Mr. Right Gets the Wrong Email

The love of my life was a click away, but not in the way you think.

Illustration by Jess Smart Smiley

November 1997, when I was sixteen and living in Singapore, I sent a boy an accidental email that changed my life. It wasn’t even a real email; I didn’t write anything in the body at all. I thought I typed in the address of one of my classmates, but I wasn’t sure if I had it right. Then I accidentally hit “Send” instead of “Cancel.”



The thing you need to know is, this was way back in the day when email was very new, and it was exciting to have any emails in our inboxes. Penis enlargement ads weren’t nearly as ubiquitous, and if a Nigerian prince wrote to you, you sent him a reply even if only to say, “I know this is a scam.” That was probably why the boy wrote back to me.

“It’s not every day I get an email from a girl,” he typed. “Especially a blank one. Who are you?”

Another thing you need to know is that my parents are quite conservative, even by Indian parent standards. One day, about six months after that first wrong-number email, they found my dia…