Aries

By Vidya Hariharan

We met in the lift. It stopped abruptly as it was ascending. Now, please don’t assume that this is the romantic tale where the girl, i.e. I, faints due to fear and the hero revives me with a kiss and gets the lift moving through some previously unheard of engineering feat.

No.

I saw the sweat break out on his forehead and the whites of his eyes gleaming at me, and I immediately picked up the phone and called the attendant, who within a few minutes had opened the door with the emergency key. We both helped him out with an arm under each shoulder. On reaching firm ground, he thanked me with a nod and strode away.

“How rude!” I thought. Thoughts of the uncouth fellow bothered me, though, and I was slightly distracted all day. I wondered if he worked in the building or was merely a visitor. I related this incident to my family that evening.

My mom, with a mournful shake of her head, said, “Your bossiness drives them away.”

I gave my automatic response, “I am not bossy. I just know how to take care of myself.”

Dad was proud of me. “That’s my girl,” he said. “And any man who cannot deal with it, doesn’t deserve my daughter.” My brother gave me a disgusted look and said, “She’s going to make some poor man’s life hell.”

I got up and went to my room. Sleep eluded me. I wondered how he was getting along, whether he was embarrassed that he had to accept help from a girl, if I would ever bump into him again.

The next day a single yellow rose lay on my desk along with a ticket to a recently released movie. The 7 pm show in the theatre across the road. I grinned.

As we munched salted popcorn, I looked at him and said, “I am not afraid of thunderstorms either.”

“I know,” he said with a serious glance at me, “that’s why I plan to marry you.”

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Vidya Hariharan is an avid reader, traveller and coffee drinker. Her work can be found on Poem Hunter, Setu, Poetry Super Highway, Muse India’s Your Space, Glomag, Borderless, Café Dissensus, Poems India and Under the Basho.