Vishnu stared at Dinkar, speechless at his reaction.

She didn’t wait for him to help her and simple limped her way off from the intersection to the side of the road where a bus stop was situated. Dinkar followed her from behind and stood to the side as Vishnu lowered herself onto the single bench in the sparsely populated bus stop.

Fuming at the turn of events, she took off her shoe and looked at her bruised foot. There was no external bleeding but one look at the red and purple shades on the skin were enough to say there was an internal injury. Vishnu massaged her foot, groaning at the sharp pain she felt.

“Does that hurt?” Dinkar finally managed to ask.

Vishnu looked up at him to see not a speck of concern on his face.

“You finally got that question?” she asked back, trying her best not to sound angry or hurt at the lack of courtesy from him. “You seemed to have laughed to your heart’s content back there.”

Dinkar vaguely registered the implied meaning. “Ah, no, I didn’t mean to laugh at you,” he tried to explain. “It’s just that… the way you shouted at him was funny. You looked like you wanted to get angry but couldn’t do that properly.”

Vishnu was flabbergasted. “That was your takeaway from the whole incident?” She didn’t know how else to ask him about his reaction and his lack of basic human decency which was revolting.

Dinkar shrugged and replied, “You handled it on your own. I didn’t have to step in.”

That was the moment Vishnu knew he was all sorts of a wrong companion for any woman.

She lowered her head, thinking how she should explain this to her family and break it off with him.

“Do you want to go home?” he asked.

“What?” Vishnu looked up, still massaging her foot and getting more spooked by the moment.

“If your foot hurts, you can go home now. We don’t have to go around anymore,” Dinkar suggested.

He wasn’t suggesting to take her to the hospital, he hadn’t bothered to take a good look at her injury and he was definitely not interested in how much Vishnu was hurting. All he wanted was to be done with the date and get home as fast as possible.

Vishnu thought it out carefully before deciding, “That’s fine, I can manage.” She set her foot down, slipped on her shoe and stood up, holding herself without wobbling on her feet lest she appeared weak. “Let’s go to the dessert shop.”

She wanted to make sure that she was reading him right, to gather as many supporting trivia and behavioural traits of Dinkar as possible to make her argument to her family against marrying him stronger. So she sucked up the pain she felt in her foot as she walked, didn’t react much to Dinkar’s actions and words as they spent another hour together before she caught a cab back to her hostel room.

That night, before making a call to her parents to inform them about the proceedings of her date, Vishnu thought it over again put off by a lot of occurrences that day.

First off, when Dinkar said he had no idea why his ex-girlfriend broke things off with him, Vishnu was confused by his lack of understanding of himself and his relationship. Usually, if a person is not aware of the actual reason of a breakup, either they are dismissive of their partner, condescending and contemptuous towards them, so uninterested in their partner or the relationship that they didn’t feel like understanding the context of the breakup. Or, they never bothered to listen to their partner when they explained the problems in their relationship and didn’t bother to understand the reason for the breakup.

Either case proved that Dinkar wasn’t the type to invest himself much in any relationship. His whole disinterested attitude towards Vishnu and the way he at times remarked about the other women he had met on blind dates had just given a stronger basis for Vishnu’s judgement.

He did seem to have a very low opinion of women in general and married women in particular. It had made Vishnu wonder how Dinkar’s father treated his mother to have made him form such views. Wouldn’t that be a problem for the woman who marries into that family? After all, men learn from their fathers on how to treat women in the family.

Above all, the whole sequence with the accident that afternoon had scared Vishnu about her future with a partner like Dinkar. If he could be that nonchalant when his date gets hurt, if he can actually laugh at someone’s pain like that, what does that make him? How trustworthy is he as a husband who has to look out for her for decades to come if he cannot even step up to help her up from the ground when she fell down?

By the way, who laughs at a person who just got hit, unless that person is a psychopath?

There were so many red flags about Dinkar that it sent chills down Vishnu’s spine.

Before realizing it, she started breathing heavily, her heart beating faster at the prospect of being married to someone like him. She called up her mother Padma to relay the incidents of the day and break it to her that she cannot marry someone like him.

“Wait, Hari is on the other line, let me put her on conference,” Padma said as soon as she picked up Vishnu’s call, and added Haritha - Vishnu’s older sister, onto the call.

Vishnu could hear her sister and brother-in-law bickering in the background of the conference call. She and Padma both stayed silent as Hari finished her conversation with her husband and spoke into the phone, “Ok, now tell me, what’s up?”

“What are you guys fighting about?” Padma asked.

“Nothing, just about what to have for dinner. He is going on and on about bringing some food from a new restaurant around the block when I have already prepped a lot to cook biriyani. Can you believe it? What about the time and effort I spent till now? If he really wanted restaurant food, he should have told me that in the morning.”

Hari was fuming as she spoke, making Vishnu doubt if it was the right time to talk about the day’s events. Before she could decide, Hari changed the subject to her, “Forget it. Oye Vishnu, how was your day out Dinkar? Is he good to you?”

“No,” Vishnu answered flatly.

“Why? Was he rude to you? Did he mistreat you?” Padma asked.

Vishnu replayed everything that had happened to both her mother and sister, and her father who was hearing everything over speakerphone on Palma’s end. “He is very weird,” Vishnu finished. “Who laughs in that situation? What will he do in similar situations in the future? I seriously cannot trust him.”

Hari sighed as Padma shook her head and said, “Vishnu, some people humour in every situation. That doesn’t make them bad.”

“Vishnu, have you never had your friends laugh at someone when they are in trouble? It happens all the time. You cannot seriously take issue with that,” Hari added.

Vishnu rolled her eyes. “You guys can’t be serious. He has very low opinion of women and is not considerate of anyone at all. And we are a very mismatched couple, have nothing in common and disagree about everything.”

“You just heard me and your brother-in-law argue, didn’t you?” Hari asked. “That was the third fight we had today. Listen, men are not always the smartest people in the room and they are too egotistic to admit that. No couple gets married because they are a hundred percent compatible with each other. You just adjust to each other, understand what each other wants, compromise and build a life. That’s how a marriage works. Your brother-in-law wasn’t always the perfect person either before our marriage. But he started changing. And so did I. Even now we both don’t agree with each other on everything. But we work around for each other to keep both us together,” she explained.

“Not everyone is as lucky as you,” Vishnu murmured.

“Marriage takes effort, Vishnu. I know you didn’t get a good opinion of him. But tell me, you have met others too. Are you sure you can meet someone better than Dinkar?” Hari asked. “Think of everything that comes with him. He is a good choice on paper, and as a person, there’s always a scope for him to get better. Are you really sure you wouldn’t consider him even once? You cannot simply reject someone without even giving them a chance to grow or trying to work it out with him. That would be pure foolishness. I don’t think you are that silly.”

Padma chimed in, “Vishnu, people change. Today might not have been the ideal day for both of you. But don’t base your future decisions on just a few hours spent together on one day. Trust me, I have been scanning so many profiles of marriageable men in the matrimony app, but this is the best we found. Don’t entertain silly doubts and ruin something so good.”

Vishnu stayed silent. She had been ruminating a lot over Dinkar’s behaviour and had assumed that her family would understand her viewpoint. But, as they contradicted her and tried to convince her change her opinions and decisions, she started doubting herself.

Did she really read too much into it and form a prejudiced opinion of Dinkar?

“No, I am sure of what I saw,” she thought to herself.

Parma and Hari were going on in the phone call relaying examples of their own marital woes and of others who had built marriages out of unlikely partnerships. After a few rounds of discussions, Vishnu understood that she would never be able to really reject Dinkar.

She would come off as a completely unreasonable person, a girl with unrealistically high standards of men if she expressed her expectations from her partner.

She had already been framed as a difficult girl to please in the arranged marriage circles with the amount of rejections she had given so far. She couldn’t go with another rejection again.