Homeward bound

Indian Americans Snigdha Sur and Neil Arora's celebrations traced their shared histories and emotional return to the land their families once left behind.

- By SARA HUSSAIN.

SNIGDHA SUR AND Neil Arora met on Hinge, a match that made instant sense. They had 25 mutual friends and a trail of near misses across Beijing and Mumbai. Yale for both. Business school for both. Mandarin for both. When they finally met on a summer night in 2017 on the Lower East Side in New York, they even wore the same blue-grey Allbirds.

The proposal came about seven years later at a hotel in Arenal, Costa Rica, during a week of hikes and long dinners. At a mid-trip dessert break, Sur asked if there was anything left to do. Arora took out a ring he had tucked into a tissue paper in his pocket. "There's one thing I haven't done," he replied. "Ask you to marry me."

From the start, their wedding was about returning to the places that shaped them. Arora was born in Kansas and raised in Virginia, the son of a Punjabi father whose family left Lahore for Amritsar after the Partition and a mother whose family is from Fiji. Sur was born near Raipur, Chhattisgarh, and grew up in New York City, her Bengali parents carrying memories of pre-Partition East Bengal and Burma. "As Partition families, we don't have a home within the physical borders of India today, so we chose a place with history and memory," Sur says, with Arora echoing her thoughts.