When Meghana Boojala’s grandmother married in 1970, she wore an antique gold-and-purple silk sari. Fifty-six years later, she was arranging the pleats of that same sari on her granddaughter for her pellikuthuru, a Telugu pre-wedding ceremony. The fabric had grown fragile over the decades, with its threads beginning to disintegrate, but designer Shravan Kummar had carefully restored it for the occasion. Boojala wore it with a contrasting hot-pink blouse, an antique-finish gold-and-ruby necklace inspired by classical South Indian dance jewellery and a floral brooch belonging to her great-grandmother.
The moment brought together much of what Boojala had wanted for her wedding to Pratik Kunapuli. Both had grown up in Indian-American households where music and traditions were integral to family life. Boojala, a finance professional raised outside Washington, DC, was introduced to Hindu mythology through bedtime stories told by her grandfather, while her mother, Deepika, fostered an early appreciation for Indian handlooms. Kunapuli, a machine learning engineer who grew up near Philadelphia, played the violin and came from a family of classical singers.
The couple met in New York in January 2022, where Kunapuli planned a first date that began at a Banksy exhibition and continued over Italian food before ending with drinks at Bathtub Gin. Within weeks, they were navigating a relationship between New York and Philadelphia, where Kunapuli was completing his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. Train journeys became a regular fixture of their relationship. Nearly four years later, he proposed at 620 Loft & Garden at Rockefeller Center, overlooking the city where their journey together had begun.
For their September 2026 wedding, the couple chose to celebrate across Virginia, Maryland and Washington, DC, where Boojala had spent much of her childhood visiting museums. They wanted their Telugu wedding rituals to retain their traditional form, even as the celebrations incorporated the music and experiences that had defined their lives in America. “Forget fusion. We wanted the wedding to be unapologetically us,” says Boojala.
Boojala and her mother spent almost a year working closely with Kummar on the bridal wardrobe, drawing inspiration from Indian paintings, temple sculptures and the family’s own jewellery collection. The designer also created Kunapuli’s wedding attire and Deepika’s saris, and contributed traditional textiles to the ceremony. Deepika had been collecting handwoven saris from artisans across India for her daughter’s trousseau for the better part of a decade, well before there was a wedding to plan. Each represented a different weaving tradition, reflecting an appreciation for Indian craftsmanship she had passed down to her daughter.
The celebrations began on September 2 with a haldi in the backyard of Boojala’s childhood home in Virginia. She wore a bright red floral Torani sari with turmeric-yellow fringe, her hair decorated with jasmine. The blessing ceremony quickly became an elaborate water fight when her brother and cousins produced hundreds of water balloons and water guns. Boojala remembers running barefoot across the grass as her relatives chased her with buckets of water.
For the mehendi and bridal shower that evening, she wore a seafoam organza sari embellished with iridescent sequins, styled by Kummar with a turquoise Kanchipuram silk corset blouse and a pallu wrapped around her neck like a scarf. The outfit had been an eleventh-hour decision. Boojala had purchased a sky-blue Banarasi lehenga from the designer eight years earlier and saved it for an occasion worthy of wearing it. When she showed it to him a week before the wedding, he had other plans. “He barely looked at it before saying, ‘No, I have a different idea,'” she recalls. He produced the organza sari from a trunk of clothes, and it fit her without a single alteration.
