La La Land

They complete each other’s sentences, make music together and get lost on the streets of Paris—this is the love story of Aditi Rao Hydari and Siddharth.

- ARMAN KHAN

Styled by RUHANI SINGH. Photographed by VANSH VIRMANI

For over a year, Aditi Rao Hydari and Siddharth shared a running joke. He often got down on his knees, taking the classic proposal stance. But, like a master of misdirection, he’d fiddle with his shoelaces instead. Hydari found this hilarious. So, it was really a boy-who-cried-wolf situation when it actually happened.

“I was closest to my nani, who passed away a few years ago,” Hydari says. “She started a school in Hyderabad. One day, Siddarth asked me if he could see it, knowing full well how close I had been to her.” So earlier this March, they travelled there together.

Siddarth wanted to get to the exact location where she’d spent time as a child, a floor above the nursery section. And then: “He got down on his knee and I asked him, ‘Now what have you lost? Whose shoelaces are open?’ He kept saying, ‘Addu, listen to me’. And then he proposed. He said he wanted to bring me to my favourite childhood place, one with my grandmother’s blessings.”

It’s always been like this with Hydari and Siddharth—innocently playful—right from that February day on which they met on the sets of the Telugu film Maha Samudram, back in 2021. “He walked in and said, ‘Hello, beautiful girl’. Usually, when someone says something like this, it does not work. But he was being genuine. By the end of the day, he had me and pretty much everyone on the set in splits. He also ensured that my team and I had ghee idlis whipped up by his cook every day for the rest of the shoot.”