Nityami Thakur looked in the mirror and cursed herself for choosing Neha’s parlour over Beauty Plus parlour. She always used to go to the latter but she had run out of things on which she could blame her relationship misfortunes. Her last date – the tenth in a year before she met Raghav – had gone wrong, and she thought the one thing that was bringing her bad luck was the parlour. Maybe something was wrong with their facial. With their hair spa. With the whole goddamn beauty parlour itself. Before the smart part of her brain could tell her all this was bullshit, she shut it up. She was already done blaming everyone and everything else. Hence, this time it was Neha’s parlour.

What irked her was the obvious difference between her two eyebrows. It was a threading gone wrong. And she couldn’t cancel the date. She had already done it twice a week ago. But that was just a coffee meet. And she cancelled it because she was feeling bloated. The week that followed was all about work pressure. Then the girl-gang thing happened. Finally, the subsequent weekend came and it was time for the different kind of date Raghav had proposed.

“Let’s meet at an OYO room,” he had said over the phone. Nityami swallowed a lump in her throat. She knew what the connotation of an OYO room was. Though she was actually a virgin, she had told Raghav a lie that she had a boyfriend with whom she had been intimate. Nityami realised by now that it was all right to tell a guy about one boyfriend, or else she would run the risk of being interpreted as boring. More than one, and the boy would run the risk of feeling threatened and also judge her character. Thus, she had told Raghav only about one imaginary boyfriend. The truth was, she never had a boyfriend. From the time she felt her hormones handholding her into puberty, she had a crush on one boy in school. The crush eventually turned into such an intense fixation that Nityami thought she would just remain in love with him, and he would never know it. The power of unreciprocated love. It can numb the sensible part of your brain for quite some time. For Nityami, it remained so until she turned twenty-three.

Looking around, she realised she too deserved a boyfriend. She knew someone must have been made for her; it was just that she didn’t think seeking him out would be such heartachingly hard work that even by twenty-seven, she wouldn’t be successful in finding THE man for her. There were plenty of options for the trending NATO (Not-Attached-To-Outcome) dating amongst youngsters, but Nityami wasn’t exactly looking for that. That was till she met Raghav via Bumble a month ago. Their connection seemed to run at top gear. They met, they conversed, they liked each other; he told his parents first, then she told her parents and now, a month after their first date at a café, the families had locked a date for the engagement in the coming week and the wedding seven months later. It all happened so fast that Nityami didn’t know how to react. Perhaps that’s how life operates, she told herself. A long dry spell and then so much rain that you didn’t know whether to enjoy it or run for cover.

Standing in front of her bedroom mirror, Nityami knew she didn’t want to screw this up. If Raghav had called her to an OYO room, she knew he probably wanted to check their sexual compatibility. And rightly so. Though she wasn’t experienced enough to even understand what sexual compatibility was, going by what she heard from her experienced friends, all she knew was if the guy could go for more than half an hour, then it was a green light. One final look at her eyebrows and she convinced herself that nothing could be done now. Instead of him discovering it, Nityami thought, she would point out the faux pas herself when she met him in an hour. He probably wouldn’t mind it so much then.

Nityami was dressed casually but that was going to change. She always used to dress casually to go out of her house because she didn’t want her parents to know she was going out on a date. On date-days, she used to reach a nearby mall well before time, change, put on some make-up and then visit the café or restaurant to meet her date. And before coming back home, she would pretend in front of the guy that she was waiting for her Uber. When he left, she would invariably go back to the mall, change and finally head home. It would spare her all the unnecessary questions her parents would have asked otherwise. Even though they were involved in Raghav’s case, she still couldn’t tell her parents she was going to an OYO room with him.

Nityami left the house saying she was going to meet a college friend. That too triggered a set of questions from her mother:

Which college friend?

What is she doing now?

Is she married?

Kids?

How is her marriage going?

Is she settled here or abroad?

Nityami knew if the answers were negative, her mother would still be filled with a weird positivity. She would be convinced that her daughter wasn’t the only one suffering in the world. This time, before her mother could even ask who the friend was, Nityami left, saying her Uber had arrived.

Excerpted with permission from Remember Me As Yours, Novoneel Chakraborty, Penguin India.