Our full story

A requirements document walks into a love story

It starts with the least romantic sentence ever typed: "Hey! Any update on that SRS part?" Two colleagues at Expenzing. Late-night deployment calls, test servers, tickets with our names on them.

She was sharp, faster than me, and formal: "Audible ho, sir?"

Sir. She called me sir 38 times that year. I kept inventing reasons to say "can we connect?" — and somewhere between the bug reports, I stopped needing a reason.

The first real message

One night I dropped the work talk and typed the truth: "I want you to know that I always appreciate and respect you, no matter what the circumstances will be… when the time comes you will find me supporting you."

I didn't know it yet, but that was the first brick of everything we built.

The first photo

The first picture ever shared in our chat. After that, 6,000 more would follow. The archive of us had officially opened.

The saree that broke me

Her birthday. She wore a yellow saree, and I forgot how the English language works. I wished her at night — carefully, like a "good friend" — and added: "I'm not the first one to wish you, but I'll be the last one to wish you." Even then I was negotiating for forever.

Within three days we were having The Conversation. I laid out the options like the business analyst I am — and my heart leaked through every bullet point.

The poem

Two days later I did something I'd never done before: I wrote a poem. About a saree, about a friend who wasn't just a friend anymore.

"Han ab wo sirf dost nahi rahi thi..!!!"

It's framed on the main page of this website, because it deserves a frame.

The hardest day

The day her world lost its centre — the day she lost her mumma. There are no words for that kind of day, and I didn't pretend to have them. I gave her the only true ones I had:

"She is inside you always… and forever."

Grief walked into our story that January. Love refused to leave the room. I took leave and showed up — because some things you don't say, you do.

"You are the one"

Six days later, everything I'd held back came out at once: "tujhse milke ek peace lagta hai… I feel fresh again, I feel myself… you are the one."

And she — in the middle of the hardest month of her life — answered with the three words first: "I love you."

9 months and 9 days after "Hey!". She cracked first. I will never let her forget it, and I will never stop being grateful for it.

Learning the language of us

Gateway of India in April. Ice cream dates. Rain and Marine Drive in June. "Sir" died quietly that year; "venky" took over — and then "baby", "pagal", "idiot", "dumbo", each one a promotion in disguise.

90,667 messages in that single year. We went from colleagues to a universe.

She planned a whole thing

My birthday. She plotted for days — the chat literally shows her scheming on December 1st. Cake, candles, that smile. For a man who used to spend birthdays at the office, being somebody's whole project felt like winning a lottery I never bought a ticket for.

Stockpiling sunshine

Kala Ghoda in January. Movie dates, night drives, coffee days. And in July — the monsoon trip: one umbrella, wet shoes, zero regrets. Looking back, we were stocking up on togetherness like we somehow knew what was coming.

The airport goodbye

I moved to the USA. There's a photo of us at the airport with a luggage trolley between us, both smiling the way you smile when you're refusing to cry in public.

Everyone — everyone — says distance kills love.

Distance never stood a chance

Five weeks after that goodbye, we set our all-time record: 1,955 messages in a single day. A message every 44 seconds. 2024 — the year an ocean got between us — became our biggest texting year ever: 1,05,922 messages.

Take that, everyone.

Her year of wandering

Diwali at home. Varanasi's ghats in December. And then she stood in front of the Taj Mahal — and in every photo from that day, the Taj is somehow the second most beautiful thing in frame.

We mastered the long-distance liturgy: good-morning-her-time, good-night-my-time, and 7,796 calls stitched across a 10.5-hour gap.

Love in video-call resolution

Goa in February. Holi colours in March. Garba nights in September — three of them, twirling. A yacht in October. Alibaug in November. She lived her year fully, and I watched proudly from a laptop screen — her face in a tiny rectangle, my heart in a big mess.

Those blurry video-call screenshots in our album? To anyone else, bad photos. To us: Tuesday.

He came home

I flew back to begin the new year the only correct way: next to her. Midnight found us together — new year, same us, zero kilometres apart.

Her hand, my city, her people

Colaba walks. A golden-hour photoshoot. Dinner at Veronica's in Bandra. A kiss under a glittering Eiffel Tower that wasn't in Paris — Paris can wait, we decided.

And the big one: I met her family. Her father, her brother, her aai, the kids who orbit her like she's the sun — the whole world that calls her didi. I walked in nervous. I walked out understanding exactly where all that love in her comes from.

Pune, Marine Drive & a food review

Our Pune trip — exploring, drinks, a fort, her floral skirt catching the wind. One restaurant earned her legendary disapproval (she didn't like the food, and the 😒 was historic). Then her Udaipur week — six days of palaces and lakes, the city looking like it dressed up for her.

Today: this website

Four and a half years. 3,34,965 messages. 1,450 days of talking. Two countries, one us.

Other gifts run out. So this year I built you a country on the internet with a population of two — where every photo, every number, every poem says the same thing:

she was always the one. she is the one. she will be the one..!!!