The Pothole Proposal

Naveen had planned the proposal with the attention to detail he normally reserved for comparing internet plans. There was a lakeside walk. There was a sunset estimate. There was a restaurant reservation under a false name, which would later cause its own small administrative problem.

The ring was inside a velvet box in his jacket pocket. The jacket was unusual because Bengaluru was warm, but Naveen had defended it as “a look”. Aditi accepted this explanation with the generous suspicion of someone who had dated him for three years.

They booked a cab. Naveen sat in the back beside her, keeping one hand near the pocket. Their driver, Lakshman, confirmed the destination and reminded them to fasten their seat belts. Naveen thanked him with the intensity of a man who needed everyone alive and on schedule for approximately forty more minutes.

“Why are you holding your chest?” Aditi asked.

“Posture.”

“You look like you’re protecting an internal document.”

He moved his hand. The ring box shifted. He put his hand back.

Near BTM, the cab slowed for a rough stretch. Even at a careful pace, one uneven patch produced a brief jolt. Naveen’s unzipped pocket, whose reliability had not been tested during the internet-plan level of preparation, released the velvet box onto the seat.

It bounced once and landed between them.

Aditi looked at it. Naveen looked at it. Lakshman, watching the road, asked whether everything was all right in the back.

“Yes,” Naveen said, in a voice suggesting that nothing had ever been all right anywhere.

Aditi picked up the box. “Is this what I think it is?”

Naveen considered several possible replies. Contact-lens case was defeated by the velvet. Tiny paperweight was defeated by common sense. He chose honesty, though it had arrived ahead of the sunset.

“Yes. But there was supposed to be a lake.”

She stared at him for one second, then began to laugh. Not the polite laugh used for his office stories. The real one, which required her to put the box down and wipe her eyes.

Lakshman asked whether they needed to stop. Naveen said yes, please, somewhere suitable and safe. The driver found a proper stopping place away from the traffic flow and parked. Outside stood a stationery shop and a sign advertising spiral binding. It was not the view Naveen had booked in his mind.

He took the ring box, turned towards Aditi, and began the speech. The first sentence was about the three years they had spent together. The second was about how she made difficult days easier. The third had vanished completely, so he admitted that too.

“I had a better version.”

“This one is good,” she said.

He asked. She said yes before he finished asking, then asked him to repeat it because she wanted the complete sentence. Lakshman quietly turned down the radio. A man outside the stationery shop glanced through the window, realised what was happening, and gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

Naveen slid the ring onto her finger. Nobody dropped anything. This felt like a substantial recovery.

They thanked Lakshman, who congratulated them and said he had driven many couples but had never previously provided proposal parking. Aditi asked whether they could take a photograph with him once they were all safely out of the vehicle. He agreed.

At the restaurant, the booking under the false name briefly failed. Aditi rescued it by supplying Naveen’s phone number, which he had apparently not considered changing for the operation.

Later, her sister asked where he proposed.

Aditi sent the photograph. Behind the happy couple, in excellent focus, stood the stationery sign.

“Spiral binding,” she wrote. “A commitment theme.”

Read when you’re a passenger or safely off the road. Never while driving.