How Indian couples are waiting for their dream wedding to come true amid the pandemic

Couples have been waiting a year to get married, and for some, it looks like there’s another year to sit it out. The Indian shaadi dream is too big to compromise—even in a pandemic

A traumatic end to a dreamy celebration—that’s how 26-year-old Nikhil Chanwani and his bride Alisha Darara will remember their roka ceremony from December 12 last year. Just two days before the function, Chanwani had planned a romantic proposal for his fashion designer girlfriend. The roka, which saw a slim guest list of hundred-odd members from their otherwise, large Sindhi families, was clubbed with a cocktail celebration at a fancy venue. Everything had been perfect, except that five days later, after returning from work, when Chanwani had his first bite of food, he couldn’t taste it. “I immediately locked myself in a room,” he recalls. A day earlier, his father had already begun showing symptoms, coughing incessantly.

The next day, Chanwani tested positive. Soon after, his parents, sister, and her in-laws took the COVID-19 test. Nobody had been spared. “Our worst nightmare had come true.” In the days that followed, Chanwani reached out to all the guests who’d shown up for the celebration, asking them to quarantine. “Every few days, we’d get a call saying someone had started showing symptoms. Even those who didn’t attend the roka had contracted it from another relative.” In a matter of two weeks, nearly 40 per cent of the guests had picked up the infection. At Lilavati Hospital in Bandra, seven of Chanwani’s relatives were admitted, including his father, whose condition was getting worse. Life had become a blur. Quarantined in his room, thoughts raced through his mind, especially the fear of someone succumbing to the disease. “I wouldn’t have ever forgiven myself if that had happened.”

Gopi Vaid, fashion designer 

Fortunately in January, things started looking up, and people were beginning to get better. The couple now had to broach the topic of the upcoming wedding, scheduled for June 24 at the Fairmont Jaipur, a luxury palace hotel, where the two wanted to have their big, fat Sindhi wedding. What they didn’t see coming, however, was the opposition from friends and family. “Many of them said they were backing out. It’s natural. Nobody wanted to relive that moment.” 

With barely three months left, Chanwani is nowhere close to starting preparations. He has paid 25 per cent of the total booking amount. “Our families have had many meetings to decide what to do next, and while both Alisha and I are hell-bent on going ahead because this is something we’ve been planning for over a year, they feel a small celebration in Mumbai would be safer. I could also lose out on the booking fee.” If push comes to shove, Chanwani will postpone the wedding. “But what’s the guarantee that the pandemic will go away soon?” he wonders. 

Kurla resident Anish Sean Shetty, 26, is set to marry his girlfriend of 10 years, Flossie Monteiro, in April. The couple had originally planned to get married on November 21 last year, and had even sent ‘Save the Date’ e-cards to family and friends. They are disappointed about having a small celebration now, but feel there is no point waiting. Pic/Sameer Markande

This tumult is being experienced by most soon-to-marry couples. While many settled for an intimate function or Zoom wedding in pandemic-ridden 2020, the ones who decided to wait it out another year in the hope that the infections would taper off by then, are feeling the heat. With cases in Maharashtra, especially Mumbai, sky-rocketing again, and a new cap of 50 people on the guest list, families who had just begun to heave a sigh of relief, are back to experiencing pre-wedding gloom.
“Postponing the wedding will just be too exhausting,” feels Kurla resident Anish Sean Shetty, 26, who is marrying his girlfriend of 10 years, Flossie Monteiro, in April.  The young couple has moved their wedding date once already—it was originally scheduled for November 21 last year. “On a personal note, we’ve been dreaming of this for quite some time. When you are in a relationship for this long, your wedding takes on a whole new meaning. Most of our relatives and friends are abroad, and were not able to make it for the function.” Shetty, however, didn’t give up hope until September, when the cases shot up overnight, with an average of 1,500 cases per day in the city. “I realised then that it was not safe to have a celebration. We cancelled and put the wedding on hold indefinitely.” Two months later, when Mumbai started opening up, they felt it was a good time to plan again. “We were still going to keep it small, inviting only 250 guests, and send the rest an apology note,” he adds. Only last week, Shetty had ordered 100 wedding cards from Charni Road. “And, now we are told that only 50 guests can make it.” Waiting again, doesn’t make sense. The couple has  made peace with the reality. 

Mumbai-based events manager Rishabh Agrawal, who is marrying Vanya Chandel from Kanpur, says he’s didn’t want to miss out on the rituals and family bonding that come with a wedding. “After all, it’s an once-in-a-lifetime affair. This is why we waited out till April. We were hoping the rules would relax by then. We have decided to go ahead anyway, because a delayed wedding can take up a lot of mental space.”

Preethica Furtado says the reason she rescheduled her wedding by a year is because the reception venue in Mangaluru was getting a lot of booking queries. Her fiancé, Clayton Serao, is the only son, and his family wants to have a joyous celebration

A recent report by The Knot, an American online wedding planning platform, which highlighted the findings of 7,600 couples originally set to be married last year, revealed that nearly 47 per cent had postponed their wedding reception to a later date. 

Of these, 32 per cent had legally tied the knot last year, while 15 per cent decided to postpone the marriage altogether—the majority setting sites on a date this year.

Toronto-based Cornelia Gonsalves, 26 and her seaman fiancé, Enzo Elden Hilary D’Silva, have postponed their wedding to December this year, as D’Silva is still stuck at sea

Mehak Sagar, cofounder of WedMeGood, an Indian wedding planning app, says that a similar trend is being seen in India as well. In a telephonic interview, Sagar said that nearly 70 per cent of those who logged into their app had postponed their wedding, of which 30 per cent have chosen to have celebrations in the latter half of this year, or the next. 

Toronto-based Cornelia Gonsalves, 26 and her seaman fiancé, Enzo Elden Hilary D’Silva, were to be married two days after Christmas, on December 27, in Mumbai last year. But with D’Silva still stuck at sea, and Gonsalves and her family unable to fly to Mumbai to begin preparations, the duo was forced to wait it out. “We kept changing dates again and again. We have finally settled on October. While the initial plan was to have 500 guests, we are already sensing that we may have to narrow down to half. I am okay with that, as long as we get to celebrate it with close family, at least.” 

Siddhika Poddar and her soon-to-be groom Nirav Sancheti have moved their wedding to January 2022. The new venue is a luxury space in Goa, where the couple say they can accommodate their expanding guest list if needed

For some, the wait for a grand celebration, has come at a heavy price. Mangaluru-based Preethica Furtado, 27, was to be married in December last year. The wedding had been planned a year earlier, when her partner Clayton Serao, 29, flew down from Kuwait, where he works. By January last year, they had booked everything from the church to the reception venue, makeup artiste, emcee and DJ, paying a fat advance, none of which was going to be reimbursed. The guest list was touching close to 700 people. “We gave ourselves time till July, before we could decide what to do next.  By then, cases began hitting 80,000 a day.” While they knew some who had gone ahead with the plan, it wasn’t a risk they wanted to take, says Furtado. Her father, who was suffering from a health complication, suggested they get married soon. “But, my fiancé is the only son, and his parents also wished to have a decent, if not huge, wedding. We reluctantly decided to push the wedding by a few months, so that everyone would be happy.” They were finalising dates for the early half of 2021, when in November, Furtado’s dad passed away. The couple has now decided to get married in December. But uncertainty over whether it will happen continues, as Kuwait follows very strict lockdowns, says Furtado. “If cases rise, the borders and airport will be sealed again, and it would be difficult for Clayton to come on time. I can only hope that everything goes smoothly, and the vaccination drive brings down the numbers.”

Chryselle Rodrigues

There are some couples who’ve consciously chosen to keep their weddings opulent even if the guests are fewer, says Ambika Gupta, wedding designer and planner, who is the force behind The A-Cube Project. “While there is a category of couples with small budgets, who are using the pandemic to justify low-key celebrations, there are those who’ve spent lavishly, but called fewer guests and followed all safety norms. So, they’ve gone all out on décor, food, trousseau, and off-beat venues,” says Gupta, who recently helmed actor Kajal Aggarwal’s wedding to Gautam Kitchlu. Wedding photographer Meghaa R Israni is one of them. She runs Israni Photography and Films, and has been part of the wedding industry for nine years. Israni and her fiancé decided to get married in March, as norms had been relaxed. The couple has booked a swanky five-star hotel in the suburbs, and the wedding was expected to be a week-long affair. Except that now instead of the 150-odd guests they were planning to invite, they will have to pare it down to 50. The first thought that came to her mind was, “Why me?” “I have done over 600 weddings till now, and when it’s time for my own, I would have obviously loved for things to go my way. We are not even allowed a baraat. I am trying to keep my spirts up.” What Israni is doing is streamlining her guest list in a way that she has about 50 different people attending each ceremony. That way, she feels, nobody will miss out.

Mehak Sagar, Ambika Gupta, Meghaa R Israni and Darshan Shroff

For Gupta, the shaadi season has begun in full swing, as clients who had postponed their wedding last year, have started going ahead with their plans. “What we are, however, noticing is a lot of last-minute bookings. It’s one of the biggest changes we are seeing now. Initially, we’d be booked at least four to six months in advance, but now most of the accounts are coming in our lap one-and-a-half months before,” says Gupta, adding, “That’s because the rules and regulations keep changing, and there is always this fear that there could be another lockdown soon. A recce for a venue takes about a month, but now you don’t have the luxury of time.” Though couples and their families have settled for off-beat domestic destinations over the popular international ones, Darshan Shroff, co-founder and partner at wedding planning company Momente Weddings, says handling the surplus bookings are becoming tough. “For six months there was a lull, and suddenly, there’s a lot of work, because of the postponements. While it has been a challenge, we are getting a grip of the situation,” he says.  

Aashna Saran

Constant rescheduling does not make it any easy for those in the business. Aashna Saran runs Aash Studio, a wedding design company, which recently did the decor for actress Dia Mirza and Vaibhav Rekhi’s intimate and sustainable wedding. “Even for weddings scheduled in April and May this year, we are 
seeing clients panicking already. 

So, there is this constant guessing—should we go ahead and prepare the décor, or if we should buy the raw material, or just hold on for now?”

Nikhil Chanwani and his to-be bride Alisha Darara’s roka ceremony on December 12, 2020, went awry after 40 of their 100-odd guests contracted COVID-19. Chanwani’s father and a few relatives were admitted to Lilavati Hospital. The family is now unsure of going ahead with the wedding at the Fairmont Jaipur as planned

For trousseau designers, this can be equally disorienting, says fashion designer Gopi Vaid, who designs dresses specifically for pre-wedding functions. “When a client wants an outfit within 10 to 15 days, we have actually bent backwards for them. Only last week, we got a lehenga ready in just four days. That meant working through the night. Fortunately, my workers are all back, so we are managing to meet the demand,” says Vaid. 

Malad-based Chryselle Rodrigues of Chrys Creation, does wedding gifts, as well as church décor, and favors, which comprise the bouquets for the bride and her maids, corsages and groom boutonnieres. Earlier this week on Instagram, Rodrigues mentioned how she was overwhelmed with orders. She is already booked out for the next few months, and is sensing a very busy December. “The quantity of orders has reduced drastically, though,” she says. “The clients have given an advance for 100 to 200 items, and suddenly because of the new restrictions, they are requesting it to be brought down to 30 to 50 orders. The problem is that the costs for these items shoot up, if not made in bulk, as raw material is expensive. But, how can I explain that?”

Mumbai-based events manager Rishabh Agrawal and Vanya Chandel are getting married this April. They have come to terms with having an intimate wedding

Israni, on the other hand, has brought down her photography rates by 25 per cent. “The scale of weddings has reduced, and this means that where a client was spending R2,500 per plate for 1,000 guests, they are now spending nearly Rs 4,000 for 100 guests, because banquet hall charges haven’t gone down. So, smaller gatherings have become more expensive. In all of this, I don’t see how I can justify charging a huge fee.” 
 
Sagar of WedMeGood says for a wedding platform like theirs, being over-booked is actually a “good problem to have”, because they have around 60,000 vendors listed from across the country, and that means there will be work for everyone. “But closer to November and December, when many would actually decide to get married, in the hope that they can have a big wedding, a scenario that we foresee happening is the [popular] vendors getting over-booked. There are only that many days in a month, and since many Hindu weddings are based on mahurats, the number of auspicious days are few and far between,” she says. “This is the reason why we are encouraging people to have weddings in the off season, or it’s going to be difficult for the vendors to accommodate requests.”

Furtado says the reason she closed in on December 18 this year was because the reception venue in Mangaluru was getting a lot of queries. Despite booking a year ago, she had already lost out on the emcee for her roce, a pre-wedding function among Goan and Mangalorean Catholics, and she didn’t want to take more chances.

Not everyone, however, is willing to give up on their larger-than-life, fairytale wedding plans, just yet. Thane resident Siddhika Poddar and her soon-to-be groom Nirav Sancheti were to be married in Rajasthan last year, but have now moved the date to January 2022. The pandemic, Poddar believes, is a hurdle that will pass soon, and won’t put a dampener on celebrations. “Marriage in India is not just about the couples, but also about their families. Weddings are a way for parents to invite their social circle. I’ve always dreamt of having a beautiful Indian wedding—kind of Bollywood style,” says the marketing professional. Though, she wanted to have a quintessential Udaipur wedding, with a palatial backdrop of the Aravali hills, none of the hotels there were ready to accommodate their expanding guest list. The new venue is a luxury space in Goa, and Poddar says, she is just as excited about it. “The pandemic has given us the opportunity to live our relationship differently and experience love from a distance. A part of us wants to settle sooner…,” she says. But, there is the other part that is still holding on to a dream.

30%
Number of clients who’ve chosen to push their weddings to later this year or 2022, according to Indian wedding planning app, WedMeGood

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