Chapter 3

2013/14

Some time in 2013, I fell in love again—something I thought I was incapable of after what I went through with Min, whose trauma had taken me about two years to shake off. Nat had just joined the team, and we developed a friendship very quickly. That friendship soon blossomed into romance. It didn’t take long for me to let her know how I felt. She reciprocated to an extent, but she was very wary of our differences in caste and worried it would be a dealbreaker for her family. Right from the beginning, she was hesitant to fully commit, but the strong attraction we shared broke down barriers and drew us closer.

That year brought unexpected trials. My manager from Bangalore traveled to Kochi for a kidney transplant operation, as Kerala was the only state where the procedure could legally be performed at the time. Navigating the legal and financial hurdles was exhausting. Nat and I, as her direct reportees, went to great lengths to help however we could—finding her family a place to stay, organizing a relaxing trip to Munnar just prior to the life-threatening surgery, and supporting them through the ordeal.

On November 12, 2013—a date I remember clearly because it was 11/12/13—as I dropped Nat off at the railway station for her regular monthly trip to visit her family in Chennai, she complained of feeling unwell. On the spur of the moment, I decided to board the train with her without a ticket. The ticket inspector caught me, fined me a few hundred rupees, and allowed me to share the upper berth with her. I handed him my only ₹500 note, and he kept the balance for himself. The next day, immediately after dropping her off in Chennai, I had to find my way back to Kochi with barely any cash left—a grueling 24-hour journey across the southern states. Looking back, I suppose I did it all just to impress her. Experiences like that brought us even closer, even as the resistance from her family grew fiercer.

But even as we grew closer, that uneasy dread hung over us: at some point, we would have to face our families, who in all probability were going to reject our relationship.