It was 1980. The exact part of the year escapes me but I was in eighth grade. We had moved to our new place the year before. Mom needed some test papers to be sent to her school (she was a school teacher) but she was going to skip school that day. She sent me to a colleague of hers who lived the next street over to drop the papers. Which I duly did.

I remember meeting that teacher (I call her “Masi“) and her husband (I called him “Kaku“) for the first time. I answered all their questions – but refused to come inside the house. Not that the “mishtis” (sweetmeats) were not inviting… it was just that my friends were waiting on the playfield for me to join them.

That day, if you had told me that forty five years later I will be driving a boat to take “Masi” around to spend a day on a lake, I would have told you that you were smoking the wrong stuff!!!

But that day did come around!!

Wish mom was alive to hear the whole story…

Quite unexpectedly, I woke up this morning to a message from Gagan that they were in Atlanta. Eshan is starting an internship in midtown and they were here to settle him down. Of course, that meant we needed to get together that evening.

I got to know Gagan in Oct 1995 when he finally joined the start up company after threatening to do so for quite some time! The four of us – Bharti, Sharmila and we two – had gotten very close to each other with all those hours of coding together and then going out for lunch or dinner together.

If I remember correctly, they got married one year after we got married. They had their first child exactly one year after we did. And of course, they had their second child also one year after we had ours!