Shaibyaa Rajbhandari and Eshan Jayamanne Don's cliffside wedding in Bentota honoured the groom's Catholic heritage alongside the bride's Hindu roots
Kathmandu-born Shaibyaa Rajbhandari and Eshan Jayamanne Don, who grew up in Colombo, Sri Lanka, first crossed paths in the most serendipitous of ways. Before starting their MBA at Stanford, the school's Slack bot randomly paired them together for a virtual coffee chat. “Eshan showed up ten minutes late to what was supposed to be a thirty-minute call,” Rajbhandari says. “I think it was love at first sight for him. He denies it, obviously, though he was texting me religiously the second the call ended.”
The proposal was nowhere close to a surprise. “I am a planner. I hate surprises unless they're being executed by someone I trust completely,” says Rajbhandari. “And Eshan cannot keep a secret to save his life.” So she decided to take matters into her own hands. “I told him exactly when, where, and how it would happen. One condition: if he didn't cry, I'd say no.” The couple, by their own admission, are unapologetic foodies, and Don booked a dinner at SingleThread in Healdsburg. He arranged for the ring to arrive with dessert. “He choked up a little,” Rajbhandari laughs. “Whether genuinely or because I'd made it a condition, I'll never fully know. I said yes.”
The couple knew they wanted the wedding to reflect their heritage: “a Catholic Sri Lankan boy and a Hindu Nepali girl, both living abroad.” For wedding designer Devika Narain, who worked with the couple on the celebrations, that became the centre of the brief. “Shaibyaa and Eshan both wanted a wedding that was honest to their roots,” she says. “Shaibyaa wanted to bring a piece of Nepal, and Eshan wanted to give Shaibyaa everything she wanted.” They considered both their hometowns before ultimately settling on Bentota. Nepal, Rajbhandari jokes, quickly became impractical. “Given the number of relatives and friends my parents have, even if I got married on Everest , it would have been an 800-person affair.” Taking the wedding abroad became the only realistic way to avoid what she describes as “a mini festival.”
The couple chose Saman Villas for their wedding in Sri Lanka, a property overlooking the Indian Ocean. “It was one of the few places that gave us our own cliffside, generous garden space, enough rooms for guests, and still felt intimate,” she explains. The celebrations began with a welcome dinner. Instead of standard place cards, every guest found a personalised note tucked behind their name card, written by the couple. “A joke, a memory, a moment only they would recognise,” Rajbhandari says. “The room shifted when people started reading them. People were laughing, crying, passing cards around tables.”
Working with Narain and her team, the evening was somewhere between “a Colombo house party in 1975 and a Sabyasachi campaign,” she says. The first recce changed the original design direction. Rajbhandari had imagined a maximalist, Sabyasachi-inspired setting, but the ballroom ceiling, inspired by Geoffrey Bawa’s architectural language, pushed the team towards something more layered. “We created an imaginary setting where Bawa met Sabyasachi, both pioneers of two different movements,” says Narain. The result was a maximalist tropical grazing table set within a ballroom shaped by Bawa-inspired materials and patterns. The couple designed the evening to flow seamlessly between dinner and dancing, with bartenders moving through the room with trays of shots and conversations turning into dance circles. For the occasion, Rajbhandari wore an off-shoulder Tarun Tahiliani corset lehenga gown with a custom emerald choker, while Don wore a coordinating custom co-ord set by Sri Lankan label Lovi.
The Catholic wedding ceremony took place the following day. With ABBA's I Have A Dream on the moodboard, the church was transformed into an orange orchard, complete with hanging florals and citrus trees growing through the aisles. For Narain, the church itself determined the design. “The church stunned us when we first visited it,” she says. “Located on a cliff with the sea as its backdrop, the ceiling took our breath away, standing at over 30 feet tall.” Rajbhandari had wanted a delicate forest wedding, so Narain’s team brought in statement trees and kept the palette largely green, allowing the couple, the church and the sea-facing setting to remain central. The bride wore a custom gown by Sri Lankan couturier Aslam Hussein, inspired by Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. “Clean, column-silhouetted, understated,” she says. Her mother's diamond-and-pearl earrings served as her something borrowed. Don wore a custom navy tuxedo by Suit & Tie in Colombo.
The ceremony flowed directly into a cliffside sundowner overlooking the ocean. Pale florals, lounge seating and a live band created what Rajbhandari describes as an “Italian summer” atmosphere. A dance floor built over the pool made guests feel as though they were floating between sea and sky. The couple cut their cake and shared their first dance before dinner, timing everything around the pink glow of sunset.
The final day centred around Rajbhandari's Nepali heritage. “We stripped things back to the emotional core,” she says. The ceremony included the lighting of the sukunda, the garland exchange, rings, sindoor and tilhari rituals. The design challenge became finding a way to introduce guests to Nepal without relying on familiar clichés. “We asked ourselves: what would it feel like to walk through Kathmandu in the 1980s?” says Rajbhandari.
Narain’s team answered that question by transforming the hotel parking lot into a Nepali street. “Shaibyaa helped us with her favourite stores and bars, and the most beautiful portraits of her grandparents helped us create this,” says Narain. The answer came in textured walls, marigolds, bougainvillaea, custom textiles inspired by traditional Nepali motifs, food stalls, small bars and even a hidden speakeasy beneath a tree modelled after one of her favourite bars back home. The design was also shaped on the ground, through what Narain describes as a market-led process. “We would stumble upon a planter and decide to weave a space around it, or find a beautiful font in one of Shaibyaa’s photos and that would define the typography for the project,” she says. “The team spent weeks detailing every space.” Rajbhandari’s father's favourite Nepali songs played throughout the evening, while tarot stalls and tiny storefront-inspired installations brought the space to life. Rajbhandari, who always knew she would be a red bride, wore a Sabyasachi sari . Don returned to Lovi for a contemporary interpretation of the traditional Sri Lankan national dress in ivory.
The wedding in Sri Lanka concluded with a Nepali reception, where Rajbhandari changed into a semi-custom blue Rahul Mishra lehenga paired with a polki set sourced from a close friend's family jewellery store in Jaipur . As Rajbhandari puts it, they weren't trying to recreate Sri Lanka or Nepal, but a space where both could coexist. Every detail—from the orange orchard in the church to the hidden speakeasy—reflected a couple determined to create something that felt authentic to who they were.
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