Back in Los Angeles, where we live and much of our extended family does too, reality set in: It would be prohibitively expensive. A lot of our loved ones wouldn’t be able to make the trip, what with the cost, their kids, their jobs. We’d have so little control over the final product, planning a wedding from half a world away. But a “pro” had always been that it would be easier to find outfits and accouterments for our multiday Hindu wedding — we’re culturally Hindu, if not the most religiously observant — in India than in the United States, where the selection along strips like Oak Tree Road (Edison and Iselin, N.J.) and Pioneer Boulevard (Artesia, Calif.) pales in comparison to that of shops in the motherland, where clothing rods sag with the weight of ornately beaded outfits, and proprietors pull ever more options from the back, loath to lose out on a potential sale.

It’s like an airport bookstore versus Amazon. (Thanks to the internet, I lusted after a devastatingly elegant gown of embroidered roses by the designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee; to try it on, I would have to visit one of his India boutiques.) While online shops exist, it seemed unwise to measure an outfit that I wouldn’t be able to try on before buying, and also, not fun.

I knew from experience. I had been married before and purchased a gorgeous, peacock feather-festooned lehenga, the two-piece bridal gown native to North India, online. But I failed to diet or exercise enough to be comfortable showing a six-inch swath of my midriff, as the outfit did, and six weeks before my wedding in New York, panicked and bought a less revealing lehenga from a store in Jackson Heights, Queens. The photos make me cringe.

There were other reasons to return to India: my fiancé’s aforementioned grandfather, along with many relatives that we rarely see. My in-laws, whom I referred to with the reverential Auntie and Uncle, go back every December. If we went with them, I’d have an opportunity to bond with the tight-knit family I was marrying into before I walked down the aisle again, something I knew was more important than the “wow” factor of the centerpieces. The memories banked during this trip could carry us through Thanksgivings and Christmases to come. My fiancé and I would have an army to help us wade through the sea of bridal gowns, lehengas and achkans, the knee-length jacket worn by North Indian grooms, and we could also get wedding invitations made for less than we’d pay in the United States.