Soniya weds Premnath

It began the way most things do now — a conversation that was supposed to be short, and wasn’t.

There were about six thousand kilometres between Pollachi and Germany, and for a long while that was the whole shape of it: phone calls that started in one country’s evening and ended in the other’s, both of us working out the time difference in our heads and then ignoring it anyway. We learned each other in voice before anything else — what makes the other laugh, what they go quiet about, how they sound tired.

Then she came to Europe to see her sister. That was the reason, and it was a good one. The first time we stood in the same room it was the arrivals hall at Frankfurt airport — fluorescent light, a trolley, no ceremony whatsoever. We had spoken for months. It still took a second.

What followed was Paris, and then a few more cities, and then the ordinary discovery that the person on the phone and the person beside you on a bridge in the cold are the same person. Somewhere between the two, expectation quietly turned into certainty.

On the fourteenth of December we are doing what we have been doing all along — closing the distance. This time for good, in Pollachi, with all of you there.