Before You Saw Me

Two people. Two cultures. Two different spectrums of society. And one thing in common - a love for their craft and their people.

Aanya Nair-Malhotra - heiress of conglomerate Malhotra Group, final year B.Arch student, and the campus's unofficial don. Feared not just for her name, but for everything she is and everything she has built on her own. She has spent four years hiding one half of her identity from the world - and hiding something far deeper from one specific person. Because Vivaan doesn't know her name. Doesn't know her family. Doesn't know that the Malhotra Foundation scholarship keeping him in college has anything to do with the quiet girl who sits three rows away in the cafeteria and has never once looked his way.

At least, that's what he thinks.

Vivaan Joshi - worlds apart from Aanya in every way society measures distance, final year Integrated M.Tech student, holding his family together in the aftermath of a loss, fighting for a future he is building entirely with his own hands. Driven, direct, and completely unaware that someone has been paying attention to him - quietly, consistently, for four years.

When a final semester project pairs them together, something shifts. Not all at once. Not loudly. The way things shift when they've been a long time coming. And the vines around Aanya's heart? They start to squeeze every time the world conspires to put her in the same room as the very man she loves and hides from. Every moment he looks at her like he's trying to figure out something he doesn't have the words for yet.

She has the words. She has had them for four years.
She is just terrified of what will happen when he finally has them too.

Some love stories don't begin when two people meet. They begin when one of them finally starts to look.