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, Siddharth 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.
Siddharth 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 Aditi Rao 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.”
That such friskiness forms the basis of their chemistry is also evident to everyone on the Vogue India set. When she appears decked up in hand-painted Anita Dongre lehengas and polki sets from Indriya, Aditya Birla Jewellery, he compliments her loudly. They are like best friends, cheering and teasing each other. Siddharth looking at her with great tenderness in his eyes, making her laugh. Hydari chiding him gently: “Stand straight, Siddhu”. Him replying cheekily: “I’ll always be straight.”
But as he joins us over a Zoom call from Chennai a few days later, while Hydari and I nosh on Bengali mithai at her Bandra home, he is pensive. “You grow up with many hopes and dreams for how things will be and over time, you grow as a person, and you begin to see your shortcomings,” says Siddharth. “And then to find my fully formed self being loved by her... well, it was very reassuring that it was possible to find love like this.”
Siddharth feels that being a Mani Ratnam protégé might have tipped things in his favour, as far as Hydari was concerned. After all, both of them signed up for a life in the movies after being influenced by his films (before he was an actor, he was assisting Ratnam on set; she has wanted to be an actor since age 10 when she first set eyes on the music video of ‘Kehna Hi Kya’from Ratnam’s Bombay). When Siddharth told Ratnam about his relationship with Hydari, his response was simple: “This is the best thing that has happened to you.” Hydari, though, is certain that they would have been in love even if they’d met each other in their teens. “I’ve not been in too many relationships because when I see someone, I instantly know if this is my person,” she says. “When I met Siddhu, that’s what I felt and had no doubt about it. Of course, there is a process of growing together in a relationship but I had none of that going on in my mind when I met him, it was all about that moment.”
After that first meeting, they started dating but had to find a way of being together because they approach public spaces differently: Hydari is comfortable with jostling crowds, having lived in Mumbai since 2011. Siddharth, on the other hand, is shy and needs a lot of coaxing to step out. “I’ve had my journey with understanding fame over the past 20 years but I still try to go out without a security detail,” he says. “Now, when we’re together and there are cameras all around us, it makes no sense to me, purely because neither of us is the kind who can live in our ivory tower and not go out in the world.”
Siddharth acknowledges that Hydari makes him want to step out of his comfort zone, and puts him at ease with sharing his inner thoughts and fears. If it weren’t for her, his 1.6 million followers on Instagram (and her 12 million) might’ve never seen him move to the Tamil hit ‘Tum Tum’. “I find dancing in front of an audience very harrowing,” says Hydari. “You like dancing,” retorts Siddharth. “Yeah okay, but it feels more intimate in front of a camera,” she blushes.
Where they both find the greatest common ground is travelling, setting off on unexplored trails and happily getting lost. In May this year, after the Cannes Film Festival, they went to Paris for a week where they got lost in the streets, walked aimlessly into museums, swigged coffee in random cafés, and treated themselves at the Parc Asterix in Plailly because Siddharth is an Asterix nerd.
Then there was Christmas in London last year, surrounded by pretty lights and endless canapés. “I’ve always wanted to do London at Christmas and Sid made it happen,” says Hydari. “His sister and brother-in-law live in Notting Hill and were in India at that time, so we lived there and quite literally played house-house.”
The quieter, more private moments are in Siddharth’s studio in Chennai, where Siddharth does most of the cooking but all the directions come from Hydari in the form of “vague yet theatrical hand movements denoting the number of spices, how the ladle should move, the way two types of flour should be mixed.”
He also makes music that will never see the commercial light of the day—because “it’s art for art’s sake.” “He will make a tune and I will sing over it for a melody,” says Hydari, adding that she has also carved out a small nook dedicated to these music-making sessions in her Mumbai home. “But I want to perfect it and he’ll say, all exasperated, it’s just a scratch and not the greatest hit of all time.”
When they are together, there is a natural ease in the way they complete each other’s sentences, in the way they are both attentive to the smallest shifts of emotions. They make long-distance relationships seem effortless. “I wouldn’t even call it a long-distance relationship because our work takes us to different places,” she says. “Siddharth has always said that we are lucky to have three homes: Hyderabad, Chennai and Mumbai.”
When Hydari was in Delhi for the India Couture Week in July this year, Siddharth surprised her by catching a flight at three in the morning on the same day as his shoot wrapped up—and this kind of thing is more of a norm rather than an exception in their universe. “There is always that possibility, something to look forward to, a plan that might be made, or a sudden holiday that might pop up,” Hydari says. “Either of us will take a flight to whatever city we are in, so rather than think of what isn’t, we’d rather think of what is and savour the present. After all, to not be bound by regimented routines is part of the artist’s life and we make it work.”
The spontaneity might never end but this long-distance relationship, or at least their version of it, is likely to. Hydari and Siddharth are preparing to get married later this year—months after their March engagement ceremony, which was mistakenly reported as a wedding. Will the actual celebrations take place in a resort in Rajasthan? A quaint place that honours their roots? Or, will it be a destination wedding replete with cruises and islands lapped by azure waters? While it will be a special day, uniquely tailored to who they are, retaining the playfulness that colours their relationship, what Hydari can reveal at this point is that “the wedding will be centred around a 400-year-old temple in Wanaparthy that is of significance to my family”.
During a pause in the conversation, I share a reel with them of an elderly Japanese couple crossing a road in the rain, huddled under the same umbrella, all sweet and tender. A super on the reel reads: Can you imagine how many times they had to forgive each other to be here? “Can we replace the word ‘forgiveness’ in that reel with something that does not sound as crime-and-punishment?” laughs Siddharth. “The way I look at it: ‘Can you imagine how many times they had to understand each other to be here?’ With others, I can forget but not forgive. With Aditi, I have neither of those options on the table. It’s just understanding and being understood.”
Head of Editorial Content: Rochelle Pinto
Photographer: Vansh Virmani
Stylist: Ruhani Singh
Aditi’s Hair and Makeup Artist: Elton Fernandez/ Inega
Siddharth’s Hair Stylist: Raaj Gupta
Siddharth’s Makeup Artist: Arun Indulkar
Editorial Associate: Kalyani Adhav
Consulting Art Director: Nandini Shukla
Consulting Bookings Editor: Aangi Nahta
Entertainment Director: Megha Mehta
Sr. Entertainment Editor (Consultant): Rebecca Gonsalves
Fashion Assistant: Khushi Bhatia
Production: Imran Khatri Productions
This story appears in Vogue India’s Wedding Book alongside the September-October 2024 issue. Subscribe here
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