'... I can count on you to innovate only in this space,' my mother gave me a pat on the back (she slapped me actually). I grinned. 'I wonder, for all your trickery, how no girl ever fell for you. Maybe they all saw through you,' she said, turned around, tied her hair into a bun and walked away without watching my grin buckle into a frown. Mothers. 

Long story short, my parents had identified a girl for me and everything but a personal visit was pending to ascertain if we could be united in holy matrimony. I was handed photographs of the girl and she was demure beyond what could be called normal. There wasn't one photograph in which she seemed cheerful and sported in the rare case, a formal smile.

'I want to meet her once before we formally visit,' I pleaded with my parents. They smiled, frowned, coldly denied the tete-a-tete and bellowed a no-meeting-before-the-formal-visit-understand-? warning before leaving me devastated, like an old barn devastated by a storm it was unprepared for. 

Devastated I was, but not done. And so, I tracked her online and thanks to her Facebook-tells-you-all-about-my-life being, learnt she would travel to a city five hours away by train in a week. I worked with a friend of mine (read bribed) in the railways to get me a ticket to the vantage point. My mother caught wind, chided me and then dismissed me with the above repartee. And as every good son does, I took it as her approval. Something was off, and I was bent on find out.

The day came, I boarded the train and realised much to my horror that my seat was not next to hers, not on the same row, not one ahead or behind, but a good ten rows away on the other half. Seats on one half of the coach face those in the other half and that meant I would have to stand up to catch a glimpse every time. Just when I sat plotting how to swat the traitor of a friend, he landed in the seat next to mine with a thump, wearing a shameless grin. 

'What the...' he cut me off as a I started to remonstrate and said, 'slouch.' When I didn't , he held me by my shoulder and forced me to. 'Now look up,' he said, pointing towards the fancy overhead luggage rack that was all plexiglass. 'The moment the bags fill in, it turns into a mirror...' 

'And I can see her from where I am. Discreet,' The genius had pulled it off. 

In a while, bags poured in and the rack was one long mirror. And there she was, in all her glory, seated oblivious of my watching her from under a book, busy with one of her own. She only looked up to buy food and then proceeded to bury herself in her book. She looked every bit as on the photographs, beautiful, calm and with lips sealed tight.

'Are you confident she is the one?' my friend (Oh! Sorry I didn't tell you he was accompanying me) said after an hour or so.

'Absolutely,' I nodded.  'The girl next door we all dream of, isn't she? Unfathomable as the ocean's deep, bright as the morning sun and ... ' I turned to take another glance so I could describe her further, 'A face as serene as ...' and froze momentarily as she opened her mouth for the first time and yawned elaborately. 

'Serene as?' my friend jabbed me. I don't know why he mumbled, 'I showed him the wrong mirror,' after I said, 'Count Dracula.'