Love Me Like You Do

Radhika was a normal village girl. She was the daughter of a farmer. Her mother died a few months after her birth. Her father loved her a lot and raised her pretty well. She was well educated, in fact, the most educated girl in the village. She was also very beautiful. On her eighteenth birthday, her father told her about his desire to get her married to Parth who was in the Army. Parth was the son of a wealthy farmer in Radhika's village. Radhika wanted to study further and go to college in the nearby town. Parth had made it clear that he will not allow his wife to study or work. As a matter of fact, no girl from the village had gone to college. Even Radhika's father was reluctant to send her to college. All the girls in the village who were of Radhika's age had already married. Some of them had kids too. As Parth was not going to visit the village anytime soon, Radhika managed to postpone the marriage talk for a few months.

A year went by and Parth was returning to the village for 2 months. He wanted to get desperate to get married and his father started looking at other girls for him. Radhika knew that her father was not very happy with her decision of not accepting Parth's marriage proposal. And now that Parth was in the village, it became even more difficult for her father to face the villagers who taunted him and called Radhika arrogant. Radhika was watching her father in silence.

One day, she took her father to the river to cheer him up. They spoke at length about how quickly the time went by and recollected all the wonderful memories of Radhika's childhood. She reminded her father how he taught her that if we follow our heart, we can achieve anything in life. And her heart told her to continue her studies and become a doctor. She didn't want to give her heart to her husband and kill her wishes. Her father understood that Radhika was right. Even though getting her married will free him from his duties, he didn't wish to do so by sacrificing Radhika's wishes. He promised her that he will go with her and get her enrolled in college.

It is rightly said that "follow your heart as the heart is always right".