A dreamy lakeside wedding in Srinagar where the bride designed her own gown

Esther Rachel Stanly and Joshua Neethirajan first crossed paths on a Sunday about two years ago at Whitefield City church in Bengaluru. The two bonded over the fact that they both worked in marketing, that both their dads are preachers, and that both are one of four siblings.

On the second day of them talking, Joshua told Esther he was going to marry her. “I don’t know why he thought it was really cool, but he proposed on the second day of us speaking. He was just like, ‘Oh I’m gonna marry you’,” she says over a video call from Vietnam, where the couple is currently based. For Joshua, it was a classic case of when you know, you know. “I knew right away. I told my mom, my friends, everyone, this was the girl I was going to marry,” he recalls.

Esther, whose family is originally from Kerala, was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, and had moved to Bengaluru for work; while Joshua, who has Tamil and Malayali heritage, was born and raised in Kashmir, and was based out of Bangkok at the time. The former works in AI and tech marketing, while the latter runs a marketing consultancy. “I was moving around a lot because my work’s remote. I lived in Bangalore for a year and had gone back just to pick up some of my stuff. I ended up finding this church on Google Maps and went to it, where someone introduced us,” Joshua says.

Marriage wasn’t something that was even remotely on Esther’s mind. “I always thought my dad was going to pull up with 500 people and I’d have social anxiety, so a wedding was never something I looked forward to. But then, Joshua was like you can just do whatever you want. So, I decided to approach it more like a channel for creative expression,” she says.

A few months into their relationship, the couple decided to get married and started planning their wedding. About six months before the big day, Joshua surprised Esther while she was on a trip to Kochi to find her wedding gown with a proposal.

Below, the couple takes us through the proposal and their five-day wedding celebration in Srinagar that was designed to reflect their Malayali heritage, the groom’s Kashmiri roots, and the bride’s Saudi upbringing.

The almost last-minute proposal

Joshua: Since we are constantly travelling, it was difficult to find the right time to propose. I had designed the ring, and it was sitting in a little white pouch in my pocket everywhere I went. I was in Chennai for a friend’s wedding when I realised the next time we would meet would be right before our own wedding—and proposing a week before would be pretty bad. There was never going to be a perfect time so I called her dad and said, “I’m planning on proposing to Esther tomorrow—can you have her come to Kochi somehow?”

Esther: I was in Kottayam at the time. Out of nowhere, my dad suggested I go to Kochi, which is a two-hour drive away, to pick up my gown. We got there, I found my gown but my sister started acting really weird. She kept telling me, “We should check out this spot” or “Let’s go to that spot.” I had a gut feeling something was up. Internally, I was panicking because I was sick, had the worst acne, and I was not dressed for a proposal whatsoever. But it ended up being really cute.

Joshua: I had found a spot, a photographer, and planned to propose at sunset, but they got delayed because of traffic. She was still surprised when she arrived and it happened very naturally rather than feeling too orchestrated—which was very us.

Esther: The ring has a myrtle on it because it’s the meaning of my name. There’s a vine that represents God because we’re both Christians and very tiny chinar leaves that Joshua drew because he’s from Kashmir. It also included my birthstones, and there’s a bible verse carved on the inside.

50 guests, with very specific instructions

Joshua: From the get-go, we thought it would be fun to have the wedding in Kashmir and then have the reception in Kerala, so we have the best of both worlds. We even considered Thailand but ended up coming back to Srinagar and it was the best decision we made. Our ceremony was right on Nigeen Lake at the Nigeen Club. The idea was to make it a big vacation so we could spend time with both families and have everyone mingle.

Esther: Honestly, we’re both just kids with adult money. We had 50 people at the wedding, and it was stretched out over five days. We had a games night, a sangeet, and we really went deep into the details. We made a custom guest book where everyone could write whatever they felt about the wedding. We had a Persian rug that we hung as a backdrop for photos that in a way represented me and the mix of cultures I grew up with. There was a 400-year-old chinar tree under which the whole family gathered. We gave out fans and umbrellas to our guests—it was these really small details that we enjoyed putting together.

Joshua: The decor was all Esther. It was hard to find things that matched our taste. I went around a lot thinking I’ll find stuff that’s already available, but we ended up having to just make a lot from scratch.

Esther: Most of the things that were at our wedding were from small homegrown, and local tailors and vendors. My favourite colour is blue, so our sisters, Johsua’s niece, and friends wore blue. All the ladies—our mums, grandmums, and aunts—they wore pink Kanjeevarams we bought for them in Chennai.

Joshua: We basically told everyone, “If you want to come to the wedding, you’re wearing this exact colour.” We wanted everything to look coordinated. No odd colours in the mix.

Esther: I knew Alan Handley, our photographer, from when I was in college. A lot of my friends had modelled for him back then and I always wanted to be captured by him if I ever decided to model. That never happened, so I thought, maybe I’ll have him shoot my wedding instead. It was so worth it. It was the first wedding he ever shot independently.

And the bride wore... herself

Esther: The gown I got from Kochi ended up looking like what everyone else had so I ditched it and I designed my own outfits. I wanted the dress to look like it came from somewhere personal with culture and meaning attached to it. I found all the material myself, drew the design, and then I gave it to a local tailor in Kottayam. The inspiration for my dress is from Syrian Orthodox wedding gowns. It had a detachable lace robe over the gown and a huge veil which just kept flowing because it was so windy on the day. I enjoyed the idea of designing my gown and putting it out there.

I didn’t wear any jewellery apart from the ring, because Kerala Pentecostal women don’t wear jewellery, even on their big day. I designed my sister’s dress too.

Joshua: I’m very particular about what I wear and like to keep it as simple as possible. I got a normal tux with a nice lapel stitched at a local tailor in Kashmir. The suit was ready just four days before the wedding.

Esther: Lilies are my favourite flower, so my bouquet was all lilies.

Joshua: This was also a last-minute clutch. I had my friend rush to the florist at 8 am to get it.

The wedding that felt like a holiday

Joshua: On the first night everyone was together, Esther’s sister and my sister planned a surprise bachelorette for her.

Esther: The next day was the sangeet. It was more intimate than the wedding. I come from a conservative Pentecostal family, so we wanted to be conscious of that and asked people who don’t appreciate singing and dancing as much to fly in the next day.

Joshua: Our sisters planned the whole sangeet. We did performances, although I won’t call mine a performance. My friends and I were literally looking for songs to dance to at 4 am the night before the sangeet. An hour before the sangeet, my friend Alina was like, “Just do these steps for two minutes, and you’re good to go.” I was all over the place, but Esther was amazing. She danced to a Karan Aujla song.

Esther: Our wedding was kinda Bridgerton-themed but the sangeet was the exact opposite. It was just hardcore Bolly stuff.

Joshua: All our siblings performed. My mom surprised us with a song. And then my uncle and my brother-in-law did a song on the guitar, and everyone joined in.

Esther: The third day was games night. It was the bride’s side versus the groom’s side.

Joshua: We had tug-of-war, a pastry eating race, and a bunch of other games. It was honestly the most fun night because everyone got so competitive. 

I finished writing my vows at 3 am the night before the wedding. I was so nervous because I had known from the day we met that I was gonna bawl my eyes out when we got married. The second I saw her, I started crying. Her vows were amazing. I cried throughout.

Esther: Our pastor had an iPad for the ceremony which I thought was pretty rad. Kashmiris usually have very conservative marriages. Most of the time, the girls are on one side, and the boys are the other. So, we were all joking about how this would be the first and last time they would see a couple kiss at their wedding. We kissed a lot.

Joshua: After what must’ve been the 50th kiss of the morning, we had a small lunch at my house.

Esther: Because our wedding was in the morning, we had a high-tea-meets-brunch situation afterwards where we served these Kashmiri breads called girda, pasta and pastries, along with kahwah.

We were serving wazwan for dinner, which is a 22-dish feast with a lot of meat. It’s advised that you don’t eat before it, but we couldn’t not serve anything, so lunch was light and vegetarian. In the evening, we had a full-blown wazwan feast at Villa Cottages, which is set in a peach and apple orchard.

Joshua: After the dinner, all the old people left, and the afterparty went on till 2 am. Instead of a wedding cake, we got three massive tubs of tiramisu. We did not know it’d be that big, so there was a lot left over. We ended up eating tiramisu every day for the rest of the week. So now, on the sixth of every month, we eat tiramisu to remind ourselves of the wedding.

The next morning, we had the entire property where we had the reception dinner booked out for the family. We all stayed there and had a brunch picnic. It really felt like a vacation. Everyone left very happy, and that’s hard to achieve at an Indian wedding, so I think we did well.

Esther: We were acting like teenagers the whole time.