The wedding planner’s wedding

Being bridezilla has got to be pretty hard if you’re both bride and planner. But when Rochelle Malaika, 37, was planning her wedding four years ago, she got to yell ‘crisis’ and ‘calm your nerves’ at the same time – in a stunning rose patterned lace white gown and heels, no less.

Rochelle, head wedding planner at Dubai-based Marriagement, has planned all kinds of weddings – from the elaborate to the intimate, across various nationalities and cultures including European, Arab, Nigerian, Indian and Iranian. But in theatrical Murphy’s law style, her own wedding involved her wedding day coordinator travelling last minute due to an emergency, while her guests and vendors were stuck in traffic due to an accident.

‘On that day, exit 119 in Ras Al Khaimah that we usually take from the highway was closed,’ she says. ‘A truck had overturned and many guests, as well as the photographer and florists, were stuck on alternate routes. I kept thinking to myself: 12 years of planning weddings Rochelle and the irony of it all crashing down on the wedding planner’s big day.’ Even her decorator, who was setting up the head table, cracked a mirror that was supposed to go above the fireplace.

‘Now, worse things have happened at the weddings I’ve planned but I have always managed to fix it,’ she says. ‘But this was miles from the city, on a closed down route, with a coordinator who couldn’t show up at the last minute. How do I fix this when I’m the bride?’

Rochelle was upset, she admits.

‘But then I remembered how anxious some brides got. I had promised myself that I would not turn into bridezilla. This was one wedding I was not going to micromanage.’

She called her husband-to-be, her voice of calm, Patrick Makwana, 38, who chivalrously told her that even if all the guests got tired and walked away, he’d be there waiting at the end of the aisle for her.

‘That’s all I needed to hear,’ she recalls. ‘We started the ceremony almost 40 minutes late and we enjoyed every bit of it. This doesn’t usually happen with my weddings. I’m always early and set up with everything. So it was funny that this was happening now.’

Funnily, a few days prior to the big day, the couple had joked that even if the gazebo flew away due to strong winds, they’d still stand and say their vows no matter what. ‘Nothing was going to stop us from getting married that day, even if it meant standing in the rain and screaming our vows to each other over the wind,’ she jokes.

The wedding ceremony, an intimate one on the beach at the Hilton Al Hamra Beach Resort in Ras Al Khaimah, had one major theme to represent the couple’s love – ‘to personalise the event in every way possible’.

A reason the Dubai-based Indian expats picked Ras Al Khaimah was because ‘I had planned a wedding in almost all the hotels in Dubai and I didn’t want to feel like I was going back to work’, she says. The couple also wanted to make the day their own and honour their close family members.

‘We wanted to make it something that we would remember as special,’ she explains. ‘Every detail was there for a reason, someone we loved, or someone we were thinking of... everything we did was personalised...we made our own vintage lace doilies. Patrick and I tied each and every one of the cards together. Instead of hiring people, we requested our bridal party to be our best men or bridesmaids, inviting them with handmade and handwritten cards that spoke about our relationship with them.’

The sentiment behind the thought had huge meaning, especially for Rochelle because of the circumstances under which the couple came together. While the two knew each other for nearly half a decade, they came closer together under sombre circumstances. ‘In 2011, my father, who I was extremely close to, passed away unexpectedly,’ Rochelle shares. ‘The strangest thing happened the morning after he passed. My father had this habit of waking up at 6am, coming into my room, and kissing me on my forehead. The night he passed, I was so distraught I didn’t want to sleep because I knew he was not coming in the next morning.’

Exhausted, Rochelle did eventually fall asleep but woke up at exactly five minutes to 6 the next day. As she lay in bed, Patrick, a family friend who works as project in-charge at FedEx, had stayed with the family that night, sleeping in their living room – and he came in to see her at exactly 6am.

‘He kissed me on my forehead and said he was going to work and walked away,’ Rochelle remembers. ‘I could only stare back and nod my head. Now I’m not a fan of Bollywood movies but I always joke that Karan Johar must have planned this one.’

Their love grew stronger from that moment. ‘He made me laugh, which was such a welcome change because when he was away, I kept thinking about my father and cried. At some point I realised I was growing to depend on him a lot. That’s when I knew I’m going to end up marrying this man.’

On the day of the proposal, the two had a minor argument, she says, laughing when she remembers the day, convinced that the argument was a deliberate ploy by Patrick.

‘He then said we will go out for dinner to make up,’ she says. ‘I thought we would be going to a nearby restaurant so I wasn’t really dressed for the occasion. But he took me to The Farm in Al Barari. The minute we entered the main entrance I was awestruck by how beautiful the place was and my anger evaporated just seeing such a beautiful place.’

After dinner, the couple went for a walk. Then suddenly Patrick went down on one knee and proposed. ‘I made him kneel for awhile but I said yes,’ she says, with a laugh.

The wedding festivities started off with an Arabian-themed cocktail party hosted by Rochelle’s sister and brother-in-law. ‘We had many performances from family and friends, that really made the night a lot of fun,’ Rochelle adds. ‘Our guests dressed in traditional Arabian outfits and we served traditional Arabic food. My guests left the ballroom at almost five in the morning, exhausted from dancing.’

The next day was a dual Roce ceremony at the hotel’s La Fortezza Terrace by the bride’s mother for both Rochelle and Patrick, who lost his parents when he was a child.

‘This is where coconut milk is applied on the couple and they are showered with blessings from the elders in the family,’ Rochelle describes. The spread included Indian food with many traditional Mangalorean and Goan dishes to represent the couple’s home cities.

After the ceremony, the bride-to-be wore a traditional Mangalorean red saree with flowers that her aunt brought from Mangalore. ‘I also wore my grandmother’s wedding Minon, which is a big long gold chain very similar to a mangalsutra. It was my way of remembering my grandmother that day.’ Surrounded by hydrangeas and roses the couple said their I dos at sunset on the beach, to the sweet soundtrack of a string trio playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D.

Rochelle’s expert hat of wedding tricks also made sure to reuse the aisle flowers on the dinner tables along with candles.

‘That really saved me some money,’ she explains. ‘The floral arrangements were put in vintage style pots and it really carried the theme well.’

The wooden wedding guest book and ring pillow was made by a vendor from Latvia. ‘The wood is from their own forest and the recycled paper was produced in Baltic states. She hand-carved the wood and used rope to tie up the book,’ Rochelle says. Meanwhile, the favours for guests included an old pocket watch. ‘It was vintage and classic. We hoped they would remember the beautiful ‘time’ they shared with us.’

The head table, adorned with flowers and candles, was set to a backdrop of an old fireplace with a frame that included pictures of the couple’s parents from their own respective wedding days.

As Rochelle walked down the aisle, her heart soared with happiness as she saw her husband-to-be waiting at the alta

The couple wrote their own vows, with Patrick even promising to do the dishes and tuck his beloved into bed every night, except on football nights when Chelsea was playing.

‘He ended his vows with “yours will be the only tears that count and the only smile that matters”,’ Rochelle says.

Five years on, the couple are now proud parents to a beautiful daughter. And in a perfect happily ever after, the couple bought their first home last year at Living Legends in the Al Barari Area.