When serendipity strikes, make the most of it
We’re often wishing for a romcom to take over our lives, and yet when a meet cute happens, we’re too afraid to act on it. This must change
Keya was trying to reach a long-lost classmate she just managed to get the number of. She dialled the number, a man answered the phone. She asked for her friend. He politely told her she had the wrong number. How cumbersome it can be dialling 10 digits on a touch-screen phone, he added. They laughed. She apologised and ended the call.
Keya spent all day thinking about that man — his voice, patience, his sense of humour. Though she didn’t know his name, she called him back. When he answered, she says, she got the feeling he’d been hoping to hear from her too.
Keya and Siraj have been together for five years, and married for four. Yes, Siraj says, he had been hoping to hear from her. And if she hadn’t called him back, he’d planned to wait a day and call her.
She was in Delhi then, and he in Mumbai. After a month of long phone conversations, they began flying back and forth to meet. They had tied the knot in less than a year.
After the bumpy first months that most Delhiites (and for that matter most Mumbaiites) experience when they relocate, Keya has embraced Mumbai and its vibrancy.
Just imagine if neither had called the other back.
If we allow it, serendipitous connections can be formed at any stage in our lives.
These can be friends, professional connections, even love.
While he was waiting to start his postgraduate surgical training in England, Dr V, based in Belgaum was summoned to Kolkata by his uncle, a senior surgeon, who needed help with his ailing wife. In his free time, Dr V began helping out at his uncle’s hospital too.
Walking along with his stethoscope around his neck one day, he was asked to help by a colleague who was talking to a young woman about some tests her mother needed. Intrigued by the informed questions she was asking, Dr V continued the dialogue even after his colleague left.
They ended by exchanging numbers, and he called her that evening. Would she like to see a movie with him the following day, he asked. She said yes. They both recall vividly how they felt all through the afternoon like they were being followed… from the movie theatre to the restaurant for lunch, and then again as they strolled through the streets of Kolkata.
Her mother and brother were shadowing them, it turned out, rather befuddled by the idea that she’d gone on a date with someone she’d just met purely by chance. When Dr V left Kolkata two months later, they were married. I thoroughly enjoy the way they tell this story, 10 years and two beautiful daughters later.
I use both these stories when I’m trying to encourage the people I meet and coach to follow their path to love, regardless of where or how unconventionally it may have originated.
It’s always easier to act when serendipity offers the chance at a simple friendship or professional connection. Most often, the hesitation comes in when it is a chance at romance. But it doesn’t need to be so. If what you feel seems strong and reciprocated, you should reach out —carefully and sensitively. You might be in luck, as Keya and Dr V were.