Roman Holiday , Before Sunrise , DDLJ , The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants — books and movies glorifying holiday romance make us feel warm and fuzzy. Sometimes, even inspiring us to scale snowy mountains or plunge into stormy seas to find our own. Here are three tales of love that blossomed miles away from home.
Down on one knee, up in the mountains
Racer-mountaineer Varun Gunaseelan met photographer Jahnavi Aggarwal, now his wife, when on the Churdhar Trek in Himachal Pradesh, in 2014. He asked her to marry him in 2018, when they were climbing to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa.
“It was a 10-day expedition, and we were going to reach the peak on the eighth day. She had no idea that I was going to pop the question: It was to be a complete surprise.
My mother-in-law was in on it, and she kept the secret well. She was with us on the trek, as were a lot of people. Jahnavi and I were the youngest in a group of 10, and I had to draw her out alone at some point.
I did it on the sixth day: the day before we started for the final summit push. I told her I wanted to click some pictures for my brand (Varun is co-founder of Wild Warrior, an adventure sports brand looking to popularise obstacle course racing in India). Jahnavi is a professional photographer, so at sunrise, she took her camera and we went out for some shots.
We were on the eastern side of Kilimanjaro, at approximately 4,100 metres above sea level. I remember the date: it was September 16, 2018, around 6 am. There was a sea of clouds below us with the sun slowly starting to emerge on the horizon. I was nervous, but I decided to take the plunge.
We were sitting on a rock admiring the sunrise and I stood up, turned around, faced her, then knelt down on one knee asking if she would marry me.
Because I knew I would propose at dawn, I actually bought a box with a light on the lid that flashes on the ring when the box is opened.
She was surprised and just kept saying “Oh my god, Varun” for about a minute — a very long, nervous minute for me — before an emphatic “Yes”. Then she had to remove her mittens for me to slide the ring on. It fit. I had smuggled out one of her old rings so I could have the right size.
The ring that I picked out for her represents our relationship: adventurous and simple, and without a big rock, so she does not have to worry about it while we try out adventure activities.
As told to Meghna Majumdar
Walking into the sunset
After travelling through 30 cities and numerous villages across India, 28-year-old Yask Kulshreshtha decided to add one more stop on the way: Kochi.
The civil-engineer student from the Netherlands was in India on a vacation. It was the end of January 2017, and the Kochi biennale was underway. That morning, after he entered the Maritime Hostel in Fort Kochi, he noticed a woman, who was hogging breakfast, like she had been starving for days. Odd girl, he thought about Krithika Samavedula, the 25-year-old, who would go on to be his life partner.
Krithika also had been backpacking across India before starting a new job as an architect in Delhi. As fate deigned it to be, she entered the bright red doors of the redesigned old Dutch quarters of Maritime Hostel the same time that Yask did.
On the second day of their stay, Krithika noticed that Yask had been roaming around the port town on a bicycle he had rented. Eager to get her hands on one too, Krithika asked Yask where the rental was. “Let’s walk there together,” said Yask, uttering the four words that would go on to be the start of a long friendship.
Krithika, it turned out, did not know how to ride a bicycle, and Yask offered to teach her. “I had a fall, and he accompanied me to the hospital to get an X-Ray,” she recalls.
After the third and final day of their stay in Kochi, the two figured they would part ways: she, to Goa, and he, to Pune. “I had decided to spend the night at the station, because I had an early morning train and there was no point in extending the checkout time,” she says. Her plans of getting some shut-eye at the station were not to be, because standing at the Kochi station, waiting for the same train, was Yask. They spent the entire night talking, and their conversations continued running along the length of the Konkan Railway route.
“For me, it was during the train journey that I knew this girl is special,” says Yask. The two had moved on from talking about mutual interests such as backpacking to opening up emotionally about their families and lives.
“We decided we would meet exactly one year later, in Fort Kochi again,” says Krithika, the pact, an idea that was inspired by Before Sunrise . The two went on to keep in touch, sending each other letters from wherever they were next. “After that, every city I went to, every friend I made, I’d tell people about Krithika,” laughs Yask.
Letters soon turned into emails, emails eventually turned into texts, and after a very long time, texts turned into calls. Though Krithika rejected Yask’s proposal the first time around, they stuck to each other through thick and thin — bad work days and job changes — until both understood the value they held in each other’s lives, and decided to get married.
The two could not keep the one-year pact, but now they are doing something better. Two years after they first met, Yask and Krithika are back in Kochi, for the biennale again, but this time, on their honeymoon.
As told to Sweta Akundi
Love across time zones
Apurv Nagpal, author and visiting faculty at IIM Ahmedabad, found love at a club in Colombo. Three months later, Ritu and he were married, and 22 years on, the love story continues.
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“I met Ritu on October 1, 1996, at Blue Elephant, a night club at the Hilton Colombo. She was a cabin crew with Cathay Pacific and was in the city on a two-day layover. I had just been posted there by my former office Procter & Gamble, and was staying at the same hotel. I didn’t notice her till she got on the dance floor; ‘Made in India’ was playing. The music was too loud to talk, so I wrote: “Are you Indian?” on a tissue and sent it to her. She replied saying, yes and we started talking. We went out for chai later that night, and it was agreed that I would take her and her friend around the city the next day.
Luckily for me, her friend wasn’t feeling too well the next morning, so it was just her and me. We walked along Galle Face Green. The magic happened at Mount Lavinia, at their private beach, where we were just chatting and figuring out more about each other. That night she flew back to Hong Kong and we spoke on the phone every day, despite the long distance, her schedule, phone bills and the fact that we had to call each other’s landlines and there were restrictions. Ritu once spent an entire month’s salary on phone calls.
I flew to Hong Kong 15 days later to meet her. After returning, I proposed to her on the phone, exactly a month after I first met her. She met my parents in Chandigarh, and on January 25, 1997, we got married. When you know someone is the one for you, you just know.
As told to Priyadarshini Paitandy
