said that, Vijay realized with dismay that he had never given Mona a number to reach him if the plan changed. “Oh no!” Vijay groaned and dropped his head on the table. “I can’t believe that I didn’t tell her how to get a hold of me! Sometimes I can be such a…”
“Dummy? idiot? stupid person?” it was Valerie’s turn to help Vijay finish his sentence.
“I’d better go and give her a call,” he said as they both stood up to leave. He no longer felt as negatively towards Mona as he had before realizing his mistake.
Valerie, however, hoped only for the worst for Vijay in a way that only Valerie could. “I hope this Mona person has an excuse for why she couldn’t make it, but you know me and how I am with the Rules,” she grinned mischievously, “The weaker her excuse is, the more I’ll probably respect her!”
