We spent seven hours together -- beginning with a tense el ride and a tenser, chit-chatty lunch at the Berghoff meant to create casualness where there was none. Of course, the easiest way for characters in any story to address the large, overarching dilemmas and issues (Why am I with you? What is going on between the two of us? How can I make things better?) is to talk about them, which, initiated by her, is what we did.

"Are your parents traditional?" she asked as we walked around the Art Institute.

"I guess they have traditional ideas," I said. "My dad likes to play the liberal, but my mom's the real heavy. They're pretty great, though. I dunno. I mean, what do you mean by 'traditional'?"

"I guess," she said, "I mean, what do they expect out of this?"

"I'm not sure," I said, and I wasn't.

"What do you expect out of this?"

"I don't know," I said, taken by her matter-of-factness. "How about you?"

She went on to tell me that her parents first brought up the idea a year ago, saying that as long as she was going to visit these cities, she "might as well" begin to meet "these" boys.

Listening to this, I felt my limbs entirely weaken and my head grow light. I thought about the Cincinnati Bengals' inability to keep their lead against the San Francisco 49ers in the 1989 Super Bowl, about the need for the Cincinnati Reds to pick up another quality starting pitcher. I saw my picture pasted on a bulletin board along with those of other earnest, nearsighted young Indian men. How did my looks rate next to theirs? My clothes? My hair? How did she feel when I told her that I felt unnerved around large groups of Indian people, that most of my close friends were Jewish?

I wanted to go home, but of course I didn't. Instead, I finished the museum tour with her and walked north up Michigan Avenue, talking to her about city politics in Chicago and Miami. She told me that she loved Cuban coffee, and I said that my father had raised my sister and me to drink Maxwell House black. She said there was nothing so pretty as a Florida sunset, but that she wanted to live in a place with hip, young professionals. I didn't ask but was pretty certain that she really, really liked "Friends."

"So Sridhar," she said before we entered a Starbucks, "what else?"

"About me," I replied, "or about this?"

"About this," she said. "What are your concerns?"

That night in my notebook, I would write that I was "gripped by an acute sensation to hold her and only let go 30 or 40 years later." I know, yeech. But I suppose that a good deal of me had thought this was a moment of real definition, where she could see something that set me apart from the rest of the Sanjays and Ajays, the would-be radiologists and software engineers. The future had in fact unfolded. Now, it just needed ironing out.

Inside, over a tall mocha and a tall house coffee, we spoke about our problems with the process and what we expected from a potential spouse. She said she didn't want to get married for two more years, and that she wanted to move to Houston. Proximity, she said, was a definite issue. I expressed the sentiment that part of me didn't feel Indian enough, that I wanted someone not entirely freaked out by my intention to eventually write a novel.

Smitten is the word for what I felt. In the course of the day I had premonitions of attending her medical school graduation in May, of buying a fixer-upper in Houston's Rice Village with a large sun porch and a home office in the attic. Premature feelings perhaps, but not entirely out of line with the heightened sense that comes with these things, where every word choice, every pause, every action takes on 400 to 500 additional pounds in emotional weight.

I told her that I'd like to see her before she left town, and she said that she felt the same. When I called her two days later, however, she said seeing me again wasn't possible, that she had gone ahead and made plans with other people. "I guess," she said, "it's just not going to happen."

A pretty good piece of dialogue for someone who is not a writer, good enough to plunge me into a rueful weekend of darkness and "Mama Tried."

Since then, however, in talks with my parents and my sister, I have come to see this experience for what it was: the first match, the initial act in a process that seeks to remove the randomness from life, that deals with affection directly and is meant to eliminate the ambiguities and missed signals that plague us once we enter the love life of adults.

I'm not sure if it will ever "happen" for me, not in this way. But for now I'm willing to try.

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