I met Melvin online, on a site called SecondShaadi.com.
Which, interestingly, he later claimed he didn’t know was a matrimonial site. The word ‘Shaadi’ means ‘marriage’, in Hindi.
It makes sense, him not knowing Hindi. But I’m still not entirely sure I believe it 100%!!
At the time, Melvin was living in Gurgaon, just outside Delhi, in India. He was the president of his US company’s India operations, setting up call centers for a Jacksonville-based firm with branches in the U.S. His life ran on American hours - asleep all day, awake all night. He’d wake up around four or five in the evening, work through the night, come home around two or three in the morning, and finally go to bed just as the rest of the city was waking up.
It left him with no real social life - not in India, and not in America either.
He says he was just looking for someone to talk to.
A friend.
I listened. I nodded.
I could be that friend.
I, on the other hand, was very clear about what I was not looking for. I did not have the time, the energy, or the patience to make friends with men. I had already spoken to a few people on the site and had come away deeply disillusioned by the caliber of conversation and intention.
And then there was Melvin.
He was intelligent. He was kind. He wasn’t pushy.
Most importantly, conversation with him felt easy.
Comfortable. Broad. Expansive. Not restrictive.
I was in Bangalore. He was in the north. We talked on Skype - a lot. I would wake up at 3am to chat with him for an hour before moving on to corrections for my two jobs and then taking care of morning duties before I went to work.
At some point, we moved to video. And that was when I realized something I hadn’t fully registered before.
He wasn’t Anglo-Indian.
He was American.
That made me pause.
Looking for an American man to marry had never been part of my imagination. In fact, it was enough for me to quietly back away from the relationship altogether. It was my brother who gently pulled me back - reminding me that Americans were also human beings, that I had studied in an American school, and that perhaps I was more of a misfit within Indian society, with my way of thinking.
Maybe, he suggested, I might actually blend better with an American man - with his way of thinking - than I had with Indian men.
So I returned. To give it another chance.
When Melvin first came to Bangalore, he arrived cautiously. He stayed in a five-star hotel, arranged for a hotel-provided car which cost a small fortune, did everything by the book. I remember thinking he could easily have taken a taxi, but safety mattered to him, and at the time he could afford it.
This, in retrospect, was the beginning of our cultural education.
I was as Indian; as Indian could be.
He was as American; as American could be.
I had almost no exposure to the American world. He had very limited exposure to India beyond his office - a carefully managed environment where someone else often served as a cultural bridge for him.
We met at his hotel. We talked. And something important happened.
The silence wasn’t awkward.
That mattered to me more than I knew at the time.
He asked if we could meet the next day, he’d really enjoyed the meeting that day. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make the time so I said I’d text him. I worked later than I normally did, and was able to send the text he was waiting for.
The next morning, we met at 7:00 a.m. I picked him up and took him for a walk - something I loved and did often. He struggled. He had a hip replacement and needed to stop frequently. I walked fast. He did not. I slowed down. We sat down often. But what mattered was that he came.
We had breakfast afterward - a very American breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast. Then I dropped him back and returned to my grading. Work was heavy that week.
It was many months later that I learned something crucial.
Melvin is not a morning person.
7 a.m., to him, is the middle of the night. For him, mornings are something to survive, not enjoy. Walking, especially early walking, is not anywhere near his idea of living.
But he showed up anyway.
Because, as he later told me, if he was going to get to know me, he figured he would have to step into my world.
That mattered too.
There is one small moment from that first meeting that still makes us smile.
As we were walking back to the car after breakfast, he kept hovering slightly behind me, leaning forward, almost peering at my head. It made me uncomfortable. I was wary of men. Of intentions. Of proximity.
Finally, I asked him what he was doing.
“You have individual strands of red hair,” he said, completely earnestly.
I explained that I used henna regularly. It colored my white hair red, which glistened in the sun. I didn’t know then what streaking was, or why the distinction fascinated him so much.
But it became a story we would tell for years - about how close I came to asking him to back off, and how captivated he was by those red strands.
We didn’t know it then.
But we were standing at the very beginning of a long life spent crossing cultural bridges - far more than either of us could have imagined.