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Vows

By BROOKE LEA FOSTER

In fall 2013, Samir Nurmohamed wanted desperately to go out with Salimah Nooruddin. There was only one problem: He had decided that she had to ask him out first.

He was — and is — an assistant professor of management at the Wharton School in Philadelphia who is known by his students for rapping his course concepts. And Ms. Nooruddin was a student there.

They had met car-pooling to their place of worship, which was 40 minutes away, since both are members of a small sect of Islam called Shia Imami Ismaili. And it didn’t take long for Mr. Nurmohamed to become smitten.

And he didn’t figure it would look quite right for a professor to ask out a student — that she might feel pressured to say yes to a member of the faculty, even though she was not in any of his classes and they were both 27 at the time.

So he decided that he would wait, and wait, for her to ask him out.

“He didn’t want to be known as the guy dating a student, and I didn’t want to be known as the girl dating a professor,” Ms. Nooruddin recalled.

This led to a series of errors one might find in a romantic comedy, since Mr. Nurmohamed grew intent on keeping his feelings for Ms. Nooruddin under wraps, despite trying to send subtle messages that he liked her — a lot.

One day, she dropped by his faculty office to say hello, and he grew so flustered that he rushed her out. A few weeks later, they talked for a few hours at her birthday party. But on their walk home, he left her on a deserted city sidewalk because, he said, he was worried that he would be tempted to kiss her good-night.

“I was so confused; there were so many mixed messages,” she says now, laughing. “I mean, that night, he just bolted.”

Mr. Nurmohamed texted an apology the following day, hoping he didn’t blow it entirely.

Ms. Nooruddin was encouraged when he started texting her more frequently after that. But every time she would leave him an opening to ask her out, the phone went silent. Growing impatient that he wasn’t initiating a date, but not willing to give up on him, Ms. Nooruddin impulsively shot him a text: “Do you want to grab dinner and/or drinks?”

It was exactly seven minutes before he replied: “I made a reservation at Barbuzzo at 9 p.m. Does that work for you?” Ms. Nooruddin beamed; not only had he said yes, but he had chosen one of the city’s trendiest restaurants.

That night, they talked about their childhoods. Ms. Nooruddin grew up with a single mother, and from the time she was a teenager, worked her mother’s kiosks in a shopping mall. Mr. Nurmohamed shared his career ambitions and listened as Ms. Nooruddin shared hers. They joked about what she calls his “gross” attempt at growing a mustache.

They discovered a shared love of rap music and realized they both had tickets to the Kanye West concert the following week. “I bet him a home-cooked meal that Kim Kardashian would be there,” Ms. Nooruddin said. (She was, and he ended up cooking.)

“Salimah was beautiful, but it wasn’t about these crazy sparks flying,” said Mr. Nurmohamed, now 31. They went on three dates in four nights, and began exploring parts of Philadelphia farther afield of Wharton, still keeping the details of their meetings private from their associates at the school.

Ms. Nooruddin, now 30, completely understood. “People have a way of labeling you,” she said, “and we didn’t want our narrative reduced to a sound bite.”

They went to the Barnes Foundation, an art institute, where he teased her about her interest in serious art. They tried Cambodian food and listened to an a cappella group and laced up ice skates. He took her to a boxing match. She took him to performance art shows.

At the end of that December, Mr. Nurmohamed was vacationing in Haiti, texting Ms. Nooruddin pictures of the beach, when she told him she couldn’t get her visa for a planned trip to India. Instead, she would spend the break at her childhood home in Atlanta.

She invited him to visit, and he got on a plane to see her; he was missing her. That New Year’s weekend, he met her mother. They had dinner with Ms. Nooruddin’s sister and her husband. And he left realizing he had met a woman who fit so easily into his life — and he into hers.

Back at Wharton, friends and classmates picked up on their chemistry. In February, Ms. Nooruddin stopped to say hello to Mr. Nurmohamed at an event at the school, and when she left, his colleague said, “I think she likes you.” Mr. Nurmohamed turned to her and came clean: “We’ve been dating three months.”

By then, Mr. Nurmohamed had already had the conversation he had been dreading. He called his department chairman, to make sure that his new relationship wasn’t going to be a problem. “I met this girl,” he told her. “We’re from the same sect of Islam. Things are going well, but she’s an M.B.A. student at Wharton.” Then he held his breath.

It was his boss who exhaled: “I thought this was one of those conversations where you tell me you’re moving to California.”

Still, he didn’t propose until October 2015, in part because they wanted to be sure that Ms. Nooruddin secured a job in Philadelphia after graduation. (She is a senior manager at Comcast.)

He knew he wanted to propose at the Barnes Arboretum, a 12-acre garden just outside the city, because of its serenity. After touring the grounds, they sat on a bench overlooking a pond. Mr. Nurmohamed began stringing words together.

“Before I knew what was happening, he came out with a full-fledged rap,” Ms. Nooruddin said.

Of course, I made every mistake
Left you on the corner
But made up for it on our first date.
Asked at the end
When will I see you next?
Called you a superstar
And started flirting on our texts.
But what stood out to me was you:
Your smile, your beauty, you kindness, your joy

At the end of the rap, Mr. Nurmohamed popped the question:

A different Roc Nation lies here in Barnes’s trees
As I pop the question and drop down to one knee
Salimah Nooruddin
Will you marry me?

Ms. Nooruddin echoed the words of Drake’s “H.Y.F.R.” song and responded, “Heck yeah, flippin’ right!”

The couple’s curiosity about the world influenced their wedding planning, eventually leading them to an unexpected locale for their Feb. 19, 2017, ceremony: Vista Springs Ranch in Dripping Springs, Tex. The ranch, about 25 miles east of Austin, wasn’t the obvious choice for a ceremony. Ms. Nooruddin grew up in Atlanta; Mr. Nurmohamed was raised in Toronto. But when deciding where to exchange vows, they thought it would be fun to go an adventure with a hundred or so friends and relatives — and they were drawn to the beautiful landscape and mild weather.

Guests were invited to a traditional Sangeet, a large Indian-themed party two nights before the wedding, at Brodie Homestead, a barn-shape event space in Austin. Ms. Nooruddin, wearing a traditional Indian dress called a lengha, was escorted in by a group of similarly attired women. As they moved through the hall with loud music in the background, they held a red-and-gold cloth over Ms. Nooruddin as a symbolic protective covering. Mr. Nurmohamed wore a long burgundy coat called a sherwani and pointed leather shoes known as mojari.

The wedding blended Islamic traditions with their love of Western pop culture; Ms. Nooruddin walked down the aisle with her grandfather, Mohammad Ali Merchant, to a string quartet playing Mr. West’s “All of the Lights.”

The bride and groom broke two sets of clay vessels with their right feet to release symbolic gifts that included lentils, a silver coin, sugar and turmeric. A longstanding belief holds that the first to break the clay plates, known as the saapatias, will rule the household, but their officiant said the couple pledged to finish at the same time “to symbolize their commitment to working together, mutual respect and the sharing of household responsibilities.”

The couple wrote their own vows, with Ms. Nooruddin telling her husband he gave her “the gift of dreaming,” while Mr. Nurmohamed said: “Salimah, you are my best friend. I love you now, and I will love you forever, ever,” — drawing a burst of laughter from the crowd with his nod to a “forever, ever” lyric from Mr. West’s “Diamonds From Sierra Leone.”

After their first dance, the couple, who wrote and had been practicing their own rap for a month, surprised the audience by busting out in rhyme to thunderous applause:

Welcome to Texas
Bollywood barbecue, y’all it’s time to get reckless.
My ladies up in here with all they henna.
I told y’all: they be 10 out of tenna!