After two wedding ceremonies at Graydon Hall, Bauvneet Sahsi and Jay Kumar took a party bus back to the Mississauga house where she had grown up. Her sisters and relatives blocked the entrance, negotiating with Kumar and making him play games before they would let him inside. Sahsi watched from upstairs through the banister, eating an ice cream cone her planner had brought her.
She had insisted on returning home for her doli rather than leaving from Graydon Hall, wanting enough time to say goodbye to the house where she had grown up. When Sahsi eventually stepped into a vintage Rolls-Royce with Kumar, she was leaving the only city she had called home for 30 years. New York and their first shared apartment waited on the other side of the wedding. “Nothing can prepare you for how it feels to leave home,” she says.
The wedding in Toronto marked the end of a relationship built largely between two cities. Sahsi and Kumar matched on Hinge after she expanded her location settings from Toronto to New York. Following several long FaceTime calls, Kumar travelled to meet her with a Google document containing three options for every meal and activity. They spent seven days together, and he booked his next visit before flying home. Over the next two years, Kumar took more than 50 flights to Toronto, usually staying for a week or two at a time.
They booked the wedding venue in February for a July wedding, leaving six months to organise five days of celebrations for as many as 500 guests. Sahsi was grieving her grandfather while managing her visa and preparing to move countries. Kumar was launching an investment firm and searching for their first apartment in New York. Approval on one came through 30 minutes before the Sikh wedding ceremony.
For many of their friends, this would be a first Indian wedding, and the couple wanted the food to offer a proper introduction to Punjabi hospitality. They attended several tastings and sent recipes and cooking instructions to the venue when dishes fell short. They also skipped the bridal party, disliking the idea of putting their friends in matching clothes or assigning them ceremonial roles, and kept the reception free of performances beyond their first dance.
Kumar’s celebrations began in upstate New York, where he had grown up. His jaggo at the Country Club at Otterkill allowed relatives and family friends who could not travel to Canada to join him. His brothers gave speeches that were, in Kumar’s estimation, the correct proportion of roast to tribute. An ice-cream truck waited outside, while a small bar tucked into one corner became the place where he kept slipping away with his brothers, cousins and closest friends to talk between dances.
Two weeks after confirming the wedding date, Sahsi and Kumar flew to India and settled their wardrobes in seven days. The clothes became a starting point for the colour and decor of each celebration. At the mehndi and jaggo in her parents’ backyard, she wore a pale-green tissue Banarasi lehenga by Anita Dongre as relatives from her mother’s and father’s sides answered each other in boliyaan. A mobile DJ and dhol followed the jaggo into the neighbourhood before everyone danced their way back to the garden.
