Angelina Franco Valencia and Niklesh Jain may have played their matches on the chess board here on earth, but their life’s match was made in heaven. How else does one explain Niklesh, a Hindi-speaking boy from Katni, Madhya Pradesh, meeting a Spanish-speaking Angela from Madelline, Colombia, during a chess tournament in Spain in 2017 and marrying each other the following year. Indeed, their love story transcends geographical boundaries, linguistic barriers and cultural differences.

Back as a trio

Niklesh went down on one knee in the middle of the 2018 Batumi Chess Olympiad, with players from 180-plus countries as witnesses and now, four years later, both are present at the ongoing 44th Chess Olympiad in  Mamallapuram, Tamil Nadu as with their tiny tot Shreshth. Niklesh and Angela are here not as players, but to cover the Chess Olympiad for Chessbase website. In 2017, Niklesh was playing on the Catalan circuit, a series of five tournaments spread across June and July in Spain.