Loving a Strange Stranger: My entry for the Get Published contest

Please vote for my idea and help me get published, at: Indiblogger's Get Published Forum!

This idea is about the forming of a relationship between two recluses. The people in question are myself and a man who was a complete stranger when I first saw him. We soon figured out we were in the same college but had never seen each other before our final years as we’d both been in different classes and had kept ourselves to our small social circles. It was intriguing for me to gradually discover his personality through my exhaustive research, peeling away layer by layer. Though friends around me were dating and chasing bold, successful alpha males, I was fascinated by the archetype of the opposite. This is a story of how this ‘quiet’ kind of love began, and what happened next.

What Makes This Story ‘Real’:

In the vast majority of romantic movies and novels, guys do all the chasing and wooing and girls are just lucky if they have a choice in who to say yes to. But that doesn’t work in real life, and it is impractical for women to give up on a guy just because he lacks the courage to ask them out (yes, forget The Rules!). This story shows how a shy but determined girl took matters into her own hand.

Source: 4.bp

Extract:

Our love began innocuously, on a day I least expected. I was in my final year of undergrad, it was a Monday, and I went to give the CAT exam (the first computer-based CAT) at my centre. Since this was Delhi’s December, a sweater was required. A day earlier, I had researched in the Sunday paper that my lucky color was red and I was duly unpreparedly wearing the only red sweater I had – an old rag my grandma had once knitted with great passion, and which was still the brightest, most eye-numbing shade of red. I would never have dreamt of wearing this in public had it not been for its lucky properties on the day of my exam. I was certain that I would not meet anyone of consequence since all my friends had given the exam over the weekend.

As I stood outside the exam centre, looking awfully tired and poorly dressed (and confidently not giving a damn too), along came a long-nosed, popular guy from my college wearing what resembled a traffic policeman’s fluorescent orange jacket. With him was an incredibly handsome stranger. The minute I saw Mr. Longnose, I shrank in fear and realised the grave sin I had committed by coming in my ragged state. It was to no avail – he saw me and whispered something to his handsome friend. The handsome guy didn’t move much, just stood straight and kept staring at me. Longnose kept darting his face between me and Handsome, quite clearly gossiping about me, my outfit, and perhaps everything nasty he knew about me.

This is my entry for the HarperCollins–IndiBlogger Get Published contest, which is run with inputs from Yashodhara Lal and HarperCollins India.