Sushmitha Ramesh had always wanted to get married somewhere familiar, intimate and personal. When she tied the knot with Anant Rao in June 2026, it was at Sumatra, a property that had been in her family since her grandfather’s time. It was a space that her family used as a plant nursery and would visit on weekends. At some point, Ramesh, a trained architect, had turned it into a wedding venue at her brother’s suggestion. So Sumatra proved to be the perfect location; she adds, “The venue itself was the heirloom.”
The couple didn’t make favourable impressions on each other at first. Ramesh had dismissed Rao after being shown a gym selfie of his; “If he’s posting gym selfies, then he’s got to be narcissistic.” Rao had passed on an introduction too, invoking the bro code because of a friend’s crush on her at the time.
A mutual acquaintance’s pre-wedding celebrations in Goa in August 2023 led to their paths finally crossing. Ramesh arrived at the resort in her airport clothes, dressed entirely in black, when she spotted Rao at the reception in the same uniform. When asked by a mutual friend what she thought of him, she was no more persuaded in person. “The tall guy? Not my type.”
Their first conversation happened at the bar when Ramesh, who was drinking her whisky neat, questioned Rao’s choice of gin and Diet Coke. “From there, we just kept talking,” Rao says. He jokingly calls his approach the ‘Joe Biden’, borrowed from the sitcom New Girl—you simply make sure you’re always there. Over the next two days, they kept finding reasons to be around each other. Their social circles overlapped enough that, only days after Goa, another friend’s wedding took them both to Bengaluru.
When it was time to leave, they coordinated their flights so they would have a few hours together before Ramesh’s earlier departure, turning the wait at an airport restaurant into a date. Rao stayed with her until she had to leave—though his own flight was several hours later. As she left, he told her, “I’ll see you soon.” Later, on the transit bus after landing in New Delhi, Rao realised how much the goodbye had affected him. “That was probably the first moment I thought, Okay, this isn’t normal. There is something serious here.”
Ramesh was in Chennai and Rao in New Delhi. By November, he had moved to Bengaluru, a decision he now acknowledges was partly about being closer to her. They spent their first New Year’s together at Sumatra. Ramesh remembers waking one morning and thinking: If they married, perhaps this was where they would wake up together.
As the relationship became more serious, they found themselves at odds over what came next. Ramesh knew that, for her, a serious relationship needed to lead towards marriage; Rao felt he had to reach a certain point professionally first. In April 2024, they broke up.
They did not speak for two to three weeks. Then Rao began asking himself what his life would look like without Ramesh. The next morning, he flew to Chennai and turned up at her doorstep. “I feel we’re letting go too easily. I really want to give this another shot,” he told her.
What changed was not that Rao had reached the professional point he had been waiting for. He stopped believing everything had to happen in a particular order.
The proposal , fittingly, returned them to an airport on New Year’s Day. Rao was dropping Ramesh off at Bengaluru airport. In the cab, she asked what he was most looking forward to in the year ahead. Half asleep, he answered, “You, Sushi.”
At the terminal, he talked about their life together, then looked at her hands and said, “So, I’ll take this ring off…” Ramesh realised what he was about to do, and Rao got down on one knee in T2 with no flowers or elaborate setup—only a ring in his pocket and a speech he barely remembers. He even asked whether he should get down on his right or left knee.
“Oh my God, is this you giving the speech?” Ramesh laughed. When he finally proposed, she dropped to her knees too. They stayed there laughing, hugging and saying yes.
Six months later, they married at Sumatra. During an internship in Sri Lanka, Ramesh had visited Geoffrey Bawa’s work, including Lunuganga, and had become drawn to architecture that allowed landscape and building to exist almost as one. She had evoked that sensibility while designing Sumatra as a wedding venue, drawing on tropical modernism and subtle Balinese influences.
“I had always wanted to get married at home,” she explains. “In the end, I did. It just happened to be a home I had helped create."
For Ramesh, Sumatra was already beautiful enough and didn’t call for ornate decorations. The nalangu (haldi) took place beneath a litchi tree, beside a fountain, with blue-and-yellow decor. The cocktail was more elaborate, with tropical colours and flowers. The morning palette for the wedding day switched to white and purple, accentuated with tuberoses, wood, rattan and the existing greenery.
There were smaller interventions too, many of them designed by Ramesh herself. The invitation combined an illustration of Thanjavur’s ‘big temple’—a connection to her father’s family—with a peacock inspired by motifs found on Kanchipuram saris. A friend hand-painted the cocktail signage, while a leaf taken from a tree at the venue became the canvas for the bar menu.
Celebrations began with the nalangu, where the couple played ‘most likely to’ and found themselves agreeing on almost every answer. The cocktail that evening centred on their closest friends. A long family table became the setting for toasts, while Ramesh’s sister-in-law Vidya Gopinathan secretly collected one-word descriptions of the couple from friends and turned them into a slide show. A surprise dance followed, with ‘Illuminati’ from Aavesham chosen for Ramesh and ‘Dil Dooba’ from Khakee for Rao. Ramesh wore Sangeeta Patel, while Rao wore a President’s Bespoke suit.
The following day was more informal, with Ramesh having her mehendi done alongside the women before joining a bride-versus-groom sports day that brought football, pickleball and a treasure hunt to Sumatra. Rao’s team won; Ramesh says she has yet to decide whether she considers the result “an acceptable wedding memory”.
For the wedding, there was far less experimentation. Ramesh had always imagined herself in Kanchipuram silk and found her JR Silks sari within three minutes of seeing it in the eponymous city. She wore it with an Amrita Classics blouse, VBJ jewellery and a Divas Mantra matha patti, while her thali (mangalsutra) took a traditional Udupi design and was scaled down to a size that would work with Western silhouettes as well. Rao also wore JR Silks and added jewellery from his mother’s collection and anklets borrowed from Ramesh’s sister-in-law.
The ceremony brought together Ramesh’s Tamil heritage with Rao’s Tulu and Telugu traditions. Her bridesmaids, all cousins and close friends, wore Kanchipuram silk saris in a coordinated palette and walked ahead carrying traditional lamps and flowers. Her two nephews held her veil as she entered with her parents to ‘Sundari Kannal Oru Sethi’ from Mani Ratnam’s Thalapathi. ‘Sundari’, meaning beautiful, is also what Rao calls her.
The couple adapted the Kashi yatra so that Ramesh’s brother welcomed Rao into the family—instead of Rao’s maternal uncle doing the same for Ramesh. Carrying an umbrella over him, he brought Rao back to the ceremony and washed his feet.
Amid all these carefully assigned roles, the moment Ramesh remembers most clearly required no planning at all. During the tying of the thali, she was sitting on her father’s lap while her cousin and sister-in-law held up her hair and veil so Rao could fasten the necklace, following a tradition from his father’s Tulu side. Unable to look up at him, Ramesh reached for his hand. Rao squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back. “It was our little yes and yes,” she said.
This story appears in Vogue India’s November-December 2026 issue. Subscribe here .
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