How I met you father!

Dear daughter,

I know there will be a day when you'll discover that the naughty boys who annoy you are actually handsome and worth a second thought. Around the same time I think you'll also realise mumma and baba had a love marriage. I know it'll be super exciting to you to know about it. But God willing, i am hoping all this will happen atleast 15 yrs down the line. (wishful!)
So here I am penning 'The Story' down for you. Coz 15 years On, your old man and you will make me so many more memories that the initial days may become blurry :D
So... Like, you have ______ , we had a social networking site called Orkut! ( yeah it was there , believe you me!) (right about now, I bet the daughter is thinking we are from the Dinosaur age).
I was fresh into an IT firm with unlimited Internet. At home, we still had a dial up connection. It opened a world of opportunities and timepass. So one fine orkut invite later, I joined the exciting new world of social networking! But like good girls, I restricted myself to add only known people. Strangers strictly off-limits. So no fraandship invites were accepted. ( which I got often and do admit were ego boosting :p) So we can safely say your father could not be some random bloke I met off the internet!
One fine day, 28th April 2006 to be precise, I get this friendship request from a sweet little girl in her teens. Oh! That no strangers rule didnt apply to girls).Plus she was a second cousin to one of my bestest friend. So request accepted and a few scraps ( what do you call them? Messages,tweets, wall entries) were exchanged. Well, I think I got a glimpse of your dad sometime during this exchange.
Then a few days later again to be precise on May 3rd 2006 I get an invite from the brother of the sweet little teen girl who is the second cousin of my best friend :p He introduced himself as a bonus to his sisters's friendship.
A quick look at his profile took me to a flashback. You see when we both were in college together, my best friend and I , she had mentioned about this gamer second cousin of hers who wanted some alpha game testers. I was supposed to go but gave it a miss. Some of my other friends went for it though. Never again was the gamer guy mentioned!
So looking at the profile, I thought 'Hello Mr. Gamer cousin'. I was into PC games majorly you know due to the influence of your mama. So to get to know some one who created games for a living sounded interesting. So i accepted the invite. ( but in my defence, he was not a stranger!)
So then on it was a rollercoaster ride (fun, exhillarating,new,scary). Loads of scraps (sigh yes PDA), we made a decision to move it to the next level! We exchanged our yahoo and gtalk Ids. :D So the increasingly private conversation moved from the social networks to the chat applications and finally to mobile conversations. Phew!
But the title of the blog still remains to be addressed,na! I didnt still meet your father yet!
You wouldn't believe we hadn't even seen proper pictures of each other,apart from the low-res blurry DP pictures. But inspite of that minor detail, on 28th August 2006 we decided to get married soon. Yes you heard it right! No first date or meeting. It didnt matter to us, the physical appearances! Yup! We were two mad people in love and we knew, but didnt care. But practically you know we had to meet to get married , so the first date was set.
I was working on a saturday for half a day. So it was arranged that he'll pick me up and drop me home from office. We had 30mins to each other ( coz i had to reach home on time , your maternal grandparents didnt know yet).
Why i am being so specific as I say maternal is ... Your dad told his parents that he is going to meet their daughter-in-law before coming on the date!!! ( i still swooon wheneva I remember that)
So yes we met first time outside my office campus, in the bike parking area to discuss how to tell my parents about 'US'.
All i can say is that it didnt feel like first time. There wasnt any awkwardness or shyness. We knew each other so well it didnt matter how we looked ( but yes we were secretly both glad that there were no horns or weird stuff :p)..
There you go! Now stay tuned to for the sequel ' How I married your father'! Coz you know now that didnt happen for another 2 years. :D

Love,
Mumma

This is my entry for the HarperCollins–IndiBlogger Get Published contest, which is run with inputs from Yashodhara Lal and HarperCollins India.