A love story that survived the sub-continent - Two decades of togetherness

That's me, Souvik, and my beautiful loving wife Deepsikha!

I am sharing our story on the occasion of the 6th anniversary of our wedding, which was yesterday the 17th of February. We got married this same day in 2012.

We are just 32, but we are together for more than two decades now!

Isn't it amazing, unbelievable even? In fact, I had never before thought about us this way. It's really unbelievable that the spark of childhood love if it can be called love at such a tender age has blossomed into such a beautiful relationship which did not just survive time but also a huge geographic distance of continental proportions in a time when there was no internet or mobile phone.

This is our story, not the full of it, but just a snapshot of a few things and some pictures.

Our story begins! It all started in 1996

We met in school when we were in Class VI. We were 11 years old back then. Our thing began maybe a year later when we were about 12 years. I am not sure I even understood what love was, it was perhaps a special friendship. I now know that it was much more special in Deepsikha's mind and heart and over the next few years she fell in love with me.

On my part, I liked her really but was more busy playing cricket and fooling around with my other friends.

Twist in the tale

Things were going great. I slowly started to feel that she treated me differently and I also felt there was something different in the way I felt about her and behaved around her which was different from how I behaved around my other friends.

Things were going really well when suddenly their family decided to leave Siliguri, the city where we were growing up and move to Mumbai. India is a huge country, to give you an idea how far they moved, just see the below pic which should give you an idea.

This was a time before air travel became affordable and widely used, Mumbai was like really a continent away. In the late nineties when internet was just starting to become available in costly internet cafes, this movement was a really big deal. In fact, in the beginning, I don't think internet cafes had yet come up.

Letters, waiting and rare meetings

Like in those old movies, she started to write letters. I responded to a couple of them and then I think distance caught up with me and I stopped responding.

I later came to know, how hard this hit her. Every day she used to wait for my letters. Her growing up years, her teenage years were spent waiting for my letters. It's unimaginable and makes me feel very bad. I tell everyone, that if it was not for her, we would not be together now. All credit goes to Deepsikha, I am just incidental to this story.

She stopped writing letters, but she came back to Siliguri a few years later on vacation. She met me and told me how she felt about me. I wanted to make her happy, I wanted to say that she was special but I really was too practical and told her that the distance was really too great.

She visited Siliguri one more time and came to my house to meet. She said nothing of that sort and we spoke for some time. This was during the first year of my engineering college, almost 5 years after she had moved to Mumbai.

No contact

I completed college and moved to Kolkata (see below maps to understand where I moved and how far Kolkata is from Mumbai). For almost 3 years during my college days and my first year in Kolkata, we had no contact. I thought about her sometimes, but those memories felt like from another world, another time.

But she rocks

But Deepsikha is Deepsikha. She somehow found my mobile number and called me up. By this time, the mobile and internet revolution had caught up and distance was not such a big matter anymore. We started talking again. She was studying medicine she told me.

A year or so later, she visited Kolkata. We met and that's when I told her that I wanted to take a step forward and maybe we should take this a little more seriously.

Coincidence

We started talking over phone every day and we tried to meet when possible given the limitations of the distance.

One time, she was traveling from Mumbai to Siliguri. She took a flight to Kolkata and had a train from Kolkata to Siliguri. Refer the maps to get an idea. Coincidentally, I was traveling to Siliguri the same night and had tickets in the same train.

Our stars were truly aligning, it so turned out that the tickets which we had booked separately ended up giving us face to face seats on the train. It was awesome. Just imagine, what are the chances of something like this happening in a country of more than a billion people with tens of millions taking trains every day?

Happily ever after

Time went by and by now we were truly in love and wanted to spend our lives together.

I asked her to marry me in 2011 and we got married the following year.

From our wedding album

And now we live happily ever after, in Kolkata….

Below are some of our pictures. Unfortunately, we don't have pictures from our childhood…. those days are precious memories to be seen through our minds eyes.

2011, Mumbai

2012, From our Honeymoon in Kerala

2013, Goa

2015, Matheran

A few more....

And more....