"Where are you from?" was all I could muster when I first ran into her on Sajha Chat. Her choice of nickname was partly responsible for my bravado. I hadn't talked to a girl on chat in years and I was genuinely curious about the person hiding behind that exotic nickname.
"Nowhere" she said.
"Ha ha..." I persisted "We must live close-by then. I'm from Kansas too!"
"You're funny" she said.
"LOL" I typed hoping not to loose her attention "So what do you do?"
Thats how it all began. We exchanged email addresses and IMs at the end of that conversation. It wasn't long before I added her to my buddy list and she added me to hers. Soon we started chatting everyday , sometimes for hours. IM conversations gave way to long hours on the phone shortly thereafter. We talked about everything from music, movies, arts, likes and dislikes, places we had been too, what we ate that day, when we slept, what happened at work etc etc
We were both lonely then. I had just gotten over a messy break-up. She was going though a crisis of confidence torn between her duties as a daughter and her desire to live life as a woman of the twenty-first century. She was under pressure from her parents to get married but had no desire to do so until she found someone of her own liking. Whenever she phoned her parents, her mother would talk about so-and-so guy who was "from a good family, well educated, well to do". Thats as far as her mother would go but she got the hint. The pressure, I sensed, was pretty enourmous.
She told me I was like a breath of fresh air compared to the guys who she had "met" at the behest of her parents. All of whom she had turned down, one after the other. She often made fun of those guys. One guy could barely speak 5 sentences without brining sex into the conversation she told me and another one wanted her to cook, clean and have babies and do nothing else! I admit I was a bit flattered when she told me I was a very different kind of guy.
We met in person for the first time in New York . She was going there for a conference and when I knew about it I convinced my boss to send me on training to NYC that week. We watched Les Miserables on Broadway and went for a late night dinner. We also did some sightseeing together one day. In an act of inexplicable insanity I even offered to go shopping with her on our last day in the city. I had begun to enjoy her company and I sensed she had begun to enjoy mine as well.
But there was an underlying tension in the relationship that was bound to surface as we got more intimate and opened up to each other. No, it didn't have anything to do with sex. Although we never talked about it, it became apparent that our cultural, social and economic backgrounds were very different. Which in it self might not have been such a big deal had our life experiences till that point not been so different. It hit me then that we are all products of our experiences and it is different experiences, and not class or caste, that make people different.
We both wondered, I think, whether it was worth the effort to try and overcome those differences. I sensed we were both too scared to bring this up lest we hurt the other person. There was an element of wounded pride involved too : one of us had to accept that the other one was better off in some way and neither one of us was prepared to do that.
A few weeks after the New York trip, I had to go to Los Angeles, this time for a real training. By then we had been talking less and less. In fact, it had been over a month since we had spoken. While in LA, I met up with a good friend of mine from my school days. Over dinner he told me he was seeing someone.
"Oh, where is she from?" I asked.
"Nowhere" he said laughing. "Thats what she told me when I first asked her that on Sajha chat"
