Love, Actually.

At the beginning of "Under the Tuscan Sun," Diane Lane looks at her run-down house, into which she is about to throw her heart, and tells her neighbor all the dreams she has wrapped in its brick walls. Its yard will hold a wedding, its rooms a baby, its walls a family's laughter. And she means for her. It will be her wedding, her baby, her family.

And at the end of the film her friend turns to her and smiles, saying "I guess you got everything you wished for." She hasn't gotten married, or pregnant, or created a "family." She hasn't received or given love in the form she wanted to. But, looking at the wedding and baby and family before her, it dawns that she did, indeed, receive all that she wished for.

Life continues to surpass even my own expectations. All my wishes come true. All in ways I never wished them.

There were no red roses on Valentine's Day. No romance. No Halmark cards with sweet nothings mass-produced. There was just love. Love in plenty.

My time in India may very well be cut short. Ineffective medicines and deteriorating health may yank me (body and soul) from S.'s warmth. June's homecoming may very well become March's return.

Yes, life is what we make of it. We are not helpless bystanders in the whirlwind of our years. But sometimes life happens to us. Sometimes life happens to us, and then life goes.

As an adolescent I pictured my 22-year-old self as living in a posh apartment, sipping on cocktails in skin-tight black dresses, coming home to a stable handsome romance. Instead of a posh apartment I dwell in a dusty plain home. Instead of sipping on cocktails I drink chai in jeans. And instead of a stable, ordinary, handsome romance I am involved in what can only be described as a "romance with living."

I moved to a rural Punjabi village and found love in every way shape and form I never imagined it. I moved to a rural Punjabi village and, I suppose, got everything I wished for.

And sometimes we cannot hold our wishes forever.

Sometimes life happens to us, and then life goes on.