Clockwise, from top left: Vikram Chatwal in his barat, a traditional wedding procession through the streets, in New Delhi; the Oberoi hotel in Udaipur; Vikram and Priya dancing at the henna ceremony in New Delhi; record producer Nellee Hooper and friends at Fantasia.   (Photo: Jessica Craig-Martin)

“His father got involved and tried to push it,” says Priya. “I think that kind of scared Vikram. It would have been nicer if we just dated without the parents, but then the parents got involved and they were always part of our relationship.”

“Vikram is not focused,” says Sant about the project’s slow progress. “Priya thought that Vikram was not attracted to her. I told her, ‘You’ve got to have patience.’ She said, ‘Whenever I hug him and we try to do something, the problem is his heart is not there. I don’t feel the vibration.’ I said, ‘Listen, Priya. He has been with hundreds of girls. It will happen.’ ”

Sant asked Vikram what was wrong, and he said she was immature. “I said, ‘That’s the best quality! You don’t want to marry your mother!’ ”

Priya stayed cool under pressure. “If they had their way, we would have been married a year ago,” says Priya, who was born in New York. “But this is not an arranged marriage. It was meant to be. I believe in destiny.”

After a year of dating, Vikram proposed—with a ten-carat diamond—and for much of the past three months, most of the long-distance communicating was about the big event. “I can’t even tell you how many times we wished we hadn’t planned anything,” says Vikram.

Indian weddings usually last a few days and always feature plenty of bling and relatives. It’s not unusual to have hundreds of people at the festivities, which end with a big parade through the streets called a barat. Men carrying lights on their heads flank the crowd, and there’s always a marching band. Sometimes the groom picks up the bride on an elephant.

Sant being Sant, and Vikram being Vikram, excess was by no means frowned upon. Or, as Sant puts it: “Because of Vikram’s lifestyle, my aim was to do the most outstanding wedding that ever existed.”

“Priya thought Vikram was not attracted to her,” says Vikram’s father, Sant. “I told her, ‘Listen, he’s been with hundreds of girls. It will happen.’ ”

The wedding would last a week, with ten parties spread out over three cities and something over a thousand guests. Three chartered 737s and a small air force of private jets would transport a substantial slice of the international jet set. From Manhattan, there were Maritime Hotel co-owners Sean MacPherson and Eric Goode, real-estate developer Richard Born, fashion photographer Sante D’Orazio, and a gaggle of models. Art-dealing playboy Tim Jeffries, record producer Nellee Hooper, arms heiress Petrina Khashoggi, actress Patricia Velasquez, and banking and oil heir Matthew Mellon led the London contingent. Royals included the son of the late shah of Iran, Prince Nicholas of Greece, and a handful of Indian maharajas.

“It’s the biggest wedding I’ve ever done,” says New Delhi–based Vandana Mohan, who has been planning Indian weddings for almost twenty years. Her duties included overseeing fourteen special hospitality desks set up at each hotel and a fleet of 70 private cars for the three-city tour. Fifty thousand kilos of flowers were shipped in from Holland, Bangkok, and Calcutta, and 3,000 candles were burned. They went through 65,000 meters of fabric.

Each event also had an elaborate buffet, carefully tended for hours. “For an Indian wedding, there is no timing,” says Mohan. “We had to make sure there was still food for everyone at 2 a.m.”

The only thing they couldn’t plan was the couple’s compliance. “The biggest challenge was hoping it would actually happen,” said Sant. “They had a lot of differences of opinions. But with no fights, there is no love.”

The wedding itself was a stupendous, mind-bending, superrich caravan—all being filmed for a documentary for the Discovery Channel. Monday was Queenie and Raja’s party in Bombay, Tuesday was the white party at a palace in Udaipur, Wednesday was Fantasia, a masked ball on a small island. By Thursday, no one could remember what day it was.

What’s known as Indian Standard Time meant that everything got going at least two hours late, every night, so midnight was the right time to show up. In Bombay, India’s—perhaps the world’s—biggest movie star, Shah Rukh Khan, arrived about 2:30 a.m. and stayed until the crack of dawn, which made the 6 a.m. wake-up calls for the first charter to the northern city of Udaipur particularly brutal. Vikram and Priya would be arriving on a private Falcon Jet later in the afternoon. Vikram’s parents gave up their room in the hotel so security could use it as a makeshift vault for the millions of dollars’ worth of wedding jewelry.

The 20,000 kilos of white flowers were for the night’s elaborate white-and-silver theme party, complete with a painted elephant roaming the courtyard. It was Valentine’s Day, under a full moon: perfect, except for one puzzling fact. “White is not an auspicious color,” said the wedding planner. In India, widows wear white.