Love, the Digital Way

the Digital Way

- by SREELEKHA CHATTERJEE

Anita walks inside the café with a throbbing heart. She looks around. The air is still, somewhat meditative. Most of the tables are empty, except a few with occupants showing absorbed attention to their respective activities—a young couple having toast and coffee, a teenybopper jammed onto her phone.

At the farthest corner, a young man is working on his laptop, sipping his coffee occasionally, heedless of his surroundings. Anita wonders whether he is the one, but he seems to be much younger than her fiancé, Sanjay. He is an IT professional who has been working for quite some time in that field, probably in his thirties or at the most, early forties from what she could make out of his online Al avatar. His image gathers in her mind from the bits and pieces of information that have trickled down gradually from him over their more-than six-month relationship in the digital realm, enlightening her twenty-year-old, university-attendee mind in their own good time.

“What’s age got to do with love?” He often mentions whenever she poses any query regarding his age.

Sanjay should have been here by now. Did he get the café’s name correctly?

He’ll be crossing three mountain ranges and three rivers to reach her—a trip via plane from the southern to the northern part of the country.

She chafes at the idea of a long wait, takes on a table, and sits facing the transparent front door to keep an eye on whosoever is entering the place. A waiter walks up to her, smiling genially.

“I’m expecting someone.” She says, nodding her head, with a fast-beating heart, before the waiter speaks.

Why on earth did they choose such a cloudy, windy January morning to fix a real-life meeting? How will they know? Isn’t love as unpredictable as the weather? In this vertiginous world, their love is perhaps the only constant.