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Nesh Pillay, 25, and her partner Aaron Vanderhoff, had been a couple for 5 years when they decided they would get formally married on the quiet with family as witness, and announce it to the wider circle of friends after the fact.
Nothing turned out as it was supposed to when on the morning of the wedding Feb. 5, a massive crane toppled on the street at the intersection of Broadway and Leonard Street, where Pillay was getting her hair done. It killed David Wichs, 38, and injured two others.
Pillay and Vanderhoff’s adventurous wedding on the steps of the Tweed Building instead of at City Hall, conducted impromptu by New York City Fire Department Chaplain Ann Kansfield, has all the makings of a love story eight days before Valentine’s Day Feb. 14, with the requisite happy ending. Yet, the couple feels sad about Wichs’ death and hopes to honor him in some way in the future.
Pillay, who spoke to Desi Talk about her experience, said the couple is still digesting the events of Feb. 5, “and it’s been happy and very sad.” Wichs’ death, she said “has brought us a fair sense of guilt,” as well, and no amount of rationalizing can get rid of that feeling.
Pillay, who has just launched her PR company, said she was originally going for an elaborate wedding in Hudson Valley. But planning for it put them off the idea and they settled for an intimate exchange of vows with a small gathering, at City Hall. Many “little, little” things changed prior to the wedding which together brought her on that day, to that street, at that time when the crane came down. While she is not very religious, Pillay says she feels superstitious.
“So many things were supposed to happen differently– the date was moved from February 3, our five-year anniversary, to February 5; The morning ceremony at City Hall was postponed to later; my father and sister Merishka left that street where the crane fell to attend to a last-minute errand; and my mom and sister Kuvanya, walked with me into the salon,” she stops counting the series of events. Just as her hair was being washed at Drybar Tribeca on West Broadway, the crane fell and they felt the earth shudder. The hairstylists and her mom and sister kept Nesh from knowing or seeing the scene of the destruction, but Kuvanya still feels the trauma from witnessing frantic efforts to extract a man from a car which was slowly being crushed by the crane. Luckily, he survived.
“We were supposed to have a secret wedding and announce it because we had been together so long and people were already used to the idea of us as a couple,” Pillay said. “Instead the whole world came to know.” The media coverage has been relentless, she said, and being in media, she understands that people want at least something positive to come out of Wichs’ sad fate.
She did not know anyone had died until later. By the time her hair was done police, who had first asked everyone to stay where they were, now asked them to leave because of a suspected gas leak. Pillay hurriedly donned her white wedding gown in the bathroom, forgot to wear a belt accessory, and had no jacket because she was planning to hail a taxi to get to the beautiful Tweed Building a few long blocks away, where a professional photographer was scheduled to take the pictures before going to City Hall.
Everything was running late when Chaplain Kansfield saw the bare-shouldered young woman lifting her wedding dress to avoid the snow and slush, trying to leave the area. Kansfield wrapped Pillay in a fireman’s jacket and walked with her “It was just half a mile but it seemed longer. My sense of time was warped,” Pillay recalls. As they were walking, Kuvanya remembered she had left a suitcase back at the salon and Kansfield rushed back to get it, texting Pillay all the while to reassure it was going to be fine. As Pillay worried about the expensive photographer and the City Hall wedding schedule, Kansfield said, “You know I could marry you,” or words to that effect, which sounded to Pillay like heaven. “I just wanted to get it over with. Everything had gone wrong,” she said.
Next thing she knew, there was her beloved husband-to-be running toward Tweed Building. “He held me in his arms,” and they hugged on the street. The wedding ceremony took all of five minutes as the photographer clicked away. All the while, a slew of uninvited journalists followed Pillay, bringing the story to the rest of the world. “My dress was all askew, my hair was all over the place,” but it was beautiful and soon over. Pillay and family hopped a cab and went to their apartment to change before leaving for dinner with a small party of friends and relatives at the South African restaurant Madiba, in Brooklyn. “We are very blessed,” she says, but immediately feels sad saying it.
“Aaron and I are trying to do something (for Wichs’ memory). We are meeting our own chaplain, and want to honor his memory with a plaque maybe. I want to know more about him and I hope we can meet the family.
Born in South Africa and brought up in Toronto and upstate New York, Pillay is a journalism graduate from City University of New York. She met Vanderhoff at Binghamton University where he graduated in “Integrative Molecular Neuroscience” and works at Belleview Hospital on patient case management. The two have been together since she was 20. Now, they are planning to move to Toronto to be close to her parents Dayalan and Vernie Pillay. “Aaron is very committed and close to my family. He’s more brown than me sometimes, eating with his hands, and getting along like a house on fire with my Indian grandmother in South Africa,” Pillay laughs
The post Getting To The Church On Time: The Nesh Pillay Story appeared first on News India Times.