Real Wedding · South Goa
Susegad, and Sequins
A roce on Friday, a nuptial mass on Saturday, and a beach that did not empty until the band did — Sara and Caetano had the most Goan wedding imaginable, which is to say nobody was in any hurry at all.
- The Place
- A chapel in Loutolim & a beach at Cavelossim, South Goa
- The Day
- December 2025
- The Party
- 150 guests
- The Palette
- Whitewash, coral, and feni-gold
Nobody in Goa is ever in a hurry, and a Goan wedding is the longest, happiest expression of that fact. Susegad — the untranslatable Goan contentment, the art of not rushing — is not the mood of the wedding so much as its organising principle. Things would happen when they happened. The band would start when it started. The feni would not run out, and if it did, Caetano's uncle knew a man.
Sara's family is Goan Catholic going back to the Portuguese, all whitewashed villas and Sunday mass and a surname with a tilde in it; Caetano grew up four villages away. They had been to roughly two hundred weddings between them, every one in the same handful of churches, and they wanted exactly that — the wedding their grandparents would recognise — with the sand and the sequins turned up.
The roce, which is the haldi's cousin
Every Indian wedding has its anointing, and the Goan Catholic one is the roce: the night before, the bride and groom are blessed and smeared with coconut milk and oil by their families, a last ritual of single life, equal parts sacred and slapstick. Sara's was in the courtyard of her grandmother's villa, under fairy lights and a frangipani tree, with sorpotel on the stove and far too many people crying and laughing at once.
We designed almost nothing for the roce and we were right to. The Goan-Portuguese villa does the work — azulejo tiles, oyster-shell windows, a deep verandah, bougainvillea everywhere — and our job was a long table, good light, and then to stand back while a family that has done this for four hundred years did it again.
“Things would happen when they happened. That was not a risk. That was the plan.”
The flowers were frangipani and bougainvillea and whatever was blooming over the nearest wall — the Goan garden is generous and we let it lead. White and coral and the green of the palms, against all that whitewash.
Sara walked into the chapel at Loutolim to a single guitar. The church is small and old and full of her family's weddings, and there was no improving on it; we lit a few candles and otherwise left three centuries alone.
The mass, and then the sand
The nuptial mass was unhurried and full of singing — the Konkani hymns, the old priest who had baptised half the congregation, the vows in three languages because the family is what the family is. And then, the moment the register was signed, four hundred years of solemnity dissolved straight into the sea: the reception was on the beach at Cavelossim, shoes off, a Goan band working through Konkani standards and then, inevitably, into the songs everyone's parents danced to.
Bebinca, the sixteen-layer Goan cake, was cut at midnight. The feni did not run out. The band played past the time it was paid to and nobody asked it to stop. At some point the bride was barefoot in the surf in her wedding dress, and that — Caetano said, watching her — was the whole reason to get married in Goa.
They did not honeymoon anywhere. They stayed in Goa, in the villa, for a week — the same beach, the same band when they could get it, the leftover bebinca for breakfast. Why would we leave, Sara wrote to us. Everyone else did, eventually. We just stopped the wedding from ending. The most Goan thing we have ever helped anyone do.
End of spread
Sara & Caetano
A chapel in Loutolim & a beach at Cavelossim, South Goa — December 2025.
Folio 072 · 6 minutes · Patrika Nº 07