Our story
September 2023
A family friend sent Ankita’s family a WhatsApp message about “a boy.” Ankita asked for a LinkedIn before she would consider anything. The LinkedIn arrived three weeks later.
She messaged the number on the profile without expecting much, reached Aditya’s Google Voice line, and Aditya, fairly sure he was being contacted by a bot, decided to reply instead of deleting it.
2024 and 2025
In June 2024 Ankita moved to San Jose. That July, at the Odisha Society of the Americas convention in Nashville, she introduced Aditya to about thirty of her closest family members in one sitting. It was a bold move, but it felt right.
In August 2025 Aditya proposed at the top of Haleakalā.
Since then
We hike together. We dance goofy with each other in the morning. We eat a lot of samples at Costco. We cook together, Ankita baking and plating (and eating the half-cooked ingredients), Aditya running the curries, both of us tasting. We talk about work far too much, and neither of us minds.
We are learning the butterfly stroke. We are rock climbing buddies. We camp under the stars, and we bring a hammock on picnics, and when the cord will not reach around the tree we sit on the ground.
Every new thing we do counts as a date, and so will this new journey.