Pick up lines, more often than not, are meant to amuse—swaying somewhere between just-giving-a-compliment and trying-my-luck. But, in 1953, when India leg-spinner and Shivaji Park boy, Subhashchandra Pandharinath Gupte, a member of the first Indian team to tour the West Indies, bowled one such googly off the sports field, it had fallen flat. "May I be so bold to say that yours is the kind of face that I would like to see every morning at my breakfast table!" Gupte had asked Carol Goberdhan, a young Trinidadian, whom he met on the sidelines of an exhibition game that was being played at San Fernando, Trinidad. Carol, who was assisting her father—head of the organising committee of the event—"manoeuvring her way around the tables, while carefully balancing a tray of empty glasses", had been anything, but impressed. "Excuse me, are you speaking to me?" she had asked, pointedly.

While it would take an apology from Gupte for her to quickly melt, it also set the stage for a whirlwind romance, which has now been retold in a novella, Love Without Boundaries: The 49-year partnership of Subhash and Carol Gupte, written by the couple's daughter Carolyn Gupte.