Snigdha Sur and Neil Arora met on Hinge, a match that made instant sense. They had 25 mutual friends and a trail of near misses across Beijing and Mumbai. Yale for both. Business school for both. Mandarin for both. When they finally met on a summer night in 2017 on the Lower East Side in New York, they even wore the same blue-grey Allbirds.
The proposal came about seven years later at a hotel in Arenal, Costa Rica, during a week of hikes and long dinners. At a mid-trip dessert break, Sur asked if there was anything left to do. Arora took out a ring he had tucked into a tissue paper in his pocket. “There’s one thing I haven’t done,” he replied. “Ask you to marry me.”
From the start, their wedding was about returning to the places that shaped them. Arora was born in Kansas and raised in Virginia, the son of a Punjabi father whose family left Lahore for Amritsar after the Partition and a mother whose family is from Fiji. Sur was born near Raipur, Chhattisgarh, and grew up in New York City, her Bengali parents carrying memories of pre-Partition East Bengal and Burma. “As Partition families, we don’t have a home within the physical borders of India today, so we chose a place with history and memory,” Sur says, with Arora echoing her thoughts.
They planned the wedding in Rajasthan themselves at the 14th-century Fort Barwara in Rajasthan. The guest list held just 66 names. “We told our parents it was either a court wedding in New York City or an Indian wedding our way,” Sur reveals. Their families agreed, giving them the rare gift of full control. Arora, who works in finance, handled logistics and budgets, while Sur, the founder of media company The Juggernaut, focused on creative details: the photographer, the sarod player, the handwritten notes left on each guest’s seat.
They leaned fully into the Indian Americanness of it all, wearing Indian regalia to their civil ceremony in New York City. Even in Rajasthan, they convinced the pandit to do the rites the American way—wrapping up in 30 minutes.
Their wedding in Rajasthan began with a poolside haldi, known in Bengali as gaye holud, with Sur’s mother and aunts leading the rituals. By evening, the courtyard had filled with the sounds of a sarod and the smell of fresh mehendi. Guests drifted between the jhumka and choodi stalls while an astrologer read charts in one corner.
