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Virat connected his phone to the car's Bluetooth, the familiar thunk of the connection offering a small comfort in the vast, sterile quiet of the Heathrow departure drop-off zone. He had just watched his boyfriend, AB, disappear through the sliding glass doors, a solitary figure with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, and now the silence in the car felt too loud. He needed something lively, something pounding, to drown out the absurd, melodramatic urge to press his forehead against the steering wheel and cry like a heroine in a B-grade film.
During one of their IPL matches earlier this year, AB was hit by a brutal delivery to his right eye. The crack of the ball against bone was sickening, a sound Virat could still recall in quiet moments. The medics rushed in immediately, chaos broke out, but afterwards, they both exhaled. A close call. A scare. They believed it was the end of that problem.
A few weeks later, they were cuddled up on the sofa, watching a documentary about emperor penguins. AB had squinted at the screen. "It's a little blurry," he'd murmured, more to himself than to Virat. Virat had just pulled him closer, chalking it up to exhaustion from the last series. They'd switched off the television and gone to bed, the worry dissolving into the familiar warmth of each other.
That was the first lie AB told him, Virat would later realise. The omission. A few days later, colours appeared duller to AB, with the world bleeding into muted shades of grey and sepia. But he chose not to mention it. He knew Virat would have dropped everything — sponsorships, training, his own sanity — to organise a fleet of the world's finest doctors to descend upon London. So he stayed silent.
The truth finally shattered one ordinary afternoon. Virat was recounting a humorous story about a dropped catch in the nets, his hands flailing through the air as he spoke. AB had reached out to take his hand, a simple, grounding gesture, and missed. His fingers grazed Virat's wrist, then closed on empty air. Virat had stopped speaking, a confused smile playing on his lips, and watched as AB tried again, his hand trembling slightly as it finally found its mark. The realisation that followed — that the vision in his right retina was completely gone — unfolded in their bedroom later that night.
Virat held him, feeling the tremor in AB's shoulders as they both stared at the cold, clinical language of the search results on his laptop. What they didn't know was that AB had already traversed that bleak landscape of medical journals and forums in the dark hours of the night alone. He already knew the truth they were desperately trying to outrun: it was incurable.
So AB had woven a new, gentler truth. A specialist in Pretoria, he'd said. An experimental treatment, but promising. Virat had immediately begun searching for flights for two. It took everything AB had to persuade him to stay. "You'll be a nervous wreck," AB had said, forcing a small, fond smile. "You'll be pacing the waiting room so much you'll wear a hole in the floor. Let me do this. I'll be back before you can even miss me."
Except, he hadn't meant to do that.
He was planning to let Virat down gently because someone like Virat Kohli, full of fierce passion and radiant light, deserved someone whole: someone who could see him clearly with both eyes. Not a partner who, in his own mind, was already becoming a fraction of the man he once was. Virat didn't deserve a disabled man.
So there was Virat, in his car, completely unaware, scrolling through his gym playlist, his thumb hovering over a pulsating Punjabi track, when his phone vibrated against the dashboard mount. A single name lit up the screen: Biscotti ❤️. A smile touched his lips as he merged onto the motorway, the grey London sprawl unfolding around him. He jabbed the answer button.
"That was quick," he chirped, his voice light, filling the car's cabin. "You haven't even reached South Africa yet."
A pause. Then a soft, familiar clearing of the throat. Once. Twice.
The easy smile on Virat's face flickered. A cold knot of dread tightened in his stomach. He recognised that sound. It was the sound AB made before delivering news he knew would hurt.
"Biscotti," Virat said, his voice dropping and losing its playful lilt. He gripped the steering wheel tighter, causing his knuckles to whiten. "Is everything alright? Don't worry about the operation, okay? You're going to be fine…" He swallowed, a frantic energy building behind his ribs. "Did you forget anything here? I can — I can turn around, I'm not even that far—"
"Biscuit." AB's voice was calm and steady. It was the voice he used to soothe a panicking batsman during a chase, the same voice that had talked Virat through that nightmare of the 2016 IPL final. Now it was dismantling his life with the same calm precision. “I am not returning.”
It was a straightforward sentence. Four words. Yet they refused to be acknowledged.
"...What?" Virat breathed, the sound barely audible over the low hum of the engine.
He heard AB exhale, a shaky but controlled breath. "There's no operation. There never was. I lied. The eye… It's gone, Virat. It's not coming back. And I can't… I can't do this to you. I can't be half a person and ask you to stay."
"What are you talking about?" Virat's voice cracked, rising in pitch. The car's speed increased, and the scenery outside began to blur. "Biscotti, stop. Just — stop. Come back. We'll work this out. We'll find someone; there must be someone —"
"I've already looked," AB said, and there was a finality in his tone that was like a door slamming shut. "There's nothing. And I won't be your charity case. You deserve someone who can see you, Virat. All of you."
"I don't care about that!" Virat shouted, his voice bouncing off the car windows. A desperate, primal anger surged within him. "How dare you? How dare you decide what I deserve? Just turn the flight around, AB. Turn the fucking plane around, right now."
"The plane is about to take off," AB said softly, his voice heavy with a sorrow so profound it seemed to resonate through the speakers. "I'm sorry. I love you. That's why I have to do this."
“No," Virat pleaded, the anger fading into a raw, desperate panic. "AB, please. Don't do this. Please. I love you. I don't care about your eye, I just — I just need you. Please, Biscotti. Please, don't —"
"Goodbye, Virat."
The line went dead.
The silence that followed was an overwhelming void pressing in from all sides. The lively beats he had been craving were now just a distant memory. He gazed at the phone screen, the call duration frozen; a digital tombstone marking the life he had just moments before.
He tried to call back. Once. Twice. Three times. Each time, a cold, indifferent robotic voice informed him that the subscriber was unavailable. His hands trembled so violently that he could barely hold the phone.
A horn blared — a deafening, furious sound that jarred him from his stupor.
His head snapped up. The world suddenly sharpened into terrifying clarity: He was swerving. The grey concrete median was a breath away from his driver's-side door. On his other side, a lorry's massive grille filled his peripheral vision, its horn a sustained, angry blare.
He yanked the steering wheel. The car responded with a sickening lurch, tyres screeching in protest as it fishtailed across the lane. He overcorrected, the momentum forcing him against the seatbelt, until finally, mercifully, the car straightened out. He pulled onto the hard shoulder, the gravel clattering against the undercarriage before the car shuddered to a halt.
His heart fluttered wildly against his ribs, his knuckles whitened on the wheel, yet no matter how sharply he gasped, no air seemed to fill his lungs. He sat there, staring at the blur of taillights rushing past, feeling the tectonic plates of his entire existence shift and crack beneath him.
The man who kept his world intact was gone.
He couldn’t remember the rest of the drive home or the days afterwards, really. Time became a concept he only perceived in its absence: a series of obligations he performed on autopilot, his body a puppet with someone else's uncertain hands pulling the strings.
He trained because his schedule demanded it. He put on his kit and went through the motions at the nets, his bat feeling unfamiliar in his hands. The crack of the ball hitting the willow sounded muffled, as if he was hearing it underwater. His teammates' voices drifted to him through a thick fog. He nodded at the right moments, or so he believed. He hoped. He no longer trusted his own voice.
But numbness, he realised, was not a permanent state. It was a thin layer of ice over a river that remained deep and cold beneath, and eventually, the ice began to crack.
It started with the voicemails.
In the first week, he called AB's phone obsessively — dozens of times a day. He knew it was pointless. He knew the number had been disconnected, or the SIM card had been discarded in a bin at Johannesburg airport, or whatever final, surgical act AB had performed to sever the last tether between them. But he called anyway. He left voicemails ranging from desperate pleas to furious tirades to heartbreakingly mundane updates about his day.
"I found your white hoodie. The one you always wore. It still smells like you. Please call me back. Please."
"You're a coward. You know that? You're a fucking coward. You don't get to decide this for both of us."
“I saw a dog today that resembled that little one we saw in Cape Town. Remember? The one that followed us for three blocks? I wanted to tell you about it, but then I remembered I can't.”
He never got a reply. Eventually, even the robotic voice changed, informing him that the number was no longer in service. He threw his phone across the room. It hit the wall with a satisfying crack, the screen spider-webbing into a fractured mosaic. He stared at it, breathing heavily, and then the anger left him as quickly as it had come, leaving him hollow and trembling on the floor.
He picked up the pieces, literally, the shards of glass from the screen protector, and swept them into his palm. They cut into his skin, tiny pinpricks of pain that felt almost pleasant. Something tangible. Something he could control.
Then began the bargaining.
He stood before AB's wardrobe, the one they had never cleared out. He ran his fingers over the shirts, jackets, and neatly folded sweaters. He pulled one off the hanger — a soft, navy blue cashmere that AB used to wear on quiet days — and pressed it to his face. He inhaled deeply, desperately, chasing the ghost of a scent that faded more with each day.
"I'll do anything," he whispered into the fabric. "Anything. I'll give up cricket. I'll move to South Africa. I'll never complain about anything again. Just come back. Just let me fix this."
He slept with the white hoodie he found, wrapped around his pillow. He stopped washing it, recognising it was pathetic. He was aware AB would look at him with those soft, pitying eyes if he could see him now. But he couldn’t bring himself to care. This was the last version of AB he had: the traces of him woven into cotton and wool.
Virat tried anger again, because anger is easier than grief.
He hated AB for leaving. He despised him for making the decision for both of them, for judging that Virat's love wasn't strong enough to survive this. He resented him for the arrogance of it: I know what's best for you, Virat. You don't know your own heart.
But the anger always shifted into something else. Because he also understood AB. He recognised the quiet, stubborn dignity of the man. He knew how AB carried himself after every failure, every loss, never once asking for sympathy. He understood that for AB, the thought of being seen as broken, as someone to be pitied or cared for, was a fate worse than being alone.
And so the anger turned inward, because what kind of love was he offering if AB couldn't accept it? What did he do — or fail to do — that made AB believe he was so fragile, so conditional in his affections?
He spent an entire afternoon scrolling through old photos on his phone. He didn’t cry. He couldn’t. He simply scrolled. Their first trip together. AB laughing at a team dinner, his head thrown back, that wide, unguarded smile that Virat had fallen in love with. A selfie they'd taken in bed, both of them sleep-rumpled and tender, AB's lips pressed to Virat's temple. He lingered on that one for a long time.
His thumb hovered over the delete button. Perhaps if he erased the evidence, he could also erase the feeling. Perhaps he could carve AB out of his memory like removing a tumour and finally be rid of this constant, aching emptiness.
But he was unable to do it.
He shut the photo app and locked his phone. He lay back on the bed, gazing at the ceiling, and let the familiar weight of AB's hoodie settle over him like a shroud.
By the third week, he had established routines — quiet, unspoken acts of devotion that no one else would understand.
He made AB's coffee in the morning: a flat white with oat milk, just the way he liked it. He poured it into the mug AB always used, a silly one with a cartoon penguin on it that Virat bought as a joke. He placed it on the kitchen table opposite his own cup. He drank his coffee silently, pretending he was not waiting for AB to shuffle in, still half-asleep, and wrap his arms around him from behind.
He didn’t drink the flat white. He poured it down the sink once it cooled, but he made it again the following day. And the day after that.
He left AB's side of the bed unmade, sleeping curled up on his own side, facing the empty space, as if he might wake to find AB there.
Sometimes, in the hazy half-darkness of 3 AM, he forgot. He reached out, his fingers brushing the cold, empty sheets, and for a disorienting moment, he didn't understand where AB had gone. Then the memory came crashing back: the call, the motorway, the voice saying Goodbye, Virat — and he lay there, breath held, waiting for the wave of grief to pass over him.
It never truly faded. It merely withdrew, leaving him gasping on the shore, aware that another wave was approaching.
The GPS in his car became vital. He'd driven these London streets for years, knew the shortcuts, the coffee shops, the park where they'd walk hand in hand after practice. Now, he found himself at unfamiliar intersections, the world outside the windscreen a foreign land. He had to rely on the sterile, digital voice to guide him home because every familiar landmark was now a landmine: the café where AB always ordered a flat white, the corner where he'd lean in to kiss him at a red light.
Virat took different routes now, longer ones, just to avoid the ghosts.
Sleep was a myth he once believed in. He lay in their bed — his bed now, a vast, cold expanse of sheets that still faintly smelled of AB's cologne — and stared at the ceiling. The city's ambient light filtered through the curtains, casting pale, shifting shadows that danced across the empty space beside him. He counted the hours until dawn, until the first grey light of morning granted him permission to stop pretending he might drift off.
He used to love London. He cherished the energy, history, and the way the rain made the city feel intimate, like a secret they shared. Now, it was just a maze of grey buildings and indifferent faces. He walked through it like a spectre, unseen and unseeing. His phone was a graveyard of contacts. He scrolled through it sometimes, thumb hovering over names — friends, teammates, family — but the thought of forming words, of explaining, of hearing the pity in their voices, was a Herculean task he could not summon the strength for. The only number he wished to call was the one that never connected. He was surrounded by millions of people, yet he had never felt so utterly, devastatingly alone.
He no longer looked. The very thought was a sacrilege. His friends, with good intentions, suggested he "get out there," "meet new people." He offered a brittle, unconvincing smile and changed the subject. How could he explain that what he had was more than just love? It was the quiet mornings with coffee and a shared newspaper. It was the arguments over which IPL team had the better bowling attack, ending with AB laughing, his whole face crinkling in a way that made Virat's heart skip a beat. It was the way AB would trace patterns on his chest as he drifted off to sleep. It was the feeling of finally, truly being seen by someone.
You don't simply replace that. You don't even attempt it.
This was the strangest part: He felt the pressure building behind his eyes, a constant, aching dam threatening to break. He felt the sob lodged in his throat, a jagged, permanent stone he had to swallow with every breath. But the tears wouldn’t come. He thought maybe if they did, it would release something, grant him a moment of relief.
Yet he held himself back with a ferocity that terrified him. Crying would be an admission. It would mean AB is truly gone. It would mean this hollow, aching shell of a life is his new reality. So he clenched his jaw, stared at the wall, and let the numbness take over.
The weeks slipped into months. The seasons changed. London's grey gradually gave way to a pale, hesitant spring, then to summer, and Virat watched it all unfold from behind a glass wall, present but not involved.
He eventually stopped making the coffee. Not because he'd moved on, but because the ritual became too painful: the moment of pouring the cold liquid down the sink every morning felt too much like burying AB all over again. The mug sat in the cupboard now, untouched. He couldn’t bring himself to use it, but couldn’t bring himself to throw it away. So it remained there, a small ceramic monument to what he lost.
He still slept in the white hoodie. He'd given up on pretending he'd wash it. He'd given up on pretending about many things.
He had stopped waiting for the phone to ring. He had stopped checking his email for a message that never came. He had stopped searching for AB in crowds, stopped expecting to turn a corner and see him there, and stopped rehearsing what he would say if he ever got the chance.
He still hadn't cried. He wasn't sure if he even remembered how.
But somewhere along the way, the sharp edges of his grief had been softened. The wound hadn’t healed — he suspected it never would — but it had scarred over, a permanent ridge of tissue he carried with him, a part of his body now, as recognisable as the calluses on his palms from years of gripping a bat.
He loved AB. That was the truth he carried with him into every empty room, every sleepless night, and every morning he woke up and thought of it all over again. He loved AB with the same ferocity and completeness as he did the day he dropped him off at Heathrow. That love hadn’t faded. It hadn’t turned into anger, bitterness, or resignation. It simply existed, a constant, low hum beneath everything he did, everything he was.
He had stopped trying to fight it. He no longer attempted to understand why AB left, what he could have done differently, or how a love this deep could end with a three-minute phone call and a disconnected SIM card.
Some questions had no answers. Some wounds would never heal. Some people walked into your life, reshaped the entire structure of your heart, and then walked out again, leaving behind their mark — an absence that is also a presence — a ghost haunting every corner of the life you once shared.
He would carry this. He would carry the weight of AB's love and AB's absence, both, for the rest of his life. He would carry it to practice, to matches, to the empty flat that still sometimes smelled like the ghost of cologne. He would carry it through the indifferent streets of a city that no longer felt like home. He would carry it through sleepless nights, silent mornings, and the long, empty hours in between.
He would not seek another person. He would not attempt to fill the gap AB left, because some gaps were not meant to be filled. They were meant to be carried.
And so he carried it. The love. The loss. The absence. The presence. He bore it like a second skin, like a scar, like the quiet, steady beat of his own heart: still going, still stubbornly alive, still filled with a love that had nowhere to go.
He didn’t know if AB ever thought of him. He didn’t know if AB was happy, wherever he was, in whatever life he had built for himself. He didn’t know if the eye had ever worsened, or if AB found a way to live with it, or if he ever regretted the decision he made on that plane.
Virat would never understand, and he had made peace with that, not exactly through acceptance but through exhaustion. Through the slow, grinding realisation that some battles couldn’t be won, only endured.
He would survive this, not because he wanted to, but because the world didn’t pause for a broken heart. The fixtures still turned up, the crowds still cheered, and the sun kept rising over a city that had forgotten him as thoroughly as he had forgotten its streets.
And somewhere, in the quiet space between one breath and the next, he allowed himself to feel it. Not the grief. Not the anger. Just the love. Pure and unchanged and utterly useless, like a compass pointing towards a destination he could no longer reach.
He thought of AB's laugh, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners, and how he said Virat's name softly and warmly, lingering over the vowel as if he was savouring it.
I will love you until I forget what love is. And maybe even after that.
He turned off the light, pulled the white hoodie more tightly, and in the darkness of the room they once shared, Virat closed his eyes and waited for sleep that may or may not arrive, carrying his love like a stone in his chest. Heavy, permanent, and his.
Always his.