What changed was not that Rao had reached the professional point he had been waiting for. He stopped believing everything had to happen in a particular order.
The proposal, fittingly, returned them to an airport on New Year’s Day. Rao was dropping Ramesh off at Bengaluru airport. In the cab, she asked what he was most looking forward to in the year ahead. Half asleep, he answered, “You, Sushi.”
At the terminal, he talked about their life together, then looked at her hands and said, “So, I’ll take this ring off…” Ramesh realised what he was about to do, and Rao got down on one knee in T2 with no flowers or elaborate setup—only a ring in his pocket and a speech he barely remembers. He even asked whether he should get down on his right or left knee.
“Oh my God, is this you giving the speech?” Ramesh laughed. When he finally proposed, she dropped to her knees too. They stayed there laughing, hugging and saying yes.
Six months later, they married at Sumatra. During an internship in Sri Lanka, Ramesh had visited Geoffrey Bawa’s work, including Lunuganga, and had become drawn to architecture that allowed landscape and building to exist almost as one. She had evoked that sensibility while designing Sumatra as a wedding venue, drawing on tropical modernism and subtle Balinese influences.
“I had always wanted to get married at home,” she explains. “In the end, I did. It just happened to be a home I had helped create.”
For Ramesh, Sumatra was already beautiful enough and didn’t call for ornate decorations. The nalangu (haldi) took place beneath a litchi tree, beside a fountain, with blue-and-yellow decor. The cocktail was more elaborate, with tropical colours and flowers. The morning palette for the wedding day switched to white and purple, accentuated with tuberoses, wood, rattan and the existing greenery.
There were smaller interventions too, many of them designed by Ramesh herself. The invitation combined an illustration of Thanjavur’s ‘big temple’—a connection to her father’s family—with a peacock inspired by motifs found on Kanchipuram saris. A friend hand-painted the cocktail signage, while a leaf taken from a tree at the venue became the canvas for the bar menu.
Celebrations began with the nalangu, where the couple played ‘most likely to’ and found themselves agreeing on almost every answer. The cocktail that evening centred on their closest friends. A long family table became the setting for toasts, while Ramesh’s sister-in-law Vidya Gopinathan secretly collected one-word descriptions of the couple from friends and turned them into a slide show. A surprise dance followed, with ‘Illuminati’ from Aavesham chosen for Ramesh and ‘Dil Dooba’ from Khakee for Rao. Ramesh wore Sangeeta Patel, while Rao wore a President’s Bespoke suit.
The following day was more informal, with Ramesh having her mehendi done alongside the women before joining a bride-versus-groom sports day that brought football, pickleball and a treasure hunt to Sumatra. Rao’s team won; Ramesh says she has yet to decide whether she considers the result “an acceptable wedding memory”.
