Rambutan’s Cynthia Shanmugalingam on Meeting—And Marrying—The Love of Her Life at 40

A couple of years ago, in the purgatory between Covid-19 lockdowns and dating app hell, I met Joe.

Solidly in my fun auntie (funtie?) era, I had all but given up on love. After another relationship came to an end, my mum surprised me with a reassuring squeeze. “You’ve got a great life,” she said. A 74-year-old Tamil grandmother, she’s been married and caring for other people for more than 50 years at that point. I felt her pride in my freedom spreading over my heart and chest, thick as strawberry jam. It was true: I could do whatever I want, see whomever I pleased, dream of opening my own restaurant. And yet, as Maya Angelou says: “Nobody can make it out here alone.”

And so I reluctantly stayed aboard the carousel of hot strangers, stupid banter, and ruthless behavior that is dating in London. My most recent romance had been a Ghanaian playwright who seemed very nice until he ghosted me mid-phone call while I was on my way over for dinner. I matched with a TV doctor and looked him up online, only to find more than one video of him discussing the science of his own farts. Oh dear. I tried to keep an open mind with a French-Tamil tech entrepreneur, ignoring the identical black polo necks he wore on every date, not to mention his penchant for starting the evening with drinks at a WeWork. When he had to move back to the US, we politely agreed to keep in touch. A second lockdown hit. We didn’t.

And then something amazing happened. After months of my friend Anokhi sending me daily motivational messages while I wrote and rewrote my proposal, I landed a book deal more generous than I had ever dreamed possible. I could afford to spend six months in Sri Lanka with my mum and dad. I wanted to write about food as a kind of Tamil joy, to find a way to represent and transcend our painful history through recipes. But the Sri Lankan Covid-19 guidelines were strict, I’d need to spend a whopping four weeks in isolation. “Well, so what?” I thought. “How bad could it be?” I’d be staying at a quarantine hotel. There was a pool. I could take a lot of beach selfies, and get a jump-start on my writing.