My mother had already shortlisted three banquet halls in Noida.
My future mother-in-law had strong opinions about which South Delhi venue served the best paneer tikka. My fiancé Rohan had forwarded me seventeen Instagram reels of influencer couples posing against identical fairy-light backdrops in identical rooftop venues across Gurugram.
And I was sitting in a Delhi traffic jam at 11pm, seriously considering eloping.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about planning an engagement in Delhi-NCR. You are not really planning a celebration. You are managing a logistics operation. Coordinating caterers, arguing about parking, sweating over whether 200 people can fit into a hall that comfortably fits 140.
And here is the part that bothered me most. I had never wanted 200 people.
From the very beginning, I had one clear picture in my head. Around 100 people. The ones who actually knew our names before we got engaged. The ones who would remember this day ten years from now, not because they saw it on Instagram but because they were genuinely, completely present for it. My closest friends. His family. The people who mattered. Not a guest list built around obligation and RSVPs nobody wanted to send.
Every Delhi venue we visited made that vision feel small. The halls were sized for crowds. The packages were priced for crowds. The entire industry seemed puzzled by the idea that someone might want something intimate on purpose.
I wanted something that felt like us. What I found instead changed everything.
The Moment I Stopped Googling Delhi Venues
It started, as most good decisions do, with a restless 2am search session.
I had typed “engagement venue near Delhi” into Google for the fourteenth time when I accidentally clicked a link that took me somewhere unexpected. A resort in a place called Nahan, in the Sirmour district of Himachal Pradesh.
The name meant nothing to me then. I had heard of Shimla. Manali. Dharamshala. But Sirmour?
I almost closed the tab.
Instead I scrolled. And kept scrolling. There were photographs of a valley stretching endlessly to the horizon, pine forests tumbling down hillsides, and a sky deck where the world seemed to simply stop. No crowds. No noise. No sixteen-storey apartment blocks in the background of what was supposed to be a romantic photograph.
I sent the link to Rohan at 2:17am with a single message. What if we did this instead.
He called me back in four minutes.
Why Delhi-NCR Felt Wrong
Let me be honest about something.
Delhi is not a bad city for celebrations. It has extraordinary food, brilliant photographers, and a wedding industry that has perfected the art of making 500 people feel like royalty. But for an engagement, the intimate and personal moment that is supposed to be just us and the people who actually matter, it felt like performing.
Every venue we visited in Gurugram and Noida came with a checklist that had nothing to do with romance. How many cars can park? Is the AC strong enough? Can we bring an outside DJ? Will there be another function happening in the adjacent hall at the same time?
Delhi today is bursting at the seams — be it traffic, air pollution, or sheer overcrowding. We wanted our engagement to feel like a beginning, not a compromise. A space that said something about who we were as a couple.
We are people who drive four hours to eat at a dhaba nobody has reviewed. We camp on long weekends. We have an unspoken rule that if everyone we know has already been there, we probably should not go.
A Gurugram banquet hall was never going to be our answer.
The Drive That Decided Everything
We left Delhi at 5:30am on a Saturday just to see the place. A recce, nothing more, we told ourselves.
By the time we crossed Karnal, the sky was doing things it never does in Delhi. Turning that specific shade of orange that only exists when there is no smog to dilute it. By Ambala, there were trees. Actual trees, not the skeletal things that line Delhi expressways.
The distance from Delhi is around 275 km, roughly five to six hours by road through Kala Amb and Nahan. I slept through most of Haryana. I was fully awake the moment we started climbing.
The road narrows after Nahan. The valley opens below you on one side, pine trees press close on the other, and somewhere around the final bend before the resort, Rohan pulled over without saying a word.
We just sat there looking at the Shivalik valley spread out below us like something out of a screensaver, except real and vast and completely silent except for birds we could not name.
He turned to me and said: I think we found it.
We had not even reached the resort yet.
What The Sirmour Retreat Actually Felt Like
I expected a nice mountain hotel. I did not expect to feel like we had arrived somewhere that had been waiting for us.
The Sirmour Retreat sits at the crossroads of adventure and tranquility, surrounded by panoramic valley views to the south and the majestic Churdhar peaks to the north.
The property is entirely private when you book it. All thirty rooms. The sky deck. The pool. The bar. Every corner of it, exclusively yours. No strangers wandering through the background of your photographs. No hotel guests giving curious looks during your ceremony. No other event happening on the floor above with a DJ whose playlist you did not approve.
Just your people, your moment, and the Himalayas holding the whole thing together.
We walked the sky deck as the sun dropped behind the ridge. The valley below turned amber, then purple, then something that does not have a name. Rohan’s mother, who had been politely skeptical about this Himachal idea, went very quiet for a long time.
When she finally spoke she said one word. Book it.
That was the moment I knew.
The Things That Sealed It
The distance is not the barrier everyone assumes. The Sirmour Retreat is just five hours from New Delhi and two hours from Chandigarh, which meant guests flying in from Mumbai or Bangalore could land in Delhi, get picked up, and arrive at the resort in time for evening cocktails. We arranged a private bus for the Delhi contingent. It became, by everyone’s account, the best part of the trip.
Then there was the pool. When I mentioned an all-weather heated pool to guests already nervous about a mountain engagement in winter, every objection dissolved. There is something deeply persuasive about telling your Delhi-based aunt that yes, she can swim while looking at a Himalayan valley.
The licensed bar serves premium spirits, wines and hand-crafted cocktails. For a crowd that had been worried about whether a mountain resort would mean rum in plastic glasses, this was revelatory. The bar became the unofficial heart of our two-day celebration. Some of our best conversations happened there at midnight, with the valley dark and silent below us and nobody wanting to go to sleep.
And then there was the quiet. This one is hard to explain to people who have not experienced altitude at night. There is a quality of silence in the mountains that does something to people. It makes them present. It makes them talk to each other instead of at their phones. Our engagement was the first family gathering in years where I genuinely felt like everyone was actually there, not performing being there.
“The mountains don’t care about your seating chart. They just hold you still long enough to remember why you’re celebrating in the first place.” — Rohan, on the drive back, which I immediately wrote down.
What Happened at The Engagement
I am not going to describe every detail. Some things belong only to the people who were there.
But I will tell you this.
We did the ring ceremony on the sky deck at dusk. The valley was doing its purple thing again. Someone had strung warm lights along the railing. The Churdhar range sat as a dark silhouette against a sky transitioning through colours I still do not have words for.
My father, a man who has attended approximately four hundred Delhi banquet hall functions in his life and has strong opinions about exactly nothing except cricket and dal makhani, pulled me aside afterward. He said: This is the best decision you have made. Including Rohan.
High praise.
Guests from Mumbai said it was the first time they had actually wanted to stay an extra night at a function. People who had been reluctant about the drive said they were already planning to come back for their anniversary. Rohan’s grandmother, who is eighty-one and had been genuinely concerned about the altitude, spent forty minutes on the sky deck telling anyone who would listen that she felt twenty years younger.
The morning after, all of us sat together at breakfast watching mist lift off the valley. Nobody was in a hurry. Nobody was checking traffic updates. Nobody wanted to leave.
That, more than the photographs or the ceremony or the fairy lights, is what I will remember. Not a single person in that room was a placeholder. Every face was one I had chosen on purpose.
That is what happens when you plan for 100 instead of 200.
Should You Consider Sirmour for Your Engagement?
If you want a venue that checks boxes, Delhi-NCR has excellent boxes.
But if you want an engagement that becomes a story, the kind people are still telling three years later, the kind that makes your grandmother feel twenty years younger, the kind where your father compliments both the location and your life partner in the same breath, then I would suggest you stop looking at banquet halls and start looking at the horizon.
The Sirmour Retreat offers complete resort buyout for up to 120 guests, with a licensed bar, mandap with valley views, and a dedicated coordinator.
Dates fill faster than you would expect. We almost lost our October slot to another couple who had found the same 2am link I had.
If you are sitting in a traffic jam right now, surrounded by forwarded reels of identical fairy-light venues, do what I did.
