On the morning of her wedding, Karmaa Dhingra walked beneath a pearl phoolon ki chaadar led by her brothers, wearing a Kresha Bajaj fishtail lehenga that carried a record of how she and Shaurya Dhir had reached this day. Their wedding date, his name and her parents’ names in Gurmukhi were embroidered alongside the island of Sicily, where the couple decided they wanted to marry, and a landscape of mountains and horses from their proposal in Kazakhstan. At the edge of her pearl veil was another detail, her late dog Max’s name and tiny paw prints. “To symbolically have him walk with me down the aisle,” she explains.
Max passed away on the evening of the couple’s roka, after 17 years with Dhingra’s family. The dinner had been planned as a casual meeting between their parents, until Dhir’s family asked for her hand in marriage. “It almost felt as if the roka came as a divine intervention to soothe the pain of the loss,” she says. “Almost as if he held on till he knew we’d be okay.”
The couple had first connected on Instagram in 2019 through Dhir’s best friend Aryamman, whom Dhingra knew separately. When Aryamman offered to share her number, she declined and suggested that Dhir follow her on Instagram instead. His opening message read, “Ary is such a clown. He claims to be the best man at our wedding.” The prediction was preserved on a large scroll at the wedding, where Aryamman fulfilled it six years later.
Their initial conversation led nowhere, although they continued exchanging occasional messages. Last summer, a discussion about politics became a catch-up, during which Dhingra mentioned that she practised Transcendental Meditation. Dhir asked her to teach him, and they met at 7am for a meditation session. Rock climbing, dinner dates and meetings almost every day followed. After that first morning, both privately told their friends that the relationship felt significant.
They spoke about marriage from the beginning, but a road trip through Sicily gave them the final assurance they needed. Their parents met after they came home. Dhir proposed in Almaty, having told Dhingra to pack for horse riding and hiking so she would have little reason to question the itinerary. After riding to a mountaintop overlooking the valley and its snow-capped peaks, she dismounted and found him waiting with a ring he had designed closely with the jeweller. “My construction engineering degree came in handy,” he joked.
They planned the wedding in under three months. Dhingra had always wanted to marry at her parents’ home in New Delhi, where leaving for her husband’s house after the ceremony held particular significance for her. Dhir, who had spent much of his childhood hiking in Manali, pictured part of the wedding in the mountains. Their compromise became a series of celebrations in both family homes, followed by two days at ITC Hamsa in Manali with 100 friends.
The first gathering took place on April 5 at Dhingra’s parents’ home, where the family’s Guru Granth Sahib had been kept for almost 30 years. After the wedding date was decided in December, her father asked the bhaiji who performed seva at their home to begin reading the scripture so it would be finished in time for the kirtan. Twenty of the couple’s friends joined close family for the shabads and ardaas, after which Dhingra’s relatives performed the sagan tika for Dhir.
