The Indian Couple Who Got The Whole Of Giza For Their Wedding

Just before the guests arrived, Vivek Nandha and Dr Monica Nayyar stood alone in front of the Pyramids. The Giza plateau, which on any other evening would have been full of visitors, was completely silent. There was nothing left to check and nobody to greet.

“It was surreal,” Nayyar said. It came at the end of a year and a half of planning, and it is the part they say they will never forget.

Nandha and Nayyar were married in Egypt in September 2025, on the second day of three days of celebrations.

Two Weddings And A Long Road To Cairo

The first wedding was a small one. In June 2025, Vivek, 31, and Monica, 32, were married at Marylebone Town Hall in London in front of 40 friends and family, with an outdoor reception afterwards at the Taj St James’ Court hotel. Egypt was the second, bigger celebration.

Nandha is a London-based investment banker, and his partner, Dr Nayyar, is a dentist.

Both grew up in the Midlands, and they met in London in 2015, when Nandha was at the London School of Economics, and Nayyar was at King’s College London Dental Institute. Romance followed in 2020, once they had worked out how much they shared: values, ambition, a love of travel and of culture. Vivek has been to more than 130 countries. Together they have covered 60.

He proposed in February 2024. He had carried the ring in his backpack for two weeks on the trek to Everest Base Camp without telling her, then chartered a helicopter back to Kathmandu. From there, they flew to Samode Palace in Jaipur, where, with the help of their friend Lakshyaraj Singh Mewar, the Prince of Udaipur, he proposed on the palace rooftop while fireworks lit up the sky.

Egypt had a hold on Vivek in particular. While studying at LSE, he lived and worked in Cairo with the United Nations, and the couple have returned several times since, getting to know members of the country’s former royal family along the way.

“Egypt has always had a special place in our lives,” Nandha said. “When we began imagining where to bring our families and closest friends together, it felt like the natural choice.”

A Pink Palace On The Nile

Three days of celebrations began at the Sofitel Cairo Nile El Gezirah, on the banks of the river, with a traditional Haldi ceremony. The family priest had come from London to lead it, and 180 guests had travelled in from around the world.

The second day was spent at Dahab Island Palace, a pink palace on a private island in the Nile owned by a family friend, Prince Naguib, a descendant of Egypt’s former royal family. Guests went over by boat. At the pier, Egyptian drummers met them and led them up to the gardens, where Vivek Nandha and Monica Nayyar were married under a floral mandap hung in soft pink. Dinner was served in the palace courtyard under thousands of fairy lights, and the night ended with dancing in the gardens under the stars.

Ten Nights At The Pyramids

The last party was the one nobody could show them how to do. Only two other couples are believed to have held a private wedding celebration at Giza, and getting the whole plateau closed to the public meant meeting strict government requirements and site preservation rules, with no blueprint to follow.

“The idea of celebrating at the Pyramids was almost beyond comprehension,” Nandha said. “But with a place like that, the vision was only a small part of it.”

The couple flew to Cairo four times to sit down with planners, architects and officials from the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, and together they designed a venue made to blend into the desert. “Every element, from the construction methods to the materials, the lighting and the dismantling, was considered within the requirements for the site,” Nandha said. The structures were kept to the colours of sand and clay, so that the Pyramids stayed the thing you looked at.

The plateau is a working tourist site, so building could only happen at night. For ten nights in a row, once it closed at 6 pm, a crew arrived and worked until 5 am, putting up stages, kitchens, lighting and private security posts on bare desert. Nothing like it had been built there before, so everything had to be brought in. When the celebration was over, it took two more nights to take it all away.

Dinner was served at the foot of the Sphinx. Chefs from India and Egypt, joined by colleagues from the UK, cooked a menu of more than 40 Indian, Egyptian and British dishes, and across the three days the count passed 100. The couple’s favourites were black truffle and Kashmiri dum aloo, wild morel and saffron shikampuri with pistachio, and an Umm Ali made with fig, rose and green cardamom and finished with clotted cream.

“We wanted the menu to be an experience in its own right,” Nandha commented, “something rooted in heritage but lifted by creativity.”

Dancers performed, and then “What a Wonderful World” began to play as 200 biodegradable lanterns rose into the desert sky. People danced until 4 am. In the days that followed, guests were taken on private tours of Egyptian landmarks, among them the Grand Egyptian Museum.

A significant part of the wedding budget went to the preservation of the Pyramids.

“We never wanted it to be simply a spectacular event against an extraordinary backdrop,” Nandha said. “We wanted to approach the privilege with the seriousness it deserved.”

Vivek and Monica spent three weeks in Bora Bora on their honeymoon and swam with whales in the South Pacific. They already have a plan for their fifth anniversary: the Great Wall of China.

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