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Midnight date romance

Midnight date romance 
As a part of my work, I started interacting closely with people with disabilities and naturally even more with the visually impaired community. Breaking away from Rahul was not easy but I realised that my work gave me solace, and the disabled community found a new spot in my heart, which was very fragile and very empty at that point. And this was when I met the man who changed many definitions of life for me.

Ashutosh and I knew of each other. If you are visually impaired in Mumbai and connected with the blind community, you inevitably know of most of the people and even the gossip about them whether you want to or not. I always jokingly say that I had believed, because of my incredible parents, I was out of the line of fire of the closed gossipy cultural community that I belong to, but I ended up in the blind community, which is more closed and, god save us, more gossipy. In fact, I remember that we were both at a common event where I had not introduced myself to him, because I had thought that his questions to the facilitator of the program were irritating and quite disruptive. I didn’t know that the voice asking questions belonged to his more
outgoing friend. For some reason, he had not come up to me and said hello either. But that event was the catalyst that changed our relationship from strangers to forced friends to more, much more.
I was meant to have coffee with someone else from the blind community. When I arrived, I was told that more people had been invited, and Ashutosh was one of them. I ignored him as much as I could. I started animated conversations with the others. But perhaps sensing my irritation towards him and not knowing the reason, he tried to dip into my conversations with his other close friends. For me, it was another proof of his supposed disruptive behaviour and to add to it, he did the thing that annoyed me the most: he tried to smoothly pay the bill in a group. Aggravated, I shoved my share of the bill in his hand and hopped into a rickshaw and yelled goodbye to the group. I didn’t know that it was really the beginning of a beautiful friendship– a relationship of love, respect, fondness, criticism and support.
The first compliment he gave me was that I had long artistic fingers right after I shook hands with him. Not used to being checked out non-visually, it was, quite frankly, the creepiest compliment I had ever received. But he really deepened my understanding about disability and its complexities.
He seemed to be an introvert, someone who spoke very little and observed carefully. He was shy but sharp, big on ability but small on show, non-confrontational and quiet.
I say he was like that, because in five years of friendship, he has remarkably changed. I remember asking him, around six months after we began hanging out as friends, ‘You seem much more confident, can I ask you what changed?’
He promptly replied, ‘It is you. Before you, no girl has gone out with me or rather asked me out even just for a coffee or just to chill alone. It was not something I experienced at all. Thank you for just reawakening that human side of me and infusing it with confidence and warmth.’
I always knew that people with disabilities lost out on so many social interactions. Having always had friends, I had not struggled with this so much. But I knew that socialising was very important, and this was the first time I was seeing its impact on a person, and believe me it was a beautiful transition. I learned from Ashutosh that engagement with social networks can be transformative.

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