'INVITATIO'Nailed !

They say marriages are made in heaven. But outsourcing being the order of the day, it seems marriages too have been outsourced from heaven nowadays. The quintessential marriage broker and marriage bureaus have taken a backseat as more and more get to find their better halves by themselves. Though largely unsuccessful so far, I have put in quite a number of efforts to this end myself.

The main bottleneck has been the shortlisting.Talkative girls don’t make the cut, so doesn't the fashionable and the over-socializing ones. No mirror cracking materials please, as she would get soon get bored going about cracking mirrors without my company. But long hair and intelligence are an absolute must-I still have my demands, you see. If at all some lady meets all the criteria she would have to still have to get acquainted with me and at least pick up a friendship with me. Sounds wishful thinking, but let me tell you, there has been more than one on my list so far. To be precise, six of them.

Now the twist in the tale. Of the six, two were already married, one was engaged, another one was already in love and the last two got engaged within a month of me meeting them. Call it pessimism or whatever you want, but I formulated my own theory about girls and me. Bring any girl who is struggling to find her match, due to reasons ranging from domestic to monetary to horoscopic, get me to like her and within a month, her cup of matrimonial woes would be empty and mine would be that much fuller.

Then I happened to switch my job. Quite often a change does you a world of good. Sometimes a change is what makes Lady Luck to cast her benevolence on us.Atleast that was what I hoped when I joined the new job. My hope wasn't out of place at all, when within a week I spotted what was to be the next entry on my growing list. She had joined recently and sat diagonally opposite to me. There was everything, the charming smile, long hair, simple dressing and calm demeanor and the fact that I didn’t even know anything about her couldn't put me off at all. Before long, glances and smiles were exchanged, and my brain worked overtime to correlate the smiles and glances to something like a mutual liking. Except for the smiles and glances, we never talked to each other. From my past relationships one thing which I had learnt was instead of being pushy,it was always better to be patiently bide my time and wait for the break.

So far, so good. By the way, I am not in a position to reveal the name of the girl, so let me call her Miss. DreamGirl.I needed to find out more about Miss. Dream Girl, starting with her name. The problem here was that since both of us were new at the office, there weren’t many whom I could ask for such sensitive data and there wouldn't be many who actually would know the details. That was when one day, luckily, I met this particular guy at our pantry. I will call him Mr.GodSend.Mr.GodSend was a talkative fellow, and since then, we used to talk occasionally over coffee. The talk was pretty much the boring crap - about the latest bank interests, housing loans, worsening condition of the roads of Cochin, train timings - the topics which come to your rescue when your interests doesn't match with someone and you still have to pick up a conversation. Though he was quite good at gossip-mongering, I was apprehensive about asking Mr. Godsend about Miss.DreamGirl as his chat never veered to "girl-topics”, as we call them. But his furtive glances and knowing smiles at me whenever a pretty, well-endowed female walked past us made me feel confident that he could be my man. I went ahead and managed to get her name from him, and also came to know that even her native place was the same as mine.

The signs were pretty bright and I sat down and formulated my plans. I methodically rehearsed our first conversations and the questions that I would ask her and so on. Meanwhile the glances continued, the smiles grew wider and the occasional one line conversations started to flourish too. Things were slowly picking up pace when after some days our Mr. Godsend came up to invite me for his marriage. He handed me his wedding invitation.DreamGirl was invited too,and was attending,so I made up my mind that I would attend too, and I joked to him about how me and Miss.DreamGirl would come to his seat to invite him to our marriage. He departed, and I folded the invitation and put it into my table to find yet another invitation there.Out of sheer curiosity I opened it.

I would have admired the card, with its silver background and embossed golden letters, if it was not for the content. I read the card again, hoping that I had read it wrong. But I hadn’t. The bride happened to be our Miss.DreamGirl and the saddest part was the date of wedding-it had happened a good two months before. I couldn’t help cursing her for not sporting at least an obvious Sindhoor mark on her forehead.

Months have passed,Miss.DreamGirl was promptly rechristened Mrs.DreamGirl,she is expecting a baby in a few months, Mr.Godsend is happily married and I am still drawing up lists and cutting the entries off with a speed that only my fast-running-out optimism can match.