They never wanted a wedding. They had two

When Andrea Battistel, 38, and Kelsang Dolma, 37, log on to our video call, an orange cat has already claimed half the camera frame. One of four pets the couple have adopted over the years, he stays put for most of the interview. The couple first met at Delhi’s Monkey Bar in 2019, when Andrea, a management consultant from Venice, was in the city on a business trip. He ran into Kelsang, a creative professional of Tibetan heritage born and raised in Nainital, on his last night in Delhi. An evening spent discussing their Tibetan Zodiac signs (they’re compatible) ended with a first kiss, and the two kept in touch after Andrea left.

Soon, Andrea’s ‘business trips’ to India became increasingly frequent, and eventually he invited Kelsang on a trip across Italy. “We started from Rome, then the Amalfi coast, and then Venice, where I got really drunk in this small bistro called Petro Rosa and told Andrea that I loved him and he said, ‘I love you too,’” recalls Kelsang. The couple eventually settled in Bali together in 2022, after a work trip convinced Andrea that the island was a better fit for their lives than Delhi. He stayed in consulting, while Kelsang now works as the director of PR at Nuanu Creative City Bali.

Marriage, however, wasn’t exactly part of the plan. Between an impromptu Tibetan blessing ceremony in Nainital and a last-minute civil wedding in Hong Kong, the couple somehow managed to get married twice.

Below, the couple takes us through a proposal four months in the making and the two celebrations that followed.

The four-month lead-up to the proposal

Andrea: Where I come from, many people consider marriage as just a bureaucratic passage. We’d been living together in Bali for almost two years at that point, so in my head we were already married. We only started talking about marriage because Kelsang’s mother was pushing us a little bit. I thought the gesture would make her and her family happy.

Kelsang: I had moved away from the idea of marriage, but a part of me still thought it’s a beautiful act of commitment. I wasn’t expecting the proposal at all.

Andrea: I was planning to propose when we went to Italy in December 2024, but so much was happening that I didn’t have time to find a ring. In February, a friend of hers gave me the contact of a jeweller in Bali. I made the ring, but Kelsang was so busy working every weekend, it took me four months to finally propose. Meanwhile, the box was in my underwear drawer.

Kelsang: My friend who helped him get the ring told me later that she would look for signs if the proposal had happened after every weekend.

Andrea: In the end, I managed to put it in her head to go to the Bambu Indah hotel one day. I hadn’t prepared anything, so I had no idea how, when or where to propose. We went for dinner and started talking about marriage. I decided to play her a little bit, saying things like I didn’t care about marriage and wasn’t interested. I could see she was getting sadder the more I talked. We went back to our room, and I had hidden the ring behind a pillow on the couch. I sat her down and I was consoling and hugging her before suddenly pulling out the ring. She started crying and screaming as if I had just opened her belly and taken out her guts! This was my proposal.

A surprise wedding in Nainital

Kelsang: In September last year, I called my mom to say I’m going to visit her in Nainital because I needed a holiday. Andrea was in Kazakhstan at the time, but he added a layover in India so we could go back to Bali together. My mom was so excited that we were going to be there together, she decided to arrange a Tibetan blessing ceremony for us. We call it tendrel. She asked me to get Tibetan clothes made for the both of us. So, we arrived in Delhi in the morning, went to Majnu ka Tilla, got the clothes stitched, and went to Nainital the same evening. It was all very last-minute. When we got there, it turned out that my mom had invited close family and arranged a dinner. She had basically planned a Tibetan wedding ceremony. 

Andrea: Despite the fact that we got to know about the blessing ceremony only 10 days before it happened, I managed to have a representative from Italy. A friend of mine who was on holiday in Thailand flew to Delhi for the ceremony. We were so awkward at the ceremony, though, because it was such a surprise and we didn’t know exactly how it was going to unfold. I kept asking Kelsang, “What should I do now?” and she was like, “I don’t know.” But it was nice to see her mum so happy, and the traditions were very heart-warming.

Eight witnesses and a wedding dress rental

Kelsang: We were supposed to register our marriage in Italy this year, because I was meant to travel to Brussels for work. But the Belgian embassy rejected my Schengen visa application twice, so we couldn’t go. We didn’t want to register in Indonesia, because it doesn’t allow couples who follow different religions to get married legally, so you have to convert.

Andrea: I would have happily converted to Buddhism than force her to be Catholic. But since it was a hassle, we started looking for places where it was easier to register our marriage and eventually landed on Hong Kong.

Kelsang: Again, it was very last-minute. I called our friends in Hong Kong, asking if they were available to be our witnesses. That’s when our friends in Bali and India started calling saying, “Why aren’t we invited?” It kept escalating and ended up being around eight people that came from different parts of the world. Two of our friends from Bali came. Andrea’s friend who came to India last year flew in from Italy and one of my closest friends came from India.

Andrea: He is our official marriage representative now. So, every time we get married, he has to come no matter where he is or what he’s doing.

Kelsang: We were planning to go in jeans and T-shirts, because it wasn’t really a wedding. But my friends all said they’re wearing gowns, so I needed a wedding dress. Andrea got an outfit from Zegna. I ordered something from Revolve, but it wasn’t going to arrive on time. We couldn’t find anything in Hong Kong either, because it was so last-minute. So, I ended up renting this big wedding gown from a rental shop in Hong Kong. It’s so not me, but as soon as I wore it I felt so special, and it fit me like a glove. I kept asking Andrea to take a look before the signing and tell me how it was, but he refused.

Andrea: It’s tradition to not see the bride in her dress before the wedding. Seeing Kelsang in the dress at the ceremony was a mix of emotions. She usually has a very simple, clean style, so when I saw her in this super-fancy dress, I felt very emotional, but I was about to start laughing because I’d never seen her like that.

Kelsang: The dress I ordered from Revolve did end up arriving on time, so I changed into it for lunch with our friends after the ceremony.

The civil ceremony

Kelsang: Before the actual signing, we had to get a legal paper from the government office. We had to pledge an oath for that and there was a word Andrea couldn’t pronounce: conscientiously.

Andrea: While we were waiting, I was practising saying it in my head. But I still couldn’t say it properly. I ended up working it into our vows as an inside joke. We could have written our own vows but didn’t have a lot of time to do it, because I was actually in Hong Kong for work. Otherwise, they give you some templates, so we chose one from those.

Kelsang: That’s how seriously we took this entire thing. I wasn’t even thinking much of the vows, because throughout the process I saw it as something administrative that I need to get done with it. I was just happy that my friends were there to witness it.

Andrea: We did it in the civil celebrant’s office. They had this separate small room with a table, four chairs, and a couple of flowers.

Kelsang: There was literally no space, because everyone was crowded in the tiny room. My dress had a train—can you imagine that in a 2x3 room?

Andrea: It was very, very simple, but it was still quite emotional.

A last-minute Italian reception lunch

Kelsang: A day before the ceremony, we didn’t even know where we were going to have the reception lunch with our friends. We had earlier gone to Bar Leone (ranked number one on The 50 Best Bars list), whose manager, we found out, is from the same region in Italy as Andrea. He literally knelt down next to our table and started writing all the places where he thought we should go for our reception lunch. He recommended Ninetta, which I liked, but they were completely booked out. I was trying to negotiate with them. It turned out that the man I was speaking with was from Nepal, who agreed to help because he saw my Tibetan name. The meal was perfect.

Andrea: It was cosy Italian food and we loved it.

How about a third wedding?

Kelsang: This is the second time we’ve made a marriage arrangement and none of Andrea’s family members have been able to make it, because it’s always been so last-minute. I don’t know if we will have to do another one in Italy.

Andrea: I hope not. [laughs]