Falling in love is a deeply human trait. It lives buried somewhere inside all of us, quiet and waiting. Evolution has washed it, tumbled it, worn it smooth over centuries but it has never managed to wash it away. That innate ache to find someone and hold on to them survives every generation, untouched.

I am human, and I have lived this. The girl was a year younger than me, and I first saw her in college, because that's where most love stories in India begin. Not because college is some sacred ground, but because it is often the first place where men and women get to simply meet, to talk freely, without the weight of a hundred watching eyes.

I saw her while chilling out with my friends in the canteen. She had walked in with her classmates: a fresh batch, just joined, wide-eyed in their first year while I was already settling into my second. She was one of them, and somehow, out of an entire room, she was the only one I saw.

It wasn't the first time I'd noticed her. A few of my classmates had already tried talking to her, and that's how I learned her name - Ani. Tall, curvy, with chubby cheeks and an aura that felt almost unfair to everyone else in the room. I remember turning to my friend Shanon, who was sitting beside me, and blurting out, half to myself, "God, she's beautiful." Shanon grinned and said, "Then go tell her that." I smiled back and said I would.

She was walking towards the canteen door just then. I had this whole plan. Cross the hall, get in front of her, say something smooth. But the timing betrayed me, and she walked past before I could even move.

For a second, I almost turned back. But I had already said I would do this, so I pushed the hesitation down, and I called out her name. She turned around. I asked,

"You're Ani, right?" She nodded, a warm, easy smile spreading across her face, the kind of smile that stays with you long after the moment has passed.

I asked what course she was in. "Computer science, first year," she said.

"I'm in second year, computer science too," I told her.

She didn't say much after that, just smiled again and walked away. But I was happy. I had talked to a girl, and for once, the universe hadn't said no.

That small, clumsy meeting quietly grew into love over the next few months. I fell for her completely, headfirst, without brakes. Life felt more beautiful than it had any right to be. It was only after I had already fallen that I found out she came from a very different world than mine, a gap that, in India, is never just a footnote. It is treated, in some circles, as close to a transgression. As nineteen-year-old kids, though, we barely understood the line we were crossing, or how many people considered it unforgivable.

Time moved like dandelion seeds on a spring breeze, and before I knew it, it was 2006 and I had graduated. Like most Indian graduates who didn't come from an Ivy League pedigree, I had to go out and find my own way. That search brought me to Chennai, where I kept knocking on doors, kept looking. It was a brutal hunt, but I stayed motivated because somewhere in the back of my mind was a simple, burning reason: I wanted to be a man worth marrying by the time she graduated in 2007.

Success is like a butterfly, it may land on your shoulder one day, but only if you're out there in the field, waiting.

So I stayed in the field, and eventually I heard about an off-campus drive at the now-defunct Satyam Computers. I attended it. Life, for a moment, felt exhilarating and full of promise. I had a job. Who wouldn't want to say yes to a boy with a degree, a job, and what looked like a bright road ahead?

But it turned out none of that mattered the way I thought it would. In India, a degree can open doors, but it cannot rewrite where you come from. Caste and class are quieter, older gatekeepers, the kind that don't announce themselves in interviews or offer letters, but sit at the head of every family table, deciding who is "suitable" and who is not. I had a job, a future, a plan. None of it counted for much against the simple, unspoken fact of which community I was born into, and which she was. No credential however hard-earned was big enough to erase that.

Ani was the one who finally said it that the only way for us to actually be together, to marry and build a life, was to elope. It wasn't the wedding I had once imagined for us, but it was the only card left on the table. Elope with the love of my life, or walk away and spend the rest of my years wondering. I chose her. Walking away was never really an option not for my heart, anyway. So we waited for her to finish college, and then we got married, against nearly everyone's wishes.

Ani became my wife. And just as we expected, the world around us pulled back we were quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, cast out. But somewhere in the middle of all that distance, we built our own happiness and kept building it, one ordinary day at a time. Some doors have opened again over the years, but on my wife's side, most still remain closed to us.

And somehow, that's a price we've made peace with, because whatever it cost us to be together, it never once outweighed what we felt for each other. I think that's just what people mean when they say "we fell in love".