Love At First Sight

Rati was an astounding, amazing girl. She was smart, pretty, witty, and extremely lovable. But there was only one problem with her. Though her parents had named her after the Goddess of love, Rati did not believe in love at all. Her favorite song was ‘Jaane kyu log pyaar karte hai?’. The reason was simple, her parents had divorced when she was just a child. She remembered them fighting bitterly with each other. Rati had grown up hearing her mother say ‘I loved the wrong man, to everyone who would listen. These bitter experiences of her parent's marriage had erased the word ‘love’ from Rati’s heart!

As she hit puberty, all her friends seemed to have put on pink glasses and looked at the opposite gender through the pink haze of infatuation, which to them seemed a lot like love. All her friends did, was talk about their crushes, how they looked, talked, walked, smiled. But Rati was put off by all that ‘love’ talk. She started distancing herself from all her friends, after failed attempts at trying to convince them that there was nothing like ‘love’! Most of her friends, deeply in love by then, would look at her quizzically, trying to figure out what was wrong with her.

Years passed by, Rati went to college, made a great many friends, participated actively in extracurricular activities, studied hard, getting many accolades on both the academic and non-academic fronts, making her quite popular. But again, while all her friends were being proposed and getting hitched with their soulmates, Rati had already started an ‘anti-love movement’, where she went and talked to everyone about how Love was just a myth, and no one in the world really loved anyone else. She went about it with such ardent fervor, that some of her friends began thinking that she was going mad.

Rati’s mother was quite worried by this point, about how Rati would ever settle in life. She tried to convince Rati that what happened to her parents wasn’t something that would happen to everyone, but it was far too late for that. The damage had been done a long time back. But Rati, though not at all emotionally inclined, was very practical, and eventually, she married a good colleague of hers.

But this isn’t a story about Rati’s non-belief in love. This is a story about how Rati finally fell in love, that too at first sight! After a few years into her marriage, one bright morning, Rati found the love of her life, she just kept looking at him for the longest time, without blinking, falling head over heels in love. She was overwhelmed with such a flow of emotions, that she couldn’t stop the tears falling out onto her cheek. At that moment, Rati knew that true love existed, and it was the best feeling in her life. It was the day, Rati held her son in her arms for the first time!