When Love Comes A-Calling ( II )

What are the odds of meeting your soulmate in an Internet chatroom, only to discover he is a silent voice from your distant past? You do the maths. For chatter GildedCage, it's already a done deal.

Seven years have passed since that fateful evening when GildedCage ('Cage' to her chat buddies) and fellow chatter Ashburn virtually met. It was a chance meeting that would ultimately take them down the road to matrimony. Yet the wonder of it all has never really sunk in for her and she doesn't even know if it ever will.

February 2001

She was such a klutz in dealing with all things electrical and mechanical and now she had just added the Internet to a long list of gizmos she kept a wary distance from.

She could never fully comprehend the functionalities of her DVD player, camera, handphone, convection and microwave ovens, remote control panels, or anything with multiple buttons on them. She got confused easily.

The Internet was a recent addition to her life. Of course she had known of its existence for a while. In fact, part of her had wanted to explore this new avenue everyone was excited about, but she was afraid of getting lost in the maze.

But since her appointment as editor of her NGO's weekly newsletter, she had no choice but to chalk up the miles on the new information highway. The said NGO was foreign-based and in more ways than one Net-dependent, so she had to go with the flow.

Soon her children realised a new word had crept into their mother's vocabulary - chatting. Mum had apparently discovered a chatroom while riding the Net waves, and went into it with the fervour of a religious fanatic.

While they were happy she had found a new hobby, they weren't so thrilled about her hogging the computer to chat with her newfound friends.

But seeing the changes in her - it was as though she had just awoken from a long, deep slumber - they decided perhaps chatting was her scene, after all.

It was on one of those quiet nights while chatting with her regular 'kakis' in the chatroom that she saw an unfamiliar nickname entering and being greeted with a raucous welcome by her new friends.

Obviously a room old-timer and a he, judging by the nick 'Ashburn' (then again you could never tell in this virtual world), he was warmly introduced to her by a fellow chatter.

She was riveted by the nick 'Ashburn', translated into Abu Bakar (although she learned much later that he was neither Abu nor Bakar), because Abu Bakar was the name of her father who had passed away just three months before.

In the presence of an obvious chatroom supremo, the newbie chatter in her felt somewhat intimidated, so she quietly retreated to her corner to observe the good-natured banterings amongst them.

Soon enough, he graciously manoeuvred her back into the room's chatflow, for which she was thankful. It wasn't fun feeling like a wallflower in a roomful of party revellers.

And so it was; they met virtually most nights to chat and share views about everything under the sun. They found a common interest in reading and singing and spent hours discussing books and songs.

She learned he was into golf, Herman Hesse, Dean Koontz, Stephen King and swing bands - in that order. He learned she couldn't have enough of true-crime whodunits, was a diehard fan of crime writer Ann Rule, devoured autobiographies like there was no tomorrow, and that she loved the ballads of Anne Murray and Karen Carpenter.

She found the friendship comfortable. It was akin to slipping into a pair of worn loafers, a perfect fit. She had some unsolicited details of his life, courtesy of those chatters who knew him personally and had met him. By the same token, she told him a bit about herself; not much, just enough to keep the friendship on an even keel.

While she found him smart, well-schooled and intriguing, she had no desire to meet him, nor anyone else from the chatroom for that matter. She drew a line at knowing them in the flesh because she wanted to keep the illusion intact....