She launched her company and her marriage in the same week, and planned every single day of it in advance

The day Ankshita’s company went live was also the day before her wedding. She was working right up until the last moment, with the functions beginning the very next morning. Years had gone into building an innovation lab that works with women entrepreneurs and smallholder farmers in Nepal and across Africa, and the launch wasn’t going to move any more than the wedding was. The only option was to plan every single element in advance, down to how each event would look and feel.

Ankshita and her partner, Rohit, are both from Nepal’s Marwadi community. And anyone who has been to a Marwadi wedding knows they tend to be big, grand, thousand-guest affairs. Theirs would have been too had their parents been left in charge. Instead, the two of them cut the reception list back to around four hundred. As Ankshita will tell you with a completely straight face, that made it an intimate wedding.

But four hundred was still enough to complicate a dream Ankshita had held on to since she was a young girl — a destination wedding in Pokhara, with the Annapurna range right behind her. Even with the downsized guest list, no resort there was big enough to house everyone, and splitting their families across hotels would have undone the whole point of gathering them.

She was sitting in a café with Rohit when it sank in. They looked at each other and didn’t even say it out loud. They just turned back to their laptops and started searching for a place near Kathmandu that could give them what they were really after: open sky, a view, and no hotel ballroom in sight. Gokarna quickly emerged as the clear contender. Ankshita called the forest resort on the edge of the city, found it free on their dates and booked it within thirty minutes.

That evening her father, relieved not to have to talk her out of Pokhara, called a friend at the resort to check. He was told there was no availability at all. It nearly brought her to tears, until it turned out the dates were gone because they were already booked in her name. Phew!

With Gokarna settled, the couple could start planning three fully decorated functions across two days – the sangeet, the wedding and the reception. And Ankshita had an advantage most brides don’t. One of her closest friends had married at Gokarna not long before, and Ankshita had been her maid of honor. She had spent months watching that wedding come together from the inside, seeing what worked, what didn’t, and which vendors were worth trusting. It gave her something close to a blueprint, though there was still plenty the blueprint couldn’t answer.

The food was one of those things. Mention any hotel to people in Kathmandu and they will have an opinion about the food. This would also be a fully vegetarian Marwadi wedding, at a resort that didn’t allow outside caterers for the main meals. Her father, who is very good at being intimidating when the occasion calls for it, sat through two rounds of tastings at Gokarna. He kept repeating that nothing else mattered as long as the food was top-notch, and in the end the resort brought in Indian chefs for the wedding. By the end, even the one relative every family has – the one who never likes anything – came over to say the food was amazing.

Everything else was divided fairly naturally between the two of them. Rohit took the finances and vendor payments, while Ankshita took vendor selection and decor. This worked particularly well because Rohit, as she says, had almost no strong opinions on decor. He would have called a sunflower theme for cocktail night beautiful.

It gave her something close to a blueprint, though there was still plenty the blueprint couldn’t answer.

That left Ankshita to decide not only how everything would look, but how each day would unfold. The wedding, for instance, had to be in the afternoon. She wanted to get married in daylight, with the forest around them, when she still looked and felt her best. And she wanted her friends beside her, rather than slowly drifting back to their rooms as a late-night ceremony stretched on.

The decor required a little more navigating. There were a few big names in Kathmandu, and Ankshita sensed early that some would upcharge her given what Marwadi weddings are expected to cost. What won her over about Clover, beyond having seen their work at her friend’s wedding, was how openly they assured her they would work around her budget.

Her friend was a bit of a godsend here too. Having recently planned her own wedding, she knew what the line items should look like and what things really cost. So when Clover’s breakdown came in, they went through it together, line by line. And on the wedding day, Ankshita handed the decor over to her completely. She wanted to live every moment of her own wedding without once wondering how the flowers looked.

For all that attention to the budget, there was one place she and Rohit were happy to let the numbers run – the music. Neither wanted a reception where guests sat in rows and queued to be photographed on a stage. They wanted to spend it with their guests. So a band played while the two of them moved around the room and mingled. They flew the band in from Delhi, gigantic sound systems and all, and Rohit called on the event-management connections he had made as a teenager to make it work. They called it their happy budget.

By this point, almost everything had been planned months in advance. The outfits, however, had other ideas. Weddings in her community mean coordinated outfits for the whole family, and Ankshita was putting them together for forty people. So she did what any online shopper would and spent months scrolling through different sites before going to Delhi. By the time she arrived, she knew what she wanted and found her sangeet, wedding and reception looks at Pernia’s in less than a day.

That should have been the easy part done. Except that when she flew back for her fittings, the outfits weren’t ready. Her wedding blouse alone took five visits before it sat the way it needed to. Ankshita kept pushing back her flight home, while the wedding she had spent months planning got closer and closer.

She made it home in time.

The day before her wedding, Ankshita celebrated a successful launch. The next afternoon, in daylight, she married her best friend, with the forest around her and her friends right beside her, just as she had planned.

Maybe that’s what it really looks like when a woman who is building something plans a wedding at the same time. You plan every day you possibly can and trust the people you love with the rest. And you accept that somewhere along the way, there will be a fifth trip to a fitting room that no amount of planning could have prevented.