“I was like, there’s no way I’m going to some random guy’s house.” That’s how Maia Shroff almost didn’t meet Jehan Daruvala.
She was a teenager. A friend was desperate to go on a weekend trip to a Lonavala bungalow. The mother had said no and Maia was recruited as the moral buffer. She almost didn’t go. But then, she did.
And here we are—ten years later—at a wedding that would span continents, cultures, 1,800 guests, speedboats, and a bride who modelled on a shoot the day before and still insisted she was “just going to show up, look good, and have fun.” And she did between ancient Parsi rituals, seaside soirées, mermaid lehengas, and marquise-cut natural diamonds destined to become heirlooms.
When fate intervenes at fifteen
Jehan and Maia’s wedding wasn’t a reinvention of tradition. It wasn’t an anti-wedding. It wasn’t even a statement affair. It was, in the truest sense, a celebration of a relationship that began in adolescence and grew up alongside them. Theirs is a love story that didn’t hinge on one or three grand gestures, but on a decade of choosing each other again and again and again.
They met at fifteen; awkward, ambitious, figuring themselves out. He would go on to become one of India’s most recognisable racing drivers, making history in Formula 2’s racing circuits. She would build a career in modelling and launch her own swimwear brand, Papaaya Swimwear. Their lives would stretch across cities and time zones, especially during years of long-distance. But through it all, there was a constant: whenever something happened—good, bad, ordinary—Jehan was the first person Maia wanted to tell, and vice versa.
“It wasn’t about one big realisation,” she says. “It was the accumulation of years, of small moments and big ones, of growing up together.” And maybe that’s what made their wedding feel the way it did: less spectacle, more reunion. A celebration not just of love, but of ten years of inside jokes, airport goodbyes, race weekends in Europe, family holidays, and a proposal in Lake Como that somehow managed to be both a complete surprise and entirely inevitable. And it all began with a weekend she almost skipped.
The wedding they imagined vs the wedding they had
If you ask Maia what she always pictured when she thought about her wedding, she won’t describe ballrooms or guest lists running into four digits. “I always imagined having an intimate destination wedding,” she says. “I never wanted something big.”
In her mind, it was simple: a beach, a tight circle, just the people who had truly lived the relationship with them. Something easy, fun and sun-soaked. But the final count? 1,800 guests! “It was definitely much larger than what Jehan and I had originally envisioned,” Maia admits. And yet, the way she says it isn’t laced with regret, it’s reflective. Almost amused at how life rarely follows the Pinterest moodboard.
Because here’s the thing, they didn’t lose their intimate wedding. They just did it differently
Their Alibaug function, set against the sea at Soulinaire, became the version they had always imagined. Around 200 people with a heavy dose of Italian seaside energy, a subtle tribute to their Lake Como proposal. An 11:00 AM start that became a raging sundowner. Think, butter-yellow bridesmaids glowing against the coast and speedboats ferrying guests back and forth. And by 4:00 PM? “Everyone was piss drunk.”
