I'll be your mirror, reflect what you are

Today is momentous, and not just because Chai is taking the bar today (kick a$$ and take names, chiquita!). And it's not just because I did a happy dance last night upon catching a trailer for the new season of The Sopranos. No- there's an odd coincidence about this day that I absolutely adore.

I still remember my first chemistry class in college. As was always my way, I arrived to the lecture early, and sat near the front, but not in the front, near the middle, but not in the middle. People filed in, and among one of the first to sit next to me was W. He was wearing a Red Sox cap. All the other freshmen were chatting each other up. My head was buried in my notebook. W sat perfectly still, looking straight in front of him. This guy seemed the kind of guy who should have been slapping another guy on the back and remarking about how this class was wicked retahded. Instead, he sat there like a zen master, impenetrable. I was intrigued by this fellow loner.

The problem with loners is that, when you recognize one of your kind, you are at a loss for how to connect with each other. The lecture still had not started. I looked over at him, made a crack about the burden of being a Red Sox fan. He smiled wryly, and said something that amounted to: "Yeah." I cringed and returned to writing on the margin of my notebook. W would later admit that he used to ask to copy my notes specifically so he could see what it was I was scribbling on those margins. You can all probably guess what they contained more often than not.

I imagined that W would be one of those people I would shake my head at. One of those people who you knew would be a great person to know, if only you could convince them you were worth knowing. And of course, convincing someone of that is impossible. Lucky for me, W turned out to be easy: me breaking two beakers and a graduate cylinder within the first five minutes of lab the next week turned out to be too hilarious for him to let pass without snark.

W did not know back then how smart he really was. And I did not know how much I really adored science. If we had never met, neither of us might have come to our respective realizations. It is W's birthday today, and he is on a different continent, living a different life, a complete tangent to my existence. But it is funny how that changes nothing.

Two years before W was born, on this day, my parents tied their fates together forever, circling a fire in Mumbai. They had been on one date previously, supervised by a mutual family friend. My father had been so bold as to suggest walking my mother home. My mom thought he was a bit of a fool for behaving out of turn in this manner. She did not understand why my father should need to speak to her without a chaperone. There were no professions of love on that walk home, but somehow it was enough.

I am always a little in awe of my parents' marriage. Not in some kind of romantic sense. In fact, quite the opposite. My parents have inspired in me a (I think) healthy fear of marriage, and an idea of all the things you really ought to know when you walk into the arrangement. But I also marvel at how they have managed to keep two loosely stranded pieces of fabric meshed together in permanence. They may not always like each other, but they know each other with excruciating precision. Right now, I have no doubt that my mother has, somewhere along their three month of tour of India, derailed my father's plans to see the next temple in favor of shopping at a nearby sari shop. And my father is drinking a cup of tea in the sari shop, listening to imaginary music in his head instead of the sari merchant's explanation of how fine the unfolded sari is, no doubt annoying my mother. And it will be like this for as long as they both shall live. They have made a habit of annoying each other over the years, and it leaves me a bit dumbfounded to see that they have come to depend on that habit. Still, after all these years, I cannot decide if that is sad or endearing.

In the spirit of today and optimism, I will go with the latter.