‘My strategy to make her wait failed’

For my self-assumed first date, I wore the best casuals I had in my wardrobe—a crisp white shirt with no stains on it and a navy-blue denim.
'To you with love' by Shravya Bhinder
'To you with love' by Shravya Bhinder

BENGALURU:  One of the coffee lovers summed up his coffee as ‘super deliciousness poured into your cup’ and I made a note of the phrase on my phone to use it at some point in my conversation with Ayra. For my self-assumed first date, I wore the best casuals I had in my wardrobe—a crisp white shirt with no stains on it and navy-blue denim.

My mother thinks that I look really cute in the combo but then she is my mother and is supposed to think that I am the cutest in the world. Even though I was already ten minutes late as per the scheduled time when I started off from home and then was even stuck in a tiny little traffic jam as I drove to the coffee house, she was still not there. I hoped that I had not been stood up.

When I stepped out of the house late, my strategy was to make her wait, just a little. That is why I had planned to be late by fifteen minutes or so. Much to my disappointment, I was the one who had to wait for her. So, my strategy to make her wait failed to do any good. On the other hand, her strategy, if at all it was strategically planned to make me wait, was working wonders as I was dying to get a glimpse of her.

After the group that was seated right behind me left with their take-away orders, I realized that there were hardly any customers at the place at that hour. I observed a couple of staff members behind the counter and counted the customers in queue waiting for their orders—there were three more people other than me. Rubbing my hands in anticipation of our first date, I looked down at the table. It was a date! I just didn’t say it out loud to her but it was, at least for me.

I fixed my gaze at the entrance. ‘She is not going to come, is she? And you do not even have her contact number,’ I thought to myself. My crazy mind can work overtime sometimes. I started fidgeting with the menu and after a while, I was keenly looking at the beverages they had to offer along with the prices mentioned next to each. 

Excerpted from 'To you with love' by Shravya Bhinder, with permission from Penguin  Random House 

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