A Week of Celebration in Mombasa: Simran & Hardeep’s Wedding at PrideInn Paradise

Love Story

“We had our first date on 5th October 2021 at a secret bar in London where a 2-hour drinks reservation turned into 4.5 hours of drinks, food and laughter.” Simran and Hardeep actually met a little earlier, on the dating app Hinge, where Hardeep swiped for Simran on August 18th, 2021. What started as a two-hour drinks booking that neither of them wanted to end turned into something neither expected, almost five years together by the time their wedding week finally arrived. Hardeep proposed on September 6th, 2023, at the Royal Observatory in London, hiring out a private viewing room under the cover story of free tickets he’d supposedly won at work. The room’s screen kept circling back to Saturn and its rings, a hint Simran didn’t catch until the stars scattered apart entirely. “Suddenly, the stars on the screen dispersed and read ‘Will you marry me?’” She had absolutely no idea it was coming.

About Your Wedding

Simran and Hardeep married in Mombasa, Kenya, at the PrideInn Paradise Resort on Shanzu Beach, welcoming 130 guests across a wedding week that took sixteen months to plan. “We wanted every event to be a different theme/vibe than the last,” and that intention shaped the entire week: five separate celebrations, five completely different moods, none of them repeating the one before it. The Mehndi and Sangeet opened the week with the bright, charismatic energy of a Turkish souk, followed by Maiyan’s simple, minimalist palette softened with touches of yellow in the flowers and origami birds. The Jaggo leaned fully traditional: jewel tones and old-school decor meant to echo how a jaggo would have looked back in the village where the tradition began. The wedding day itself stayed calm and pastel, a deliberate contrast to everything before it, before the reception closed the week on its most glamorous note, with drapes, lights, and sparkle throughout.
Choosing the destination turned out to be the hardest decision of the entire process. “We reviewed and enquired about several different destinations for our wedding and spoke to loads of wedding planners in different parts of the world,” balancing a location guests would actually be excited to travel to against one that could genuinely deliver everything they wanted. “But once we decided on Mombasa - everything fell into place.” What mattered most wasn’t the polish of any single event but something harder to manufacture: memories and real experiences their guests would carry home. “Our relationship and personalities” inspired the whole week, they say, a wedding built to reflect exactly who they are as a couple rather than a performance staged for anyone watching.

Mehendi

Haldi

Jago

Bride Getting Ready

Simran’s wedding outfit came from Marwar Couture, and the search for it turned out to be shorter than most brides ever get. “My wedding outfit was Marwar Couture. It was the first outfit I tried on and fell in love with.” She held off confirming it immediately, wanting to shop around first the way most brides feel obligated to, but nothing she tried afterward came close to that first instinct. “I am a big believer in when you immediately love something, it’s hard to top that.” Her getting-ready photoshoot took place in the resort's gardens just after sunrise, the whole morning settling into something calm and unhurried before the week’s celebrations properly began.

Groom Getting Ready

By the time the wedding day itself arrived, Hardeep had already spent nearly a year and a half planning toward this exact morning, sixteen months of decisions, destination research, and conversations with planners across multiple continents before Mombasa ever entered the picture. None of that groundwork showed on his face when he finally sat down at the gurdwara, waiting for Simran to walk in. Whatever nerves came with proposing at the Royal Observatory two years earlier had settled by now into something steadier, a groom who’d already done the hardest part of the waiting long before this particular morning began.

Ceremony

Simran and Hardeep exchanged their vows at the gurdwara in Mombasa, the same sacred space where their first look had unfolded only minutes earlier. The ceremony carried the full weight of Sikh tradition, grounding a week that had otherwise moved through five very different aesthetics, souk-bright, softly minimal, richly traditional, pastel-calm, and finally glamorous, back to something rooted and constant. After days of shifting themes and changing palettes, the gurdwara offered something the rest of the week deliberately hadn’t: a single unchanging ritual passed down through generations rather than designed for the occasion. Guests who had followed the couple through a Turkish souk, a minimalist garden party, and a jewel-toned jaggo found themselves in a considerably quieter room, one built around meaning rather than mood. It was, in its own way, the still center the entire week had been building toward.

Photoshoot After The Ceremony

Palm trees, swords still in hand, and warm ocean air replaced the gurdwara’s quiet formality almost instantly, the newlyweds barely out the door before the celebration found them again. Photos after the ceremony stayed right on the resort grounds, tropical greenery and open sky doing most of the work a more elaborate location might have needed to fake. Still dressed in full wedding regalia, swords included, the two of them moved through the same gardens where Simran had gotten ready just days before, the whole week folding back on itself in one continuous location. There was no need to travel anywhere for a more dramatic backdrop, since the resort’s own grounds, palm-lined paths and ocean light, already carried the same warmth that had defined every event before it. It felt less like a separate photo session and more like a continuation of the celebration itself, just with slightly better light and considerably fewer guests underfoot.

Wedding Venue & Decor

Executing five completely different aesthetics in a single week, without any of them bleeding into the next, took far more coordination than most guests probably realized as they watched it unfold. Each event needed its own decor build, its own breakdown, its own turnaround before the next celebration’s team could move in and start again, all within a resort property already hosting 130 guests across multiple days. Behind that logistics stood planners Sapna and Shitul Sachania, whose work translated Simran and Hardeep’s vision, “fun, laughs, friendships, family and togetherness,” into five genuinely distinct rooms without ever losing the thread connecting them.
The couple has nothing but praise for the team that pulled the week together. “All of our vendors - not a single vendor disappointed us.” From Clicks Unlimited behind the camera to Black Diamond Events Kenya building each event’s distinct world, from Harneet Bhogal’s hair and makeup to Paragon Music’s DJ set carrying guests through five different nights, every vendor delivered exactly what the week needed, and then some.

Reception

The reception arrived as the week’s grand finale, a glamorous mehfil built entirely around drapes, lights, and sparkle, the most theatrical of all five events by design. Guests danced the night away to Paragon Music, Amrit and Taran Sidhu carrying the same energy that had defined the entire week straight through to its final night. Simran and Hardeep’s first dance moved to Alicia Keys’ “If I Ain’t Got You,” the Bridgerton version, a quietly romantic close to a week built on five completely different moods.
But the moment that actually stayed with them wasn’t the reception at all. “The first event - we made our entrance to a really upbeat song, and as soon as we got in, almost everyone joined us on the dance floor.” That was the Mehndi and Sangeet, the week’s opening night, and it set a tone neither of them expected so early. “That moment will forever live in our minds because it was the moment where everything came together, and it was the best start to the wedding week.” By the time the final reception lights came up days later, Simran and Hardeep had exactly what they’d hoped for from the very beginning. “Fulfillment and a full heart - we wanted our guests to be glad they came and experienced the start of our new chapter with us.”