Salima Ladhani and Khalil Chagani began their wedding weekend with a three-minute walk from home. Ladhani stepped onto Toronto’s Ossington Avenue in an olive Seema Gujral lehenga covered in mirror work, its hammered-metal blouse giving her the appearance of a very festive suit of armour. “I liked that I would essentially be a walking disco ball,” she says. Beside her, Chagani wore a dark brown Canali suit bought during the week of the wedding and collected from the tailor the previous afternoon.
Photographer Koko King followed them through the streets to HomeCourt on Ossington, where the couple had combined their mehndi, mandvo and sangeet into a single evening. The lehenga caught the light against exposed brick and graffiti-covered walls. Inside, their friend Ali Rajan played the Afghan rubab as fresh naan came from a tandoor installed at the venue. Their relatives had prepared cones of suwa dhana bearing the couple’s initials.
Ladhani, a management consultant who studied music at university and still sings in a rock band with friends from INSEAD, had wanted the celebrations to feel connected to the life she and Chagani already led. They had recently settled in a house just off Ossington after several years of dating between cities.
Ladhani and Chagani had known each other by sight since university, when he was in his fourth year and she was in her first. Nearly a decade later, they recognised each other at an event in Lisbon. Looking back, they discovered several occasions when their paths had nearly crossed, including contributing to the same casebook on global development agencies. The pandemic finally placed them on the same volunteer project for the Aga Khan Foundation, with their international team meeting over Zoom every Sunday.
When Chagani missed a group call, he would request a separate catch-up with Ladhani. “I never knew whether he intentionally missed the meetings, but loved those Zoom dates nonetheless,” she says. After an early conversation, she called her mother. “I don’t know if this guy is single, but that’s the kind of guy I want to be with.”
Chagani flew from Vancouver to Toronto for their first date while Ladhani was visiting from Amsterdam. He began taking extended “coffee breaks” to call her before she went to sleep, nine time zones away. They officially began dating after she returned to Toronto, trading the Amsterdam–Vancouver distance for weekends between Toronto and Vancouver.
After years of long-distance dating, Chagani proposed beneath an ancient olive tree in Greece. The seaside photoshoot and clifftop dinners on Chagani’s itinerary led Ladhani to suspect that an engagement was imminent. He chose an earlier picnic in an olive grove, though the plan nearly collapsed that morning when Ladhani woke with a scratchy throat and suggested that he “go ahead on the picnic without her”–he persuaded her to join him.
Their years of long-distance dating ended when they moved into their Toronto home. The couple traced that history on the canvas tote bags given to guests at their wedding in Toronto. An illustration followed them from Vancouver and Amsterdam to the neighbourhood they now shared, with small references to their lives hidden throughout. Inside were spicy cassava chips and ganthia, alongside coconut snowball cookies made by family.
