Time Period: 1990s – Bangalore
Lie: Believing love can exist without vulnerability..
The Virtual Lie
Bangalore in the 1990s was a city in transition. The quiet town of gardens and lakes was evolving into India’s Silicon Valley. New glass-fronted office buildings rose beside crumbling bungalows, and the hum of computer servers filled the air. Ravi Prakash worked late most nights, staring at lines of code under the harsh fluorescent lights of his company’s office.
He wasn’t lonely, he told himself. He liked the quiet. Yet the loneliness crept in anyway, slipping through the cracks of his routine like light through a broken shutter.
It was during one of those late nights that he received the email.
The Mystery Begins
The subject line read: I liked your essay on algorithmic efficiency.
Ravi frowned. It wasn’t uncommon for his work to circulate among colleagues, but no one had ever reached out to him directly.
The email was warm, almost playful:
Hi, Ravi. I stumbled upon your essay and thought it was brilliant. It’s rare to find someone who writes about logic with so much heart. Let’s chat sometime. Maybe over email first?
She signed it simply as Kavya.
At first, Ravi thought it was a prank. But curiosity got the better of him. He replied.
Over the next few weeks, their emails became a lifeline for him. Kavya was sharp, funny, and kind. She seemed to understand him in a way no one else ever had. She asked about his favorite books, his childhood, his dreams. And, slowly, Ravi began to open up.
“You’re like a puzzle,” she wrote once. “Layered and complex. I like that.”
No one had ever described him like that before.
Falling in Love
As their conversations deepened, Ravi found himself thinking about Kavya constantly. He would imagine what she looked like, what her voice sounded like. Her warmth felt like an anchor in the otherwise cold, transactional world of the office.
“I want to meet you,” he wrote one evening. “Can we grab coffee? Or lunch?”
There was a long pause before she replied. When her email arrived, it was hesitant:
Not yet. I’m not ready. What if it ruins what we have?
Ravi felt a pang of disappointment but told himself to be patient. Love, after all, wasn’t about rushing.
The Truth Unfolds
One evening, Ravi stayed late at the office, working on a complex encryption program. He was the only one in the building, or so he thought, until he heard the faint click of a keyboard from the HR office.
Curiosity led him to peek inside. There, under the glow of a desk lamp, was a woman typing furiously. Something about her movements seemed familiar. He leaned closer and noticed the screen. She was drafting an email with his name in the subject line.
“Kavya,” he whispered.
She froze, her hands hovering above the keyboard. Slowly, she turned around. It was her—the woman behind the emails.
“Kavya,” he repeated, his voice shaking. “What’s going on?”
She stood, flustered. “Ravi, I can explain—”
“You work here?” he asked, his mind racing. “You’ve been here all along?”
“Yes,” she admitted, her voice small. “But it’s not what you think.”
“Then tell me,” he said, his chest tightening.
Kavya took a deep breath. “The company asked me to write to you. They said you were working too hard, that you might leave before completing the project. They thought… I could keep you engaged.”
The words hit him like a punch to the gut. “So, this was all a lie?”
“No,” she said quickly. “Not all of it. I… I really did enjoy talking to you.”
“But you never wanted to meet me,” he said bitterly. “Because it wasn’t real.”
She looked away, unable to meet his gaze.
The Draft That Remains
Ravi walked out of the office that night, the glow of the streetlights casting long shadows on the pavement. For days, he couldn’t bring himself to return to work. He deleted all of Kavya’s emails, but his mind clung to the fragments of their conversations, replaying them endlessly.
Eventually, he resigned from the company.
Before leaving, he did something he hadn’t done in years—he wrote. It wasn’t a love letter, not exactly, but a message encoded into the encryption program he had been working on. A story about loneliness, betrayal, and the lies we tell ourselves when we’re afraid to be vulnerable.
The program was distributed widely, becoming a standard tool in the industry. Buried deep within its code was Ravi’s story, written in a language only a few would ever understand.
Narrator : The words he left behind weren’t for Kavya. They were for himself—a reminder that love, no matter how painful, demanded courage.