Second Romantic Endeavour

Some time in 2013, I fell in love again, something I thought I couldn't do after what I went through with Min the trauma of which took me about 2 years to come out of. Nat had just joined the team. We developed a friendship very quickly. And the friendship turned into feelings of romance soon enough. It didn't take me long to let her know of my feelings. She reciprocated it to an extent but was very vary of our differences in caste and worried that it will be a problem for her family. So she was always hesitant about getting fully committed. But the attraction we had for each other broke all barriers and we got closer.

In 2013, my manager from Bangalore came to the city for a kidney transplant operation. Kerala was the only state at the time they could perform the procedure. They had to go through several legal and financial hurdles and Me and Nat being her direct reportees went to great lengths helping them whatever we could, like finding an place to stay, organising a trip to Munnar prior to the life threatening surgery and so on.

On 11/12/13, as I dropped her at the railway station for her monthly train trip to Chennai where her family lived, she complained of being unwell, and I decided at the spur of the moment to travel with her without a ticket. The ticket inspector fined me a few hundred rupees in return to share the upper berth with her. I gave him the only ₹500 note I had and he kept the balance to himself. The next day, immediately after dropping her, I had to find my way back to Kochi with whatever little money I had which took 24 hours of travel across the southern states. I think I did all that to impress her. All such events got us even closer just as the resistance from her family only grew fiercer.

In the March of 2014, being forced to choose between me and her family, she figured that the best course of action for her was to move to Chennai and start over again, a decision which left me devastated. I couldn't fathom the fact that this was happening to me all over again. Once again I faced the dilemma of having to fix the problem at hand or to just let it go. And once again, I chose to do the exact same thing I did years go with Min - to all guns blazing fixing it. I just couldn't accept a second failure and was determined to fix the relationship because I was convinced that there was something between us.

To think now, it was wrong of me to have crossed that professional boundary with a colleague to begin with. I also ask myself why I was so adamant to win her back. Was it the fear of rejection? Was it a combination of shame and ego? Or was it simply a case of me not being able to accept the fact that this was happening to me all over again? Whatever it was, I took the decision to move to Chennai for good.

Years ago, when Min moved to Chennai, I was unable to move there because I couldn't find a job. This time, I was not about to let that stop me. I gave myself no excuse to fail a second time. I had some friends from College and some family there so all I had to do was find a job or at least, get a transfer.