Life can be cruelly funny at some times. It can ridicule. It can tempt us with a warm curvy smile but by the time we smile back, what we see there would be a mere scoff.

It seems that I’m good. Good! Though this realization came to me a bit late, though you would have enough reasons to flout this argument on my face itself, though I don’t promise I’ll be this good forever till doomsday, all of a sudden I have realized last week that I’m too good! In fact Donnymol (name changed) told me. She told me that ‘You were such a good man’.

Why did Donnymol say that I’m that good? Looks like I don’t have answer. I did not transfer any of my bank credits to her name; I did not buy her vegetables from the market or I even did not write an article on her good deeds to the society! The only thing that I did to her was that I liked her. And how did that happen?

It happened uninvited. Like a mistake. Or rather, like every other mistake I do. Like how I catch wrong trains and jump off at wrong stations at wrong times. Like how I came to write the Marketing Management examination on a day when it was supposed to be the Advertising Management examination. Like how I once misplaced a bottle of oil with water and poured it into the boiling milk to make a nice tea. (This is how oil tea is made; justifications need no raison d'être).

However, this mistake was a bit more cavernous, characterized by a deep sense of frustration and uneasiness. Because, Donnymol did not want to get married to me and thus she said ‘You were such a good man’. A nice way to end something like an alliance. A nicely said ‘bye bye’. After all, it sounded like ‘You are such a nice guy so that I don’t want to get married to you!’ Funny isn’t it?

Her uncle wasn’t agreeing it seemed. But he had given her a choice before expressing his disagreement. ‘Would you feel bad if you don’t get him?’ Kin mattered the most to her and she said ‘No, I should not’. A friend of mine said that I should have first proposed to her uncle!

But what’s the big deal in turning down a marriage proposal? After all, it’s just that. A marriage ‘proposal’. She had the right to say ‘No, I don’t like you’ But wait, things were different and that’s what the big deal about it. One day I even told her that I should not speak to her anymore the way I used to do, as we were still not sure of getting married and becoming one. Yet the talk continued. Yet the emotions got created and feelings, babied. The sad love song ‘arikil nee undayirunnengil’ got looped in the background endlessly. Sorrows were trimmed down by sharing and joys multiplied. Love sprouted with a ‘we are almost sure of getting married… so we should speak’ kind of an affair.

Like the way she started talking to me, she stopped talking to me too. Both times, unexpectedly. One idle day, when I was not thinking about anything in particular and not really keen on doing so too, her first call came. She told me that she wanted to know me better as she would like to have herself married to me.

Whatever, if you really want to marry someone, you would stand up and say that you want to. Donnymol did not stand up. May be that she forgot to do so. That’s the big deal I was coming into.

If I would use a simile, I would prefer rains. An untimely rain that got me wet but unclean at the same time.