The one at the ticket counter - the plan

Its in continuation of an ongoing fiction; so in case you missed the 1st part, here you go :
http://unsocialgaurav.blogspot.in/2015/05/the-one-at-ticket-counter.html 
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I was sure I would never see her again, even if I did, will not recognize her, and even if I did recognize her, she would pretend she did not. Never did I know that not even a month later, I would see her again, at a chaat counter, at my colleague’s wedding reception. “Oh its sooo spicy, can you get me some water”, she yelled at the same hurried tone, I couldn’t help looking back as the voice was very very familiar. Damn, it was her, with water coming out of her kohl lined eyes, induced by the extra spiciness of the chaat. She was trying hard to keep her make up intact, when she looked up and caught me staring at her.

I panicked as she continued to gaze at me. Contrary to women, men find it weird when looked at. Men are looked at mostly due to their shabby/good looks or uncanny familiar looks. In this case, it was the latter. Now I was in complete fix. The chaat counter where she hogged onto paanipuris were adjacent to the desserts where I was headed to. I wasn’t sure if should risk confronting her yet again in order to suffice my sweet tooth or help myself with yet another serving of hot piping chicken biryanis. The disgust on her face as she looked at me made me shift my loyalties towards the biryanis. This is something which I could never understand. I or rather men stare women primarily for the very same reasons why they do the same to men. According to one of my closest friend, who happens to be a female, women get all decked up for these special occasions just to be looked at. I just did the same; she was pretty as ever, looked prettier in that ‘i-am-not-sure-which’ shade of blue churidaars. And if you consider the fact that I had met her once before; oh am sorry, not only met but also helped her selflessly just a couple of weeks before, I gazing at her was totally justified. Yeah, I could have smiled at her rather than scurrying off the place; but her sudden look did scare the shit out of me.

Marred by these thoughts, I acted to listen to the group of colleagues I was sharing the space with. The buffet dinners have this unique art of balancing your plate filled till the brim, making your way in and out of the food counters and also shamelessly asking the servers for another round of servings. As I multi tasked the act of listening to my colleague’s nonchalant rant, hogging on to the food, observing every female around in the age group of 18-28, and think about the girl-in-blue-churidaars, I felt a tap on my shoulders. “Damn, not again” I thought, as I turned back. It was her standing less than a hands distance from me. I have read that the best way to impress a woman at the 1^st impression was to make an eye contact with her. Technically, it was not our 1^st meet, but I tried my best to give this trick a shot. “Have I seen you somewhere ?”, she blurted with a expressionless face. Seemed more like an interrogation rather than a curiousity. “Maybe, in your dreams”, would have been my usual reply, had I been my filmy self. But I was transfixed in her deep blue eyes; NO they weren’t blue, am just exaggerating.

“Yeah, we saw the same shit 1^st day 1^st show, at the same place”, I tried to spice it up by not being upfront with my reply. Unmoved by my intellect and sense of humor, all she hummed was “I am sorry, WHAT ?”. “We saw Ek tha tiger, starring Salman Khan 1^st day 1^st show, at talkie town. It was a huge crowd and I helped you get the ticket. You said you would see me around, but as soon as your purpose of getting in an animated conversation with a random guy was over, you were ACTUALLY nowhere to be seen”. This time I opted to go all guns blazing and bluntly utter what the fact was in a single go to the lady who seemed nothing more than beauty-without-brains now. “Oh ok”, she said and started to leave. A moment later, she turned back and said the unexpected “By the way, HI, I am Ritika; Ritika Sharma, I work as a Software Engineer at Wipro”. Till now, I could not decipher what impressed a woman, but for that moment I thought it was honesty, which proved to be wrong a couple of months later.

No matter, I had dropped the bomb by stating obvious, but she was still pretty and I tried to play it cool. “I am anyways not gonna marry her”, the thought played in my mind the very instant. Its weird how things change and your heart overrides the decisions taken by your mind in a split second. If an average person’s mind and heart could be considered as a couple, the heart always plays the nagging wife, while the mind is the logical husband. No matter how practical the mind is, the heart always wins the argument.

“I am Gaurav, working as Consultant at XYZ Consulting India”, I tried being my professional best. “By the way, what brings you to Rahul’s reception, how do you know him”, I spoke to her as I looked down at the chicken drumstick which though had lost its prominence now, but was next in my priority list. “Raashi is my close friend and a colleague, she invited me over”. I was hearing the name for the 1^st time. Any sane person would have guessed who could be possibly that person , but in the heat of the moment, my common sense went for a toss. “Rashi, who ?” was my instant reaction. She looked at me with utter dismay and amazement. “You were invited by Rahul and you don’t even know his wife's name” Woman, I knew where the reception was being held, I knew that they would be serving non-veg, and I for sure remembered the date and time for the reception. Remembering the name of spouses while coming for a dinner reception is never a criteria. “Oh yeah, now I recollect where I saw her name, it was on Rahul’s wedding card”, I tried to play down the embarrassment. In reality, Rahul never gave us any wedding card. All I remember getting on my official mail ID was a email which said “Please consider this email as my personal invitation for my wedding blah blah”. He asked me to consider it as a personal invitation and I did, even contributed 500 bucks for his wedding gift, no questions asked. As I was lost in my thoughts, she bid me a good bye to join her friends.

By this time, my sub conscious mind had started to multi task, prepared a network tree and analyzed all possible ways by I could confront/meet her yet again while portraying the incident as a mere co-incidence. I knew the shortest route to my destination was Raashi, Rahul’s wife. I immediately finished up my dinner, tossed the soiled plate in the dustbin and headed to the podium to greet the newly weds, as they posed with an artificial smile and tons of make up, just to look merrier and prettier in the wedding pictures.