I had broken up with my boyfriend when I met this guy on a matrimonial portal. From his pictures, he didn’t come across as anywhere close to attractive, but he was fun to talk to. We interacted on text for a couple of days before we met in person. Even though he looked quite tiny physically in front of me, I was impressed by the way he handled difficult situations. As time went by, we both started meeting often after work. We both started liking each other. Or at least I had.

A few days later, he said that his astrologer had forbidden him from taking any important decisions until further notice due to a “Shani” dosh in his stars. He suggested I could choose someone else in case I didn’t want to wait for too long. I had taken quite a bit of liking towards him and decided to wait. We continued to meet. I even sneaked out of the house for a night out with him once in a resort in Gorai a month or two later. That night we got drunk and smoked sheesha till dawn. When we retreated to our room, things started to get intimate. However, he just didn’t seem to be into it irrespective of all his efforts. We concluded that he must be too drunk and went to sleep.

Things changed a bit after that night. He became a little aloof and wouldn’t keep in touch a lot.

Another month later, I expressed quite clearly to him that I felt as if I had been chasing after him and I didn’t wish to come across as someone desperate. So if he didn’t want to keep in touch, he should just tell me and I'd move on. His reply went like this - "Not in my prime right now." As if how I felt, and whatever I felt meant the least to him.

I stopped communicating with him thereafter. When we had started communicating all those months ago, he had mentioned his plans of moving to Canada. He had been coaxing me as well to work on my PR as we'd need to do my paperwork as soon as the marriage was fixed. All this time, even his visa hadn’t come through. A couple of months after I stopped talking to him, he texted me that his visa had finally come through and told me that he'd be leaving for Canada by the end of that month.

We decided to meet one last time.

However, when we did, the longing for each other seemed to still exist. He dropped me outside my building but didn’t wish to leave. So he stayed back. So did I. The 'one last meeting', happened again, and again till a day before he left. I realized that I had started liking him more than ever. I didn’t know whether I could call it love. But I had started imagining a happy married life with him. And then he left.

For the next one month, I tried convincing him to give our relationship a chance, until one fine evening he put his foot down saying he needed to concentrate on making a successful life there in Canada, and besides, he didn’t see this relationship materializing. He said we could still be friends. But I hadn’t met him to be just friends with him. I couldn’t have. So I bid him farewell yet again and stopped talking to him.

Then, a day before the day it would have been a year since I received his proposal on the matrimonial site, he pinged me on my social media messenger and said he was sitting at the restaurant where we used to hangout usually, missing me. I realized he was in town. Instead of asking him directly whether he wanted to catch up, I asked him for how long he was staying.

To that he replied, he was getting married. Something collapsed inside of my heart at that moment.

I was sitting at my office desk, with all my colleagues buried in their work around me. I couldn’t breathe. I shut my laptop and rushed downstairs. I called up my mother and cried my heart out. I cried and cried, but didn’t know how to stop. I don’t know when I did, but I stopped crying after what felt like years. Aside from the fact that the guy wanted as my husband was getting married after telling me that he could not have invested his energy in a marriage with me, this situation was happening to me for the second time. I had no power over what was happening. He had conveniently avoided introducing me to his parents too, which had never felt fishy to me until that moment. Had I been in touch with them, I could have done something. But I couldn’t. So I decided to bear this burden and move on.

Then the day after he got married, my mother told me something that brought together all the pieces of the jigsaw for me.

One of her friends was his neighbor and had attended the wedding. When asked about the boy and the family, she told my mother that this was a love marriage, and the girl, who was originally from Dhanbad, had been living as a paying guest at his apartment located in Thane. His parents refused to accept the girl for a very long time but finally agreed as he never liked any other girl as far as they knew. My mom’s friend also told her that had his parents known that he was in talking terms with me, they would have adored me and pampered me like anything. And about the astrologer part, she said they didn’t even believe in God.

Believing in astrology was far from possible. And when my mother told me all of this, I realized that I was only his backup plan. In case his parents would have refused to let him marry the girl he was in love with, he would have then introduced me to his family. He met me in a time when his marriage to his girlfriend seemed impossible at any cost. That was why he lied to me about the astrologer. That was why he never introduced me to his parents. That was why he couldn’t get intimate with me that night. That was why he suddenly drifted away from me after that night.

That was also the reason why he couldn’t see the relationship falling through after all. His parents had finally agreed! And I was but a backup plan.

By the end of all of this, I had only one question for my mother - "If the guys from our own community do this, how am I supposed to trust anyone at all?" She had no answer.

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