The Feeling of Being Loved

By Raviraj Mishra

'The Feeling of Being Loved' is a story of a girl - Shruti and her experience of finding love. The story depicts a few crucial issues faced by a girl in society like looks, decision making ability and wanting to be loved. No matter what the girl has achieved in her career and life, still the society finds it convenient to question her abilities, judge her and assume what she would want.  In these frustrating dramas, a best friend like Meera is a gift for Shruti. 'The Feeling of Being Loved' is not a love story, it is story of realizing what love is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raviraj Mishra
• Release date: May 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393107934

Book preview

Dedicated to the people I love

CHAPTER 1

I was driving at thirty kilometers per hour on an almost empty road with my mind wandering everywhere it could roam. It went to my school, where I was a young girl with two plaits. Singing and dancing to ‘bumro bumro’ at my school annual day. It roamed across the hallway of our new home, where I was still unclear how to unlock the door. My mind talked to me for a very long time. It guided me and somehow, I could listen to everything it said. It helped me to take firm decisions and sometimes it was the reason I would mess things up. I was 26 years old, working as a Software Engineer in Indore where I lived with my parents. It would almost take me around 45 minutes to reach my office. The streets of Indore had changed in the course of time. There were a lot of vehicles moving and the roads remained busy on the business days. I used to take the Agra-Bombay road to my destination - CoDirect Systems, Crystal IT Park. I was working as a Team Lead in Software Development. The route I took had moderate traffic and made it easy to go from my home in Vijay Nagar. Everyone in my family and my friends at the office thought I traveled too far and some of them suggested I switch the job or to find one somewhere nearby. But I never thought about this as an important issue of my life. I loved driving long distance, it gave me quality time with myself in which I could think about the important stuff going on in my life or I could just sing a song to myself while I drive.

It was one of that day when I was thinking about something important happening in my life. The next day, a boy with his family was meeting my parents. This meeting was arranged by one of our close relative Mr. Gautam Jaiswal. This wasn’t the first meeting for me with some random boy, I had met three boys in the past and nothing happened. Of course, they all had their own reasons for rejecting me and they presented it in a way that I was forced to believe them. These rejections naturally planted seeds of doubts in my head. I started looking at myself in the mirror in a very different way. My friends said - I am beautiful, I have a great pair of eyes and I am really nice as a person, and someone lucky deserves to be with me. I’d always just nod in agreement. I’d always hoped to find the lucky one soon. 

I was preparing myself for the next day, about the way I was going to talk and the things I was going to say. I had this feeling of anxiety but I realized, I was used to it. People around me would wonder why I always acted so weird and anxious around boys, but I knew the reason for this, I had not been close to any boy, but one - Abhishek. Apart from him, the only boys I knew were related to my family. I studied in Girls school and then got enrolled in a College for Engineering, where there were so many pretty girls, that most of the time the girls like me got ignored in the crowd. While in college I never cared about the way I looked which had resulted in me gaining some weight. I always thought no boy will ever get attracted to me. The boy I was attracted to was also following the same pattern as others of chasing the beautiful girls around. After college, it had been five years since I was working in a software company. In-office, I got a few hits but I then I didn’t care to respond as they and their hits seemed useless to me and the person I had turned into a person - mostly found broke in a one-sided love story. Now, my parents had taken over the responsibility of finding a match for me. This is how things happen in our Indian society, Mr. Gautam Jaiswal told my mother. So soon I was sure about one thing that sooner or later someone will walk into my house and say yes!, he likes me and maybe I would get a chance to judge him according to my requirements and If I found him good enough I would get married to him. This is what I was been told from my childhood. I came to believe this, that at least this is how fate wants it for me. Maybe girls like me can only find love after marriage.

I reached my office parking and saw a girl and a boy standing really close to each other. I could tell that they were in love because they held each other without any fear of getting judged by anyone. By looking at them I assumed that love felt really good. Whatever the smaller bits about love I knew was taught to me by Bollywood movies and classic novels about love stories. I had the wish to experience this feeling of love. I just wanted to be loved by someone I never knew. I wanted to learn about a person from thousands of small talks, wanted to spend time with that person, hold his hands while crossing the roads. I wanted to make my days different.  

I stepped out of my car and started towards the office building. Still, a lot of thoughts about tomorrow were playing with my mind but now I was feeling something new popping inside my head. It was Love. And whenever I thought of love. I could only picture one person - Abhishek.

For me, love came wrapped in an incomplete piece of paper that only I could read. All the questions, all the feelings I ever had about love were answered by me. There was hollow on the other side of my heart which wanted to be filled with the feeling of being loved by someone. Some overrated experienced people around me wanted me to believe that once I got married, I would experience this love. But this sounded like the lamest and the last possible way. I was not interested to walk on the path of my life with someone I don’t love. Because some other thoughts which depressed me were, what if my husband never loved me. I mean - a typical husband in a typical arrange marriage in India would wake up early from Monday to Friday, he would get ready for his work, Meanwhile, I would be preparing breakfast and packing a lunch box for him. Then he would grab the lunch box and would walk out of the door only to come back all exhausted at night. I would serve him dinner and we would talk about pretty much nothing related to love, care or any other feeling. The talks would be about the EMI, plumbers and all those never-ending stuff - people are busy doing for themselves. Then after that maybe while sleeping, he would place his hand on my belly and get started with something which would end up with me having a new life in my womb...I was surely depressed with this. I was afraid of living a life with each day as the same blank page, filling it with a shit of daily unavoidable patterns. The life I would dream about had an essence of beautiful feelings in it. I wanted someone to kiss me good morning while still lying on the