Our Wedding Story — Part 1
Abhinav and I met during COVID times, the story of how and when is for another blog. This blog is solely dedicated to the efforts our family and friends put in to make it a wedding of our dreams during one the most turbulent times the world has seen.
Engagement ceremony — Feb 2021(6 months before the wedding)
We had a Thambulam exchange ceremony in Bangalore in Feb 2021. (Parents of the Bride and Groom sit together with a pundit and exchange Thambulam which means acceptance of marriage from both the sides).
Since I had just come back from India and it was difficult to take another vacation prior to the wedding, we did a virtual gathering of all our near and dear ones on Google Hangouts. Our parents along with first circle of relatives met up at my place in Bangalore. It was nothing short of a magical day. Both my grandmothers were ecstatic and Ajji had cooked up a festive meal for 30 odd folks all by herself. My parents were over the moon.
Covid — (March 2021- May 2021–4 months before the wedding)
Covid 2nd wave hit strong across the world and India was one of the worst affected countries. We did lose some relatives in the first wave of covid, but loss was too damn personal in the second wave.
Ajji who had gone to attend to a sick relative of hers came back infected with Covid in the beginning of April. Not to take any further chances considering her age and co-morbidities — my parents decided to get her admitted in the hospital. What followed weeks later was an extremely painful time we went through as a family.
It was also one of Ajji’s last wishes to see us married soon.
Mom and aunt in the midst of grieving the loss of my grandmother, also took it on themselves to plan our wedding.
Hungama of Wedding Dates…. now? later? next year? court marriage?? :)
Where do we get married?
I have always wanted an aesthetic wedding with lot of traditional south Indian elements added to it. I did secretly check out some wedding venues in Bangalore in January 2021, even before Abhinav and I had decided on getting married. But little did I know that travel restrictions would play a spoil sport. I was also not to keen on not having parents around for the biggest day in our lives. So we decided to have the wedding in the US in August, instead of infinitely waiting for travel restrictions to ease.
We started venue hunting, from Seattle to Bay Area to Dallas to Houston, we scouted venues for the next 10 days. Trying to figure out not only the venue logistics but also travel and stay options for our family and friends.
We finally decided on getting married in the newly renovated Madurai Meenakshi temple in Pearland, TX. (outskirts of Houston)
How do we bring our parents here?
US had banned travel from list of high risk countries. India was one of them. US was only allowing travel from Mexico, Maldives, Dubai, etc if the travelers were fully vaccinated and with 14days of quarantine before entering the mainland. We waited until first week of July to see if the travel restrictions would ease, but tough luck. Dubai would have been the ideal place for both our families to spend 14 days, but UAE had cancelled all the flights departing from India. We evaluated both Maldives and Mexico and decided on bringing parents to Cancun in MX to spend 2 weeks.
Finer details on how our folks spent their time in Cancun is a story for another blog.
Parents came into the US on August 2nd, 10 days before the wedding finishing their quarantine period.
Stay tuned for the all the wedding planning in next blogpost :)
Cheers,
Manasa