Love Started With A 'Boo' | ✓

Episode 16

𝘈𝘮𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘴𝘢𝘳, 2017
𝘗𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘬𝘢

My life starts and ends with you only.
And I have accepted you with all your flaws and blemishes. 
Respect for you is infinity. 
Rasgulla will be the name of our first baby. 
I will be with you, through every thick and thin. 
Always, that's my promise. 
Grown is the sapling of our love, let's get married &,
End the trademark of being my boyfriend, my hubby.

The speculum in front of me was showcasing a girl I hadn't appreciated ever who was festooned in a fuchsia pink coloured Lehenga. She looked ethereal, divine as if a decorated piece of some vintage shop. Her lips were tinged red and dark natural hues was spread over her cheeks as if some heavenly glows splashed across the dusky sky of a spring eve. An intricately designed nose ring was attached to her parrot's beak-like nose giving her the final look of an Indian goddess. The dangly earrings were rhythmically swaying in utter exaltation and celebration as if they too were partying like the way her cousins and relatives were doing from several days. The soft dark tendrils abreast her temples were tickling her skin yet were efficacious enough to hold one's eyes on it. The necklace around her slender neck was gracefully embellished and the decorated dupatta too was tucked properly on her hair from where a beautiful Mangteeka was peeking as if playing hide-and-seek. Her Heena clad hands were gracefully adorned with the red and ivory Choodas ─ a reminder and a mark of the nuptial bond she would be sharing with her husband.

Yes, today was the wedding day where I'd be pronounced as the rightful, loving, caring wife of Mr Divyaant Jain ─ a man whom I loved, would love and will continue to love till...no, no, I rebuked myself before that word could've left the used-to part of my subconscious.

Millions of thoughts were trespassing my mind now, each demanding equal remembrance and attention from me as if they were my psychic, cranky babies. Picking one of my baby-like memoir from the registers of my organic microprocessor, I went back to the memory lane.

I was bouncing, tripping and hopping like a bullfrog under thundershower since the day our matrimony was fixed. Marriage ─ the purest sacrament of two souls which does not only unite two individuals but ties two families too.

Yet it wasn't a cakewalk. It was as backbreaking as cruising on a fire-path with another assortment of fireballs plummeting from the sky. My side of the family had no problem with our conjugality but Divyaant's tribe was under the tropic of Capricorn, in the Southern Hemisphere concerning my family's decision who was very much positioned in the Northern Hemisphere only.

The most bizarre moment was when Divyaant's grandma started throwing tantrums that they'd disown my Hippo if he'd go against them. But Divyaant didn't want any of the things to happen ─ neither my absenteeism in his life nor his abnegation from his folks. And as challenging and rough time motivates us the most, Divyaant did something I hadn't contemplated he could ever do.

"Okay, you don't want me to marry Pritika, right? I will not. But I have a condition too. I will not marry any other girl in my entire lifetime." My gallant Hippo had upbraided in outrage when his family had downright declined the idea of him marrying a non-Jain girl.

And there his proletariat had melted like an iceberg, just at the skin of the teeth of that moment before my hero could've ravaged towards his room to destroy everything inside his abode which I still hadn't viewed.

"Beta, what sorcery had that girl put inside you that you're flouting us?" his granny had called out to him in a furore and coercing tone which every Indian parent takes pride of.