Rasika, 29, and Varad, 27, met while working in rural India. When Rasika found out she had cancer, Varad gave her the motivation she needed to survive
A month after arriving he met Rasika, a physiotherapist from Nagpur, Maharashtra, who’d also come to work for the NGO. “I had been studying in Mumbai but wanted to better understand rehabilitation in rural areas of India,” she says. “While I was being shown around, we went to see the badminton court – which was some mud ground with a net – and that’s where I saw Varad for the first time.”
Rasika liked the fact he introduced himself and found him “outgoing”. “I really enjoyed spending time with him from the very first day, and I was constantly waiting for him to approach me,” she says. As they got to know each other, it soon became clear there was something more than friendship between them. “I was not patient enough to go with the flow, so I went up to him one day and just told him I had romantic feelings for him,” she says. Varad felt the same way.
Before departing for the UK, Varad visited Rasika and said he wanted them to be together. “He told me, ‘I am here with you for ever and we will go through this together.’ That was the biggest motivation for me to do every possible thing I could to survive,” she says. The three-month curative treatment, which included chemotherapy and surgery, was successful, and she began to make a swift recovery. Varad admits he was terrified he might lose her.