Date: February 14, 2013
Location: St. Francis College for Women, Hyderabad / National Cricket Academy, Bangalore
For a first-year MBA student at St. Francis College for Women, February 14th was not merely a date on the calendar. It was a highly competitive, emotionally charged, high-stakes spectator sport.
From the moment Krithika stepped off her purple TVS Scooty Pep+ and walked through the wrought-iron campus gates that morning, she was visually and physically assaulted by a blinding sea of red.
The crisp February air was thick with the overwhelming scent of imported roses and cheap, sugary perfumes. Girls were walking into morning lectures clutching life-sized, overly fluffy teddy bears, bouquets wrapped in shiny cellophane, and heart-shaped boxes of Ferrero Rocher chocolates.
Out in the courtyard, two different guys were nervously down on one knee proposing with varying degrees of success.
The entire college was buzzing with the chaotic, highly commercialized, frantic energy of Valentine's Day.
Krithika, who was usually fiercely independent, brutally pragmatic, and entirely dismissive of such manufactured corporate holidays, found herself feeling strangely, infuriatingly susceptible to the atmosphere today.
She walked into her 9:00 AM macroeconomics lecture and took her usual seat near the back. She placed her bag on the floor and set her phone face-up on the wooden desk.
Every three minutes, like clockwork, she tapped the screen.
No new messages.
Siddanth had texted her at exactly 6:00 AM that morning. It read: Morning, Shorty. Heading to the Chinnaswamy nets. Have a good day at class.
It was a perfectly normal, routine, entirely functional message. It was the exact same message he sent her every single morning when he was away at training camps. But today, it felt glaringly insufficient. There were no heart emojis. There was no mention of the date. There were no grand, sweeping, romantic declarations from him.
"Oh my god, look at Neha," Riya whispered, leaning over her desk and pointing toward the front row, where Neha was blushing furiously over a massive, expensive box of imported chocolates her boyfriend had just delivered.
Riya turned back to Krithika, a knowing, mischievous smirk spreading across her face. "So... did the he send you anything? You've been staring at that phone of yours like it holds the secrets of the universe all morning."
Krithika gritted her teeth, immediately snatching the phone off the desk and shoving it deeply into the pocket of her jeans.
"He's busy, Riya," Krithika said defensively, her voice a little sharper than she intended. "He's at training camp."
"Right, right," Kavya, Riya's twin sister, chimed in from the desk behind them, resting her chin on her hands and smiling affectionately at her friend. "Look, Krithi. We know he's basically running a tech empire and preparing to face the Australians. We get it. But it's Valentine's Day. He can definitely take two minutes out of his highly important day to order some flowers online. It takes literally three clicks."
Krithika didn't answer. She pulled her notebook closer, forcefully clicking her pen, and tried to focus on the professor writing demand curves on the whiteboard. But Kavya's words echoed loudly in her mind.
It takes literally three clicks.
---
The morning dragged into the afternoon. By the time the lunch bell rang, Krithika was in a state of mounting, irrational irritation. Every single time her phone vibrated in her pocket, her heart executed a violent, hopeful flip, only for her to pull it out and see a notification from a college Flash messenger group, or an email from the university library, or a promotional text from a pizza delivery chain.
She spent the remainder of the day watching other girls in college being showered with affection, gifts, and surprises, while her own phone remained agonizingly, stubbornly silent.
By the time she finally left the campus at 4:30 PM and rode her Scooty back to her hostel, the irritation had blossomed into a full-blown, fiery frustration.
She unlocked the door to her bedroom and aggressively dropped her heavy backpack onto the floor with a loud thud.
"Woof!"
A tiny, golden blur of fur immediately bounded out from under the bed. Ronny scrambled across the linoleum floor, his tail wagging so furiously his entire back half was shaking. He skidded to a halt at Krithika's feet, immediately grabbing her shoelace in his tiny, razor-sharp teeth and beginning to aggressively tug.
"Not now, Ronny," Krithika sighed, her anger melting slightly at the sight of the puppy. She knelt down, gently untangling her shoelace from his mouth and giving him a soft scratch behind the ears. "Deva is currently on my absolute worst list, so you need to behave."
Ronny simply let out a happy yip and bounded over to her discarded backpack, instantly beginning to chew on the strap.
Krithika threw herself onto her small, single bed, staring up at the ceiling. She pulled her phone out again.
It was 5:00 PM.
She knew Siddanth's schedule intimately. The National Cricket Academy (NCA) training sessions in Bangalore were grueling, often starting at the crack of dawn, but they usually wrapped up by late afternoon to allow the players to recover.
By now, he was definitely off the pitch. He was definitely back in his hotel room. And still, absolute, deafening radio silence regarding the occasion.
She squeezed her eyes shut, fighting a sudden, stupid wave of insecurity. She knew he cared about her. They were fiercely protective of each other, and they spent every stolen moment they could together, but neither of them had ever actually said the words 'I love you'.
And sitting alone in her hostel room on Valentine's Day, surrounded by the echoes of everyone else's grand romantic gestures, the absence of those words felt heavier than ever.
---
Meanwhile, the Indian Cricket Team was in the middle of a brutal, high-intensity training camp ahead of the impending Border-Gavaskar Trophy against Australia.
In the primary net session, Siddanth Deva was a terrifying sight to behold.
He was entirely locked into his express pace mechanics. He steamed in from his run-up, his boots pounding against the dry earth like a freight train.
Standing at the batting crease was Virat Kohli, looking intensely focused.
Siddanth hit his delivery stride and released the ball. It was a searing thunderbolt that pitched on a perfect length and jagged sharply back into the right-hander. Kohli brought his bat down with lightning speed, barely managing to dig the ball out, the impact sending a violent shudder up his forearms.
"Good pace, Sid! Keep hitting that length!" MS Dhoni yelled from behind the stumps, wearing his keeping pads and watching the trajectory closely. "Don't give him any room to free his arms!"
"I'm trying, Mahi bhai, but his bottom hand is too fast," Siddanth called back, wiping sweat from his forehead and offering Kohli a dangerous, competitive grin.
"You're going to have to bowl faster than that to get me, Devil," Kohli shot back, adjusting his helmet grill and tapping the pitch.
For three grueling hours, Siddanth bowled tirelessly. His perfectly conditioned body bypassed the usual lactic acid buildup that would cripple a normal fast bowler. He practiced his reverse-swinging yorkers, his deceptive slower balls, and his aggressive bouncers, meticulously preparing his arsenal for the Australians.
When the bowling session finally concluded, he didn't rest. He swapped his bowling spikes for his batting gear, strapping on his heavy leg guards and picking up his custom-weighted bat. For another two hours, he faced down the Indian spinners—Ashwin and Jadeja—on a specially curated, dusty, turning pitch, honing his defensive technique and sweep shots.
By the time the camp officially wrapped up at 5:30 PM, the players were physically drained, covered in red dust and sweat.
They boarded the heavily air-conditioned team bus back to the luxurious ITC Gardenia hotel.
Siddanth sat in the back row, his earphones in, listening to a steady, low-fi electronic track.
As soon as he reached his sprawling, ultra-premium suite on the top floor of the hotel, Siddanth showered quickly, ordered a massive portion of boiled chicken and salad from room service, and went straight to work.
He pulled on a pair of thick, black-rimmed, blue-light-blocking glasses, sitting cross-legged in the center of his massive king-sized bed, and opened his high-end, heavily encrypted laptop.
At 7:00 PM, the door to his suite burst open.
Virat Kohli and Ravindra Jadeja strolled in, completely uninvited but entirely at home. Virat was holding two bottles of sparkling water, and Jadeja was carrying a PlayStation 3 console under his arm.
"Your TV is bigger than ours, Sid," Virat announced, immediately walking over to the massive eighty-inch flat screen mounted on the wall and beginning to plug in the console cables. "Jaddu thinks he can beat me in FIFA 13. I need to humiliate him on a high-definition screen."
"I beat you three times yesterday, Cheeku! You just can't defend a counter-attack!" Jadeja shot back, grabbing a controller and throwing himself onto the plush leather sofa adjacent to Siddanth's bed.
Siddanth didn't even look up from his laptop. "Try not to break the TV. The BCCI won't pay for the damages."
For the next hour and a half, the suite transformed into an absolute warzone of virtual football.
Virat and Jadeja screamed, cursed, and aggressively trash-talked each other as digital players sprinted across the screen.
"Pass the ball! Pass the ball, you absolute idiot!" Virat yelled, his face inches from the screen, his thumbs a blur on the controller. "Jaddu, I swear to God, if you slide-tackle my striker near the box one more time..."
"It's a tactical foul, bro! Learn to play the game!" Jadeja laughed maniacally, mashing the tackle button.
Siddanth remained sitting cross-legged on the bed, an island of absolute tranquility in the middle of the chaos. His intense focus effectively turned the shouting and the loud video game commentary into manageable, white-noise static.
The evening blurred into a montage of rapid keystrokes and scrolling text as he quietly built the complex neural architecture that would soon manage his tech empire, completely unbothered by the virtual football warzone next to him.
At exactly 8:30 PM, his phone, resting on the mattress next to his knee, suddenly vibrated, the screen illuminating the dark room.
Siddanth glanced down.
The caller ID flashed a single word: Headache.
A small, genuine smile touched Siddanth's lips, instantly softening the sharp, calculating lines of his face. He didn't stop typing with his right hand, continuing to execute a complex string of commands, while his left hand reached out to accept the call and bring the phone to his ear.
"Hey, Shorty," Siddanth greeted casually, his deep, smooth baritone easily cutting through the sound of Virat scoring a virtual goal and screaming in absolute triumph. "How was college?"
Hundreds of miles away, Krithika was pacing a hole into the floor of her room. Ronny the puppy was happily chewing on her shoes lace at the corner of the room, completely ignored.
"College was fine," Krithika replied. Her tone was noticeably clipped, her words sharp and punctuated.
Siddanth, whose emotional intelligence was usually exceptionally high, was currently utilizing ninety percent of his cognitive bandwidth to compile a neural network. He missed the subtle tonal shift entirely.
"Good. Did you finish that microeconomics presentation you were stressing about?" he asked, hitting 'Enter' on his keyboard.
Krithika stopped pacing. She closed her eyes, taking a deep, shuddering breath. She decided to give him a lifeline. One final, incredibly obvious hint.
"Yes, Sid, I finished the presentation," she said, forcing her voice to remain calm. "Did you... check the calendar today, by any chance?"
Siddanth frowned slightly, adjusting his blue-light glasses. He quickly scanned his internal mental schedule.
"The calendar? Yeah," Siddanth answered honestly. "Why? Did I miss something?"
Krithika massaged her temples, her fingers pressing hard against her skin. "No, Sid. Did you notice anything... special happening around you today?"
Siddanth looked up from his laptop. He glanced over at the sofa. Virat and Jadeja were now physically wrestling over the PlayStation controller, elbows flying as they fought for an advantage on a virtual corner kick.
"Not really," Siddanth replied, completely, genuinely oblivious. "Virat broke the NCA beep-test endurance record this morning, which was pretty impressive. Other than that... it's been a pretty standard Thursday."
That was it. That was the final straw. The dam broke.
"Are you actually a robot?!" Krithika snapped, her pent-up frustration finally exploding through the phone speaker. "Siddanth?! It is February 14th! It is Valentine's Day!"
Siddanth paused. His fingers froze perfectly still over the keyboard.
"Every single girl on my campus today walked into class holding giant, ridiculous teddy bears and absurdly expensive roses!" Krithika continued, her voice rising in pitch, venting twelve hours of silent, agonizing annoyance. "My classmate's boyfriend, a guy who is currently failing basic financial accounting and can barely tie his own shoes, managed to send her a three-tier custom cake! And I have spent the entire day—since 6:00 AM—checking my phone like a complete, desperate idiot, waiting for you to send me a single text message saying 'Happy Valentine's Day', or maybe send a single flower, or literally anything!"
She was breathing heavily by the end of the rant, her chest heaving. On the floor, Ronny stopped chewing and tilted his golden head, looking up at her in confusion at the sudden shouting.
In the hotel room in Bangalore, the atmosphere had shifted instantaneously.
Virat and Jadeja had completely frozen. The digital players on the TV screen stood idle, the football rolling out of bounds. The two cricketers were staring at Siddanth with wide, terrified eyes, having heard the faint, high-pitched, furious yelling bleeding through the earpiece of the phone.
Virat, who was no stranger to relationship drama, visibly winced in sympathetic, second-hand panic. He mouthed the word 'Sorry' to Siddanth and slowly, carefully set the controller down on the table, trying not to make a sound.
Siddanth didn't look panicked. He didn't look angry. He simply closed his laptop with a soft click.
He held up a single finger to his teammates, a silent command to remain entirely quiet. He stood up from the bed, walked across the plush carpet, and stepped out onto the private, glass-paneled balcony of his suite. He slid the heavy glass door shut behind him, completely blocking out the noise of the room and plunging himself into the quiet of the Bangalore night.
The cool evening air washed over him. He leaned his forearms against the cool metal railing, looking out over the glittering, sprawling city lights of the IT capital.
He didn't interrupt her. He didn't immediately rush to defend himself. He waited for a full, deliberate five seconds to ensure she had gotten every last drop of frustration out of her system.
"Have you finished venting your pent-up anger?" Siddanth finally asked.
His voice was incredibly calm, dropping an octave into a low, soothing register.
Krithika, standing in her room, felt a sudden, sharp flush of embarrassment at her own outburst. Hearing her rant echoed back to her in the silence of the room, she realized she sounded exactly like the superficial, materialistic college girls she constantly mocked. But her pride forced her to hold her ground.
"Yes," Krithika said stubbornly, crossing her arms over her chest. "I'm finished."
"Okay," Siddanth said softly. "First of all... I am sorry, Krithi. I am genuinely, deeply sorry that I made you feel forgotten today. That was never my intention, and I apologize for making you wait and feel foolish. You didn't deserve that."
Krithika's defensive posture instantly crumbled. Her shoulders slumped. She had expected him to argue. She had expected him to cite his exhausting training schedule, or bring up the immense, crushing national pressure of the impending Australian Test series, or remind her that he was currently running a massive technology conglomerate.
Instead, he offered no excuses. He simply took absolute accountability for her feelings.
"But," Siddanth continued, his tone shifting away from an apology and into something deeply earnest, logical, and profoundly grounded. "I need you to understand how my brain works, Shorty. I don't believe in Valentine's Day."
"Siddu..."
"Listen to me," he interrupted gently, his voice firm but warm. "It is a manufactured corporate holiday. Why let a calendar dictate the market value of our affection? There's a quote I read once: 'True affection is measured in the silent choices we make every day, not in the loud gestures demanded by a date on a calendar.' Why on earth do I need a greeting card company to tell me when to show you that you matter to me?"
Krithika sat down slowly on the edge of her bed. She reached out, aimlessly tracing the intricate, floral pattern of her bedsheet with her index finger, listening to the absolute conviction in his voice.
"You're upset about a gift," Siddanth said, a small, incredibly affectionate smile touching his lips as he looked up at the night sky. "Krithi, I can give you a gift anytime I want. I don't have to wait for a specific, socially mandated date in February to give you something."
Krithika bit her lip hard. Put into his brutally logical, wildly extravagant perspective, her rant about oversized teddy bears and custom cakes sounded painfully childish. He hadn't bought her chocolate; he had bought her a living, breathing companion.
Siddanth leaned his head back against the glass of the balcony door.
"And as for the wishes..." Siddanth's voice dropped into a low, quiet, incredibly intimate. "I love you all the time, Krithi. I don't need to say it on a specific day just because everyone else on your campus is doing it."
The line went dead silent.
The ambient noise of the hostel—the distant hum of traffic, the faint sound of music from down the hall—seemed to vanish entirely.
Krithika's breath hitched, caught painfully in her throat. Her heart executed a violent, terrifying leap against her ribs, hammering so loudly she was certain he could hear it through the phone.
Neither of them had ever said those words.
They had danced around them for months. They had shown their affection through secretive car rides. They had shown it through his massive, over-the-top protective gestures. They had shown it through quiet understandings and comfortable silences. But they had never actually spoken the words out loud.
And Siddanth had just dropped the confession into the middle of a logical debate as casually, as undeniably, as stating a universal fact of physics.
Realizing the sheer magnitude of what he had just effortlessly admitted, Siddanth let out a soft, deep, rumbling chuckle that vibrated through the phone line.
"We haven't even officially told each other 'I love you' yet, have we?" Siddanth mused softly, the realization dawning on him. He smiled, his eyes crinkling at the corners. "But you know I love you, Krithi. And I know you love me. Isn't that enough? Does a date in February really change what we have built?"
Krithika remained completely, utterly silent, her grip on the phone tightening until her knuckles turned white.
The anger was entirely gone. The frustration over the roses and the chocolate was vaporized, burned away by the sheer intensity of his words. In its place was an overwhelming, suffocating, chest-tightening rush of pure, unadulterated affection for the absolute, beautiful, hyper-logical dork she was dating.
"Krithi?" Siddanth asked after a long moment of silence, a hint of genuine concern finally creeping into his voice. "Did you hang up on me in a fit of rage?"
"I'm here," Krithika finally managed to whisper. Her voice was thick, choked with sudden emotion, as a massive, uncontrollable smile stretched across her face. She reached up with her free hand, wiping a stray, happy tear from the corner of her eye. "You are... you are the most unromantic, infuriatingly logical, absolute nerd on the planet."
"I try my best," Siddanth smiled warmly, the relief evident in his voice.
"I'm sorry," Krithika said, her voice dropping, filled with genuine regret. "I was being stupid. The college hype just got to my head. Seeing everyone else... it made me feel insecure. But I know you care about me, Sid. You show it to me every single day. I don't need a stupid teddy bear."
"You'd probably just give the teddy bear to Ronny to destroy anyway," Siddanth noted with terrifying accuracy.
Krithika let out a watery laugh, the remaining tension fully dissipating into the ether. She looked down at the floor, where the puppy was now happily tearing a page out of her textbook. "He's currently chewing on my economics notes, actually."
"Good boy. Economics is a flawed, highly theoretical science anyway," Siddanth joked effortlessly, pushing off the balcony railing and walking back toward the sliding glass door. "Are we patched up, Shorty?"
"We are patched up, Mama's Boy," Krithika replied softly, her heart feeling incredibly light. She paused, clutching the phone tightly, gathering every ounce of her courage. "And... Siddu?"
"Yeah?"
"I love you too."
Siddanth stopped, his hand resting on the handle of the sliding door.
"Goodnight, Krithi," Siddanth whispered, his voice filled with quiet adoration. "Go rescue your textbook."
He hung up the phone. He stood on the balcony for another few seconds, looking at the dark screen of his phone, letting the reality of the conversation settle deep into his bones. He took a deep breath of the Bangalore air, before sliding the door open and stepping back into the chaos of his hotel room.
The tense silence in the suite broke the moment he entered.
Virat Kohli, who had paused the game the second Siddanth walked outside, leaned back on the sofa. He looked at Siddanth with a wide, teasing grin.
"What was all that about, Sid?" Virat asked playfully, tossing a controller from hand to hand. "Girlfriend looked pretty angry at you, huh? Did the big bad billionaire forget to buy some flowers?"
Jadeja snickered from the other end of the couch, watching Siddanth carefully.
Siddanth simply shook his head, a bright, undeniable smile plastered across his face that made him look completely human.
"Stop it, Cheeku," Siddanth chuckled, walking over and picking up the discarded PlayStation controller from the coffee table. "Nothing like that. It was just a misunderstanding."
He sat down on the edge of the sofa next to Virat, perfectly content, his eyes locking onto the television screen.
"Sit down," Siddanth said, nudging Virat's shoulder. "Let me show you how to actually beat him."